SF activist wants justice ‘on a micro and macro level’
‘It’s alarming, but I trust this is right where we’re supposed to be,” said poet and activist Thea Matthews last week while she was on the move from one public demonstration to the next in the name of protecting Black Lives.
The peaceful daytime protests against police violence were coordinated by Movement 4 Black Lives, a national coalition of black-led organizations, joined to create meaningful policy, cultural and political change in the wake of the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown Jr. by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Too many subsequent (and prior) police murders, including George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, have given rise to the growing movement of young people demanding the defunding and abolition of law enforcement, mired in a history of racism, among other demands for defending black life.
“There’s anger, sadness, so much emotion,” said Matthews of how she’s been doing in these weeks of national mourning and uprising.
“Since 45 took office, said Matthews, “There has been an undercurrent of contentiousness. Pandemic or not, enough is enough.”
Even with 21st century militarized policing intended to dissuade protest while actually inspiring it, marches and civil disobedience are clearly alive and well throughout the country and across The City.
“There’s no business as usual,” she said of the movement’s intention, “but I’m writing.” She offered an excerpt from “Join US,” a new poem dated June 1.
… and join us fight with us be with us now
not against us your family calls your name
not your badge number and to the one with no badge
keep running to the one with the badge
you guilty of murder systemic lynching
whether you pulled the trigger used your weight or not
you killed you killed you killed black life
you took what was not yours and you stole
black life away from the sun from the soil from the hands
of their mothers you killed as if you were a monster
“I called on the ancestors, June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and even Bob Kaufman,” said Matthews, referring to a long line of internationally esteemed black poets including Kaufman, who lived much of his life in San Francisco, and served an inordinate amount of time in its jails, his words relevant today as they were some 60 years ago.
“I knew I was a poet when I wrote my first poem as an adolescent,” said Matthews, “It came out with a degree of unmerited divine assistance to express what I was experiencing internally, to convey that to whoever would then see it.
