Histories of people's struggles in the San Francisco Bay Area | email: leftinthebay@gmail.com
The White Panther party was founded in 1968 by white midwestern radicals allied with the Black Panthers. Like the Yippies, they attempted to combine revolutionary socialist politics with a countercultural ethos, promoting communal living, rock & roll, and psychedelic drugs 
The People's Food System, an attempt by radicals to replace commercial food distribution with cheaper, healthier, democratically-managed alternatives, grew out of the "Food Conspiracies" of the late '60s. By the late '70s they managed a large, successful network of food co-ops 
After celebrating New Year's Eve in San Francisco, Grant had been heading home to Hayward on BART. Around 2AM, a fight broke out on the train, and police were called. When they arrived, the fight had already been broken up by other passengers
Once the verdict was announced several hundred gathered in the Castro to chants of "No justice, no peace" and "Out of the bars, into the streets." After a moving speech from Cleve Jones, friend and student intern of Milk, a march and candlelight vigil was led to city hall 
For those three days, police from Pittsburg, Concord, Antioch, and Martinez battled with snipers who fired from at least five directions. Six cops were wounded; only one rioter was. No one on either side was killed 
Melnikov, who had participated in revolutionary groups in Russia, New Jersey, and Seattle, was arrested at the IWW's Jack London Memorial Library in Oakland, and accused of plotting the murders of local capitalists as a member of an alleged IWW secret society, the Cat's Claw Club
The essay, also known as “Blueprint for a Communal Society," was published in the early weeks of BTU’s massive 1970 Berkeley-wide rent strike. A manifesto of sorts, it analyzes housing in Berkeley from a radical social and ecological perspective 
The march was led by the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s rag-tag Gorilla Band, a 27 member radical musical crew that included flag-bearing majorettes, a chorus, a brass section and a man who hummed through a comb. A goal of the march was to bring collective arts into the streets 
The earliest IWD celebrations in the Bay Area were organized by the Communist Party. The first that we know of was in 1935 at the Finnish Comrade’s Hall in Berkeley. Early IWD celebrations featured dancing, spaghetti dinners, and speakers such as SF suffragist Anita Whitney 
The split in the BPP between Huey Newton's Oakland leadership and Eldridge Cleaver's faction, which enjoyed support in New York and in Cleaver's Algeria-based "International Section," had split into the open shortly after Newton was freed from prison in August 1970
Shabazz had been invited to San Francisco for a three-day memorial to Malcolm X in Hunters Point that was organized by the Black Panther Party of Northern California, an armed group affiliated with the local chapter of the Revolutionary Action Movement
Stewart was a member of the SF chapter of the Young People's Socialist League, the Socialist Party's youth wing, led by Lowell High School senior Malvina Milder (who would later become famous as the folksinger Malvina Reynolds), the daughter of leading local radical David Milder
The Panthers announced the UFAF in May after the killing of James Rector and the occupation of Berkeley by the National Guard. These incidents, combined with increasingly violent state repression of the BPP, were seen as signaling a turn towards fascism
The White Panther party was founded in 1968 by white midwestern radicals allied with the Black Panthers. Like the Yippies, they attempted to combine revolutionary socialist politics with a countercultural ethos, promoting communal living, rock & roll, and psychedelic drugs 
Once the verdict was announced several hundred gathered in the Castro to chants of "No justice, no peace" and "Out of the bars, into the streets." After a moving speech from Cleve Jones, friend and student intern of Milk, a march and candlelight vigil was led to city hall 
Many participants had come to the Bay Area for an anarchist convention in San Francisco. They crossed the bay for a celebration of People's Park and a demonstration to "defend" Telegraph Ave, once a center of local radical activity, from rapid gentrification 
As early as the late 1840s, hundreds of Chinese migrants had taken up residence in a couple square blocks of downtown Antioch abutting the delta, creating one of many California Chinatowns. In little time, Anti-Chinese sentiment had been practically baked into the town charter
The People's Food System, an attempt by radicals to replace commercial food distribution with cheaper, healthier, democratically-managed alternatives, grew out of the "Food Conspiracies" of the late '60s. By the late '70s they managed a large, successful network of food co-ops 
Berkeley students were inspired by the then-ongoing Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State University. Berkeley TWLF's key demand was for a "Third World College," to include student-led departments of Black, Asian, and Chicano studies
The General Strike grew out of a struggle for union recognition by downtown retail clerks, almost all of whom were women. Early on, some local retail stores caved to union demands, but the largest, Kahn's and Hasting's, refused. In late October, workers at both stores walked out 
While they quickly made a major impact on the American political scene, the BPP didn't come out of nowhere. The mid-'60s Oakland they emerged from was swirling with Black radical organizations, thinkers, and militants which they worked with, learned from, imitated, and critiqued 