San Francisco civic, spiritual leaders brace for challenges ahead at MLK Day celebration

by Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News January 20, 2025January 21, 2025

Rudy Corpuz, of the community group United Playaz, delivers a rousing speech at Yerba Buena Gardens at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. Jan. 15, 2025. (Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News)

Over 1,000 people from the Bay Area gathered Monday in San Francisco to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., but the city’s legacy as a defender of civil rights was the underlying narrative as it braces for a political battle to come.

Rev. Amos Brown, senior pastor at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church and student of the assassinated civil rights leader, rallied the crowd at the city’s MLK Jr. birthday celebration.

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Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.

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