I’ve been staying with my family in California’s East Bay and every Sunday we walk to the local farmers market here in Martinez. I was there around noon on June 21 when a crowd of people walked up clapping and shouting in celebration. I had no idea this Black Lives Matter rally was going to take place. The celebratory crowd seemed to come out of the bushes! Around 50 people, some holding signs, took a knee in honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. Some of the shoppers walked away but a large section of the market knelt and listened. The approach caught me off guard but the message was great. I didn’t have my camera on me but was able to use my phone to capture the event.
The response hasn’t been without tension, though. Martinez made national news when the Black Lives Matter mural, painted in front of the Wakefield Taylor Courthouse on July 4, was defaced. Since then two Martinez residents have been charged with three misdemeanor counts, including a hate crime, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. In the photo above you can just make out the spots where the mural was painted over with black paint.
In response to the vandalism, more than 500 people showed up in Martinez for the most recent Black Lives Matter rally, on Sunday, July 12.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.
Black Lives Matter in Martinez
