Resistance is Town Bizness

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Resistance is Town Bizness 〰️

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our annual Reclaim MLK march. We’re excited to reach this milestone together, and, for the first time since the start of the pandemic, we will hold a mass march in Oakland on Monday, January 15 to reclaim Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s true radical legacy.

Maybe you only started following our work a few years ago. Maybe you have followed and supported us through our entire 14 years. Nonetheless, we want to share some of our most memorable moments throughout the years:

BART shutdown (2015)

In 2015, following the Ferguson uprisings in 2014, we kicked off four days of action over the #ReclaimMLK weekend by shutting down both the Embarcadero and Montgomery BART stations on a Friday morning.

Our demand was for charges to be dropped against the Black Friday 14, who were arrested in November 2014 for chaining themselves to a train in Oakland to protest after a Missouri grand jury declined to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the murder of Black teenager Michael Brown.

Bay Bridge Shutdown (2016)

In 2016 as part of our 96 hours of #ReclaimMLK, Black activists blockaded the San Francisco Bay Bridge to call for an end to the war on Black people. We shut it down in the same spirit of resistance that led our ancestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, facing bullets and batons, from Selma to Montgomery.

J20 Shutdown (2017)

After Trump’s election in 2016, as part of Reclaim MLK, we joined a coalition of activists in San Francisco to shut down CalTrain, Uber, Wells Fargo, the Financial Building, the Israeli Consulate, and other entities complicit in supporting or normalizing the Trump agenda of racism, sexism, and bigotry.

*APTP co-founders Assantewa Boykin RN and Cat Brooks standing on CalTrain tracks with activists blocking the tracks behind them.*

Mass Car Caravan During Year 1 of Pandemic (2021)

The first year of the pandemic was also the year that the masses rose up in the U.S. and across the world for Black liberation in response to the horrific police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We rose up with resounding calls to defund terrorist police departments from Minneapolis, to New York City, to San Francisco, Oakland, and beyond.

We knew that, no matter what, we needed to stay in these streets and quickly pivoted to Covid-safer actions, like our 7th Annual Reclaim MLK Car Caravan that spanned for miles across the City of Oakland: