When San Franciscans take to the streets ...

When I went looking for an image appropriate to musing on the George Moscone/Harvey Milk murders that took place 40 years ago today, this photo from "Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images" grabbed my attention. It shows San Franciscans expressing their horror and grief marching down Market St. from the Castro district to City Hall.

I don't remember where I was when I learned that someone, rapidly revealed to be ex-cop and ex-Supervisor Dan White, had killed the progressive mayor and the flamboyantly gay and populist legislator. I do remember that the murders came about a week after the Jonestown atrocity -- the murder/suicide of some 400, mostly poor and black people, from the Bay Area under the orders of cult leader Jim Jones. That horror I learned about from overhearing a radio broadcast in Thriftown, the still-extant Mission Street source of winter clothing in a chilly November. The enormity of what had gone down left everyone stunned.

I don't remember whether I was a part of that doleful march after the assassinations. Both dead politicians had been symbols of hope for better days for many. Moscone represented the city's long immigrant labor tradition which had made the place a union stronghold through the 1930s and 40s. Yet he'd made common cause with the city's newer populations -- Blacks migrated from the South, immigrants, and the upstart gay community. He came out of the city's tradition of Catholic social justice activism; he intervened for the Martin de Porres Catholic Worker community when the health department wanted to shut down our anarchic feeding operation. (Nancy Pelosi still carries a whiff of that San Francisco tradition.) Milk was, of course, the gay leader who had personified resistance to a mean-spirited California ballot initiative to bar gays and lesbians from teaching and our friends among educators from even putting in a good word about us. (We won that round.)

And so, people responded to the Moscone/Milk murders by taking to streets. If I wasn't at the pictured march, I certainly was at several in days after. I know I was there for what came to be called the "White Night Riots" in May 1979 when thousands besieged City Hall after a jury failed to convict Dan White for murder. Marchers torched police cars and police smashed up a bar in the Castro that night.

Thinking back on those days, I realize how deeply taking to the streets in moments of horror is part of the culture of this city. We took to the streets when President Reagan feinted at military intervention against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. We marched night after night against George H.W. Bush's Gulf War for Kuwaiti oil sheiks. We marched for days after the cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted; San Francisco was placed under a state of emergency and curfew.

More recent marches, against Bush II's Iraq invasion for example, were usually more structured events, implicitly if not directly permitted by city leaders. The great immigrants marches of 2006 also had that quality, but involved new participants. The culture of taking to the streets without permission to cry out at injustice and acquiescence in horrors still lives here, under a more regulated surface. In recent years, bits of it have shown up in response to killings by the SFPD.

And most notably, San Franciscans, mostly young, mostly not veterans of those previous outpourings, marched night after night in response to Donald Trump's election in 2016.

So what? People march a lot. Big deal. But think about it: all these eruptions presaged political organizing which has changed society (queers are just well-integrated 'Murricans these days), the empire can no longer conduct wars that lead to US casualties, Latinx power is growing -- and agonized people managed to goose the Democratic Party into a force which just yielded a blue wave. Let's keep marching and keep organizing San Francisco. That's how to remember George and Harvey.