San Francisco demonstrators turn to statue vandalism, spray paint

A day after demonstrators toppled or spray-painted statues of major historical figures in Golden Gate Park, cleanup operations began, while marches in downtown San Francisco continued and artists painted “Defund the Police” and “BLM” outside City Hall.

On Friday night, protesters riding the tide of a national reckoning on racism toppled statues of St. Junipero Serra and “Star-Spangled Banner” lyricist Francis Scott Key. They also felled the statue of President Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious general in the Civil War.

A 30-foot replica of Serra, wrapped in a friar cloak and gripping a large cross, capsized in seconds after protesters coiled rope around the base of the cross and pulled him to the ground. Video of the incident went viral on Twitter, showing the founder of nine California missions teeter, and then fall, as a crowd cheers in the background.

Another video showed the felling of Key’s statue, which tipped forward and somersaulted before landing on its side.

The pedestal that held Grant’s bust was empty Saturday morning; the green statue lay in a roadway, partially covered in red spray paint.

Workers on Saturday power-sprayed graffiti from yet another casualty of Friday night, a defaced statue of Miguel de Cervantes, the 17th-century Spanish author of the literary classic “Don Quixote.”

The spree ripped through the park’s old museum concourse, in the shadow of the empty new Ferris wheel. Vandals also targeted statues from the Mid-Winter Exposition of 1893, including a man with a sword. Park staff later tabulated the damage: commemorative benches, Apple Cider Press sculpture, a sphinx statue, drinking fountains, pathways and a balustrade.

Early Saturday, crews from the Recreation and Parks Department loaded the discarded statuary into trucks and closed off the concourse with yellow tape. New graffiti messages splashed over Serra’s empty pedestal. “Stolen land,” read one scrawled in black over the yellow-painted words “Ohlone land.”

Steve Martin-Pinto gazed at the wreckage as he walked his dog, Sasha.

“It’s horrible,” said Martin-Pinto, a San Francisco resident. “It’s mob rule. These people taking down statues won’t be satisfied until they’ve removed every book and canceled every TV show.”

Mayor London Breed, commenting on the vandalism, acknowledged “the very real pain in this country rooted in our history of slavery and oppression,” but she said that ravaging a park is not the way to address it.

“Every dollar we spend cleaning up this vandalism takes funding away from actually supporting our community, including our African American community,” Breed said.

Serra, whose name adorns roads and schools throughout California, became a controversial figure long before he was elevated to sainthood five years ago. The Franciscan missions Serra established up and down the state to help establish Spain’s colonial foothold have been criticized in recent decades as subjugating native people.

After Serra fell, someone in the crowd pointed out that Key, who enslaved African Americans, had a statue nearby, Barros said. The crowd also pulled down the statue of Grant, who enslaved one man, William Jones, before freeing him in 1859. As army leader and president, Grant sought better conditions for black Americans and tried to crush the Ku Klux Klan — reasons he has risen rapidly in the presidential rankings in recent years.

More spray paint was deployed in downtown San Francisco on Saturday, as artists painted “Defund the Police” and “BLM” in large yellow letters outside City Hall.

Meanwhile, several hundred people marched down Market Street on Saturday afternoon from the Ferry Building to City Hall.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-demonstrators-turn-to-statue-15354711.php

Northern California mayor lashes out at Newsom’s mask order: ‘There is no law’

The mayor of Nevada City, in a controversial social media post, suggested that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent order for all Californians to wear masks when in public was not legitimate.

Mayor Reinette Senum wrote Saturday morning that Newsom’s orders could not be enforced by law, and that no action can legally be taken against offenders.

“As you go about your day today, KNOW there is NO LAW that Orders you to Wear a Mask. Our Governor does NOT have that unilateral power to make such orders,” Senum said. “Ask our local Police chief or officers. They will not, and cannot, cite ANYBODY for not wearing a mask because the law does not exist.”

On Thursday, in response to a surge in coronavirus cases across the state as economic restrictions are rolled back, Newsom announced new rules through the California Department of Public Health intended to reduce viral transmission.

“When you come across Newsom’s ‘orders’ online, you will see it’s linked to a page that does not lead you to his Executive Order, BUT to the California Department of Public Health GUIDELINES!,” she said. “Again, NOBODY can be forced to wear a mask outside, in a business, or as an employee or customer.”

While the new CDPH rules are technically termed ‘guidance,’ a previous executive order issued by Newsom that required Californians to follow public health guidelines grants the state the ability to enforce CDPH rules.

However, Newsom has largely avoided that tactic, instead openly relying on voluntary acceptance among Californians to implement his various coronavirus response measures.

A notable exception was the Newsom administration’s use of the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control in April to shut down restaurants and bars that had reopened for in-person service despite state orders prohibiting them from doing so, even threatening to revoke licenses from defiant offenders.

As a result of Newsom’s broadly lax approach, many local law enforcement jurisdictions have refused to enforce stay-at-home orders and other measures, including the recent mask order.

The Nevada City Police Department cited the statement previously made by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office regarding enforcement procedures on Saturday as an indication that it would be following the lead set forth by the Sacramento agency.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, along with Sacramento police, Placer County deputies, Roseville police and Placerville police, will not be enforcing Newsom’s mask order.

Yolo County, which has had a localized mask order since late April, will continue enforcement against businesses that do not comply with mask orders.

Nevada City police, acknowledged the “recent order by Governor Newsom for all Californians to wear face masks while out in public” as well as “a slight uptick in COVID-19 cases,” but ultimately sympathized with the educational approach adopted by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.

While Nevada County has kept its coronavirus numbers low, it has seen significant increases in infections recently. Although only 75 people have been infected and just one person has died as of Saturday, nearly a third of all cases are still active and more are being added each day, according county health officials. Between April 28 and June 1, Nevada County’s total infections remained static, at 41 total cases. So far this month, health officials have reported an increase in cases of nearly 83 percent. On Wednesday, a new record for daily increases was set after 10 new cases were reported.

Senum’s stance against Newsom’s mask order is the latest in a series of social media posts questioning coronavirus response measures. Last week, she posted a CNN news article that suggested asymptomatic transmission may be rarer than expected. The article quoted an official from the World Health Organization — which just this week officially endorsed the use of masks to fight the spread of coronavirus.

“We do NOT have to be in so much fear around Covid,” she said.

more: https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article243686692.html

Tensions rise in Tulsa streets as Trump prepares to hold campaign rally there

TULSA, Okla. —

President Trump supporters and demonstrators began to spar on the streets of Tulsa Saturday as he prepared to hold his first reelection rally in months against the backdrop of the deadly coronavirus outbreak and a reenergized push to confront the nation’s legacy of racism and police violence.

The rising tensions were being monitored by police in riot gear, who stood by as two men — one Black and one white — began fighting just outside the downtown arena where Trump is scheduled to speak Saturday night.

Earlier, about 30 protesters approached a security gate at the edge of the arena’s outdoor rally area, chanting slogans popular with the left-wing movement known as antifa and carrying anti-Trump signs and a banner that said, “Revolution Nothing Less.”

They were surrounded by a group of Trump supporters, who recorded them on cellphones and chanted “USA!”

Trump has been so eager to return to the campaign trail that he’s brushed off warnings from public health experts that gathering thousands of people in an indoor arena could help spread the virus, which has already claimed some 120,000 American lives.

And the president’s campaign worked to create a carnival-like atmosphere for the rally, with multiple stages offering entertainment for supporters, many of whom camped out for days in advance. But not as many people have showed up as expected, and Trump cancelled his plans to speak to an overflow crowd that never materialized.

Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman, claimed “protestors interfered with supporters, even blocking access to the metal detectors.” But police on site said the entrance was closed only briefly and no one was denied entry.

In an interview with the news website Axios, Trump promised a “wild night.” But many fear he risks inflaming racial tensions at a time when protests have swept across the country over the killing last month by a white Minneapolis police officer of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.

Across town from the arena, in the historically Black Greenwood district, the site of the 1921 massacre, activists covered memorials and murals ahead of an expected visit by Vice President Mike Pence.

“We don’t want him using our monuments for a photo op,” said Tyrance Billingsley III, 24, a local entrepreneur. He said the Trump administration was not welcome and is “100% diametrically opposed to what Greenwood stands for.”

Tykebrean “Ty” Cheshire organized a Rally Against Hate on Saturday evening and said she is expecting more than a thousand people, based on Facebook RSVPs. The rally is being staged at a park on the other side of the city to avoid conflict with Trump supporters.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-20/trump-rally-controversy-tulsa

Great Grandson of ‘Aunt Jemima’ Enraged Her Legacy Is Being Erased By Removing Her From Brand

This week, the parent company of Aunt Jemima, Quaker Oats said they would be re-working the brand.

From Townhall:

“As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations,” Kristin Kroepfl, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a statement. “We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype. While work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough.”

But not everyone was happy with their move, particularly not the great grandson of one of the two women behind ‘Aunt Jemima,’ as he told the Patch.

“This is an injustice for me and my family. This is part of my history, sir,” Larnell Evans Sr. told me. “The racism they talk about, using images from slavery, that comes from the other side — white people. This company profits off images of our slavery. And their answer is to erase my great-grandmother’s history. A black female. … It hurts.”

The first “Aunt Jemima” debuted at Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893. Former enslaved woman Nancy Green, who worked as a cook on the South Side, was hired to wear an apron and headscarf while serving pancakes to folks who came to visit the fairgrounds known as “The White City.” Green embodied the Aunt Jemima character until her death in 1923.

Evans says his great-grandmother — the late Anna Short Harrington — took Green’s place.

It was her likeness Quaker Oats used. She worked as a cook at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house in Syracuse. She was discovered by a Quaker Oats representative while serving up her pancakes at the New York State Fair in 1935.

Harrington worked for Quaker Oats going around the country, promoting the brand and became a national celebrity.

“She worked for that Quaker Oats for 20 years. She traveled all the way around the United States and Canada making pancakes as Aunt Jemima for them,” he said. “This woman served all those people, and it was after slavery. She worked as Aunt Jemima. That was her job. … How do you think I feel as a black man sitting here telling you about my family history they’re trying to erase?”

According to Evans they also used her pancake recipe for which the family says they never paid her or the family any royalties.

“How many white people were raised looking at characters like Aunt Jemima at breakfast every morning? How many white corporations made all them profits, and didn’t give us a dime? I think they should have to look at it. They can’t just wipe it out while we still suffer,” he said.

“After making all that money —and now’s the time when black people are saying we want restitution for slavery — they’re just going to erase history like it didn’t happen? … They’re not going to give us nothing? What gives them the right?”

While they’re virtue-signaling, they’re forgetting the very real person and history behind the name, and her family.

https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/06/20/great-grandson-of-aunt-jemima-enraged-her-legacy-is-being-erased/