Support SF Bay View’s Resistance to Trump’s MAGA Madness!!

Save the Free Press from MAGA Repression in the Trump Era! The San Francisco Bay View Needs Your Support!!

The voices of resistance to our looming Donald Trump-style oligarchy must NOT be silenced! For nearly 50 years, The SF Bay View has centered stories featuring voices of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, nationwide, and around the world. Our acclaimed, award-winning reporting on all aspects of Black life, from street journalism and breaking news to emerging cultural figures and ongoing socio-political struggles, is more crucial now than it has ever been. As a movement newspaper, we’re not just about the headlines; we are about fundamentally changing systems of white supremacy and ensuring that the progress our nation has made in forging equality and justices for all will NOT be rolled back!

Our editor and social justice advocate extraordinaire, Mary Ratcliff, 85, is again attempting to retire — still locked in battle with cancer and exhausted by simultaneously caring for her beloved 92-year old husband and lifelong partner in activism, Willie Ratcliff , our publisher. She has valiantly fought the good fight for decades, ensuring our print and digital editions offer fortitude for the fight, solace, support, joy, camaraderie, and shed light for the community on the issues impacting them. Despite her own struggles, she is determined to keep this beacon of hope shining. We are seeking a new editor-in-chief, and other staff to continue our vital work as an independent Black media stronghold and key part of the resistance to the MAGA agenda.

Learn more about the Ratcliffs:

San Francisco Examiner profile about the Ratcliffs

SF Heritage profile - San Francisco Neighborhood Heroines: The San Francisco Bay View's Mary Ratcliff

Willie Ratcliff Muckrack Profile

SF Senior Beat article about Mary

SF Bay View National Black Newspaper’s Impact

Our Reach is global, not just local. Our award-winning features and investigative exposes are read on every continent. Our writers contribute from all over the world. We are invested in the political, socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural transformation of our society on a global scale. Here are a few examples of the power of our journalism and advocacy:

The Bay View brought in the new millennium with a series of stories about police brutality, a topic never before covered from the perspective of the Black victim. The Bay View’s leadership of the movement to bring the police officer to justice who murdered Oscar Grant in Oakland in 2009 was picked up by activists in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police murder of Mike Brown. And by 2020, millions were marching across the world demanding justice for George Floyd – all because a brave Black newspaper had the courage to tell the truth.

In 1989, California built a prison called Pelican Bay designed to be the toughest in the country, where men called the “worst of the worst” struggled to survive the torture of indefinite solitary confinement for as long as 46 years. Communicating through vents, they planned a hunger strike in 2011, inviting support from prisoners statewide. That first strike drew 6,600 participants, the second 12,000 and the third, in 2013, when their demands were finally met, 30,000, according to state records, the largest prison hunger strike in history. The organizers wrote dispatches published in the Bay View, the only coverage of the strikes. Later, at a meeting of the Corrections top brass, the blame was laid: “The Bay View newspaper caused the hunger strikes!” Mary Ratcliff calls that the proudest moment of her life.

Just a few blocks from the Bay View’s office lies one of the dirtiest Superfund sites in the country, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where for decades the Navy tried to remove the radiation caused by exposure of ships to atomic bomb blasts and left behind a deadly toxic mess poisoning residents. For over 25 years, a Black woman doctor born and raised here has investigated, reported and warned in nearly every issue of the Bay View that redevelopment of the Shipyard must wait until it is clean, backing her findings with her first-in-the-nation community biomonitoring clinic measuring residents’ toxic “body burdens.” Lawsuits may cost the Navy and its contractors billions.

In 1995, the Bay View was credited with the election of San Francisco’s first mayor of African heritage, Willie Brown, despite a Black population of only 11% at the time. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina flooded Black neighborhoods in New Orleans, the Bay View’s coverage was second only to the Times-Picayune, the city’s daily newspaper.

Both via digital media and in print, our newspaper unapologetically tells stories of daily life and ongoing struggles and triumphs, striving to represent the full spectrum of Black life.

The San Francisco Bay View MUST continue the fight for irrevocable change and protect the freedoms our ancestors fought and died for. JOIN US TODAY!