Is Black San Francisco something to be feared or…

Have our innovations been the solution to society’s most pressing problems for centuries. John William Templeton discusses the Democratic National Convention with KPOO’s Larry Chew

Vice President Kamala Harris, like similar first Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will rise or fall based on what the nation thinks about Black San Francisco.  The epithet “San Francisco liberal” kept Pelosi out of the Speaker’s chair for eight years.

The author of Come to the Water: Sharing the Rich Black Experience in San Francisco discussed this morning on KPOO 89.5 FM, the only Black public station on the West Coast,  the target being placed on a community which:

— raised the funds for the California campaign during the Mexican War

—sent $30,000 to John Brown for the raid on Harpers Ferry

—created jazz music

—hosted the first integrated baseball league

—integrated organized labor and brought about the National Labor Relations Act

—built 400 ships during World War II

—presaged the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the California Civil Rights Act in 1959

—sparked the end of apartheid in South Africa

John William Templeton, son of a World War II submariner who shipped out of Mare Island, is marking the 10^th anniversary of the California African-American Freedom Trail and the 21^st Journal of Black Innovation National Black Business Month as well as the International Day for Peoples of African Descent this week with daily tours of the California African-American Freedom Trail at 1 p.m.

Templeton also discusses the trailhead for the 6,000 site trail with Ebon Glenn, new deputy director of programs for the S.F. Arts Commission; artist Malik Seneferu, James Bryant of JBR Partners and Al Williams, president of the San Francisco African-American Historical and Cultural Society Aug. 28 at 6 p.m. at The Marlowe, a new African-American owned art gallery in Union Square, at 231 Grant Ave., not far from the site of Third Baptist Church during the Civil War, which was one of three Black churches whose abolitionist activities led to the Emancipation Proclamation.

“If people are going to talk about Black San Francisco, they need to know the entire story,” says Templeton, also author of Our Roots Run Deep: the Black Experience in California, Vols. 1-4, a Library Laureate selection of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library in 2002.