Survival requires sacrifice

by Dr. Willie Ratcliff and Mary Ratcliff, Bay View publishers

Celebrate … and save the SF Bay View National Black Newspaper!

You are invited to the Ruth Williams Opera House to celebrate Dr. Willie Ratcliff’s 93rd birthday and stay for a brainstorming session on how we can keep the SF Bay View newspaper alive and kicking! Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025, 6-8 p.m. The Opera House is at 4705 Third St., San Francisco.

Celebrate Dr. Willie Ratcliff’s 93rd birthday with cake and ice cream, then join a rousing discussion about how to SAVE THE BAY VIEW NEWSPAPER, which is drowning in red ink.

If a Black radical newspaper that dares to tell the truth is important to you, bring your family and friends and, most importantly, your ideas, so we can come up with a plan.

“The Bay View is not simply a newspaper; it is a historical record, a community stronghold, and a continuing instrument of liberation.” – Kevin Williams

Here’s the problem

So far in 2025, SF Bay View has lost an average of $4,000 a month. Keeping it in print is the biggest expense; paying for printing, layout, distribution and mailing costs $7,000 a month. If we stop printing, though, we lose an average of $10,000 a month in print advertising, putting us deeper in the hole. 

We’ve always vehemently opposed going online only, mainly because that would cut off the lifeline thousands of prisoners around the country count on to organize and get free. It’s prisoners’ stories, published in the Bay View, that California Corrections’ top brass blame for the 2011-2013 hunger strikes, which are largely responsible for an over 30% drop in the state’s incarceration rate. Don’t you agree that’s too big a sacrifice to ask of some of our most oppressed people and that the Bay View should stay in print until prisoners have access to the internet?

So how DO we save the Bay View? Our unusually patient landlord is running out of patience. We’re five months – $7,500 – behind in rent. The flat where we work and live is small but adequate, and at Third and Palou, we’re in the heart of Bayview Hunters Point, where we should be. We need your ideas and help and support to keep the Bay View alive.

Two facts – what can we make of them? 1) The Bay Area has more billionaires than anywhere else in the world. 2) California is tied with Louisiana as the state with the highest poverty rate, nearly 20%. Young President Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso challenges the paradox of Africa being the richest continent in resources while its people are the poorest, and African youth are demanding change. Are we that brave? Can we sacrifice our fear?

Dr. Willie put his people’s prosperity above his own

In East Liberty, Texas, where Dr. Willie Ratcliff was born and raised, he says they didn’t need white people. They prospered by their own Black hands, hearts and minds. Only the mailman was allowed to set foot on their land. During hunting season, when whites would ask the sheriff if it was safe to ignore the “No Trespassing” signs around the 5,000 or so acres of Black-owned land, he’d say, “Do that and you’ll come out in a pine box.” The men met regularly as a resistance force, but no such violence was ever necessary. 

East Liberty, founded by Blacks who had freed themselves before the Civil War, thrived on solidarity and self-determination, raising their own food, educating their own children in their own school and sending them to college, loving and caring for each other. Dr. Willie carried those values with him when he left in 1950, first for San Francisco, then Alaska, then back to San Francisco in 1987.

Alaska had beckoned with its high wages – higher than the dollar an hour he earned at the Hunters Point Shipyard – that he needed to feed his growing family. During his early years in Alaska, he mastered construction by building a five-bedroom house and built Black power by founding the South Side Voters League. Later, when Human Rights Commissions were popping up around the country, he pushed for a statewide HRC and was appointed to it by the governor, soon becoming the chair. 

The Alaska State Commission for Human Rights was recognized as among the toughest in the country. You’ve heard about the boarding schools that Native children were forced to attend – they plagued not only Canada and northern US states but Alaska too. Willie Ratcliff, remembering his childhood learning real, not white-washed history in a Black school, worked with Native leaders and HRC lawyers to shut down the boarding schools and replace them with a high school in every village. White Alaskans couldn’t believe it. The Black-Native coalition held through construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, where they won some $80 million in construction contracts – a half billion in today’s dollars – making their hundreds of Black and Native workers rich.

‘I never let the door close behind me’

Dr. Willie could be a rich man today, but, as he says, “I never let the door close behind me.” White capitalists eagerly exploit Black brilliance but not in the numbers that could make Blacks a competitive threat. As the pipeline was completed and the world’s largest oil companies who owned it prepared to make Alaska their oil fiefdom, they targeted two men who were too popular and too proud to bow down to them: the Teamsters boss and Willie Ratcliff. 

Dr. Willie returned to San Francisco in 1987. He chose to make Bayview Hunters Point his home because when he had come as a teenager, it was the “happiest hood” he’d seen – everyone was working and buying homes and starting businesses. When he returned, he found BVHP highly organized and politically powerful and known throughout the Black Bay Area as “the fiercest hood in the Bay.” 

He also smelled danger. Just as the tiny British Isles had conquered massive China with opium, our federal government pushed crack to weaken our people, then truckloads of guns to divide and conquer us. City Hall watched and did nothing but send young Blacks to prison.

So when Muhammad al-Kareem offered to sell us the paper he’d founded 15 years earlier, in 1976, called the New Bayview – ad revenue being hard to raise and barely covering costs – Dr. Willie jumped at the chance. He saw City Hall moving in to take over Bayview Hunters Point and drive Blacks out as they’d done in the Fillmore, so he was glad to be able to pay his last $2,000 in November of 1991 to make a way for the community to fight back.

Our first paper, published Feb. 3, 1992, was “paid for by 30 ads for local businesses, nearly all of them Black, plus nine churches and one mosque. We’d jump for joy to have that kind of Black business support today. More Black businesses might have survived if they’d kept advertising,” Dr. Willie wrote in the 2016 story headlined “Bay View turns 40.”

Quoting again from “Bay View turns 40”: “From the beginning, we distributed the paper to the people we wanted most to read it and write it. From 1992 to 2008, we distributed the paper door to door throughout Bayview Hunters Point and several public housing developments nearby. A lively flock of children threw the paper for many years – young adults still greet us with ‘You gave me my first job!’ and sometimes it’s the only job they ever had. When the shooting got too heavy, adults took over.” 

Sacrificing his own prosperity for the greater good

Here are a few of the countless times Dr. Willie sacrificed his own prosperity to keep the Bay View newspaper alive:

“The banner headline ‘Terror at the Airport’ on Sept. 2, 1998, topped a picture of the hangman’s noose found in the jobsite trailer of my company, Liberty Builders, that signaled the lockout of Blacks from construction in San Francisco – a lockout that continues to this day,” Dr. Willie reported in “Bay View turns 40,” and the same is true today, nine years later. “As head of the African American Contractors of San Francisco, I’d worked with the Willie Brown administration to ensure the participation of Blacks and other contractors of color on the multi-billion dollar airport expansion, and most of our members had won multi-million-dollar contracts, the largest of their careers.

“However, as they would arrive with their crews to begin work, they were greeted with death threats, leaving Liberty Builders the only Black contractor at SFO and the target of some of the craziest harassment I’d ever seen. But my all-Black crew braved personal life-threatening attacks and topped the five-story building off early, though work had been several months behind schedule when we started.

“The noose was our ‘reward,’ sparking a firestorm of Black protest, led by then San Francisco NAACP President Alex Pitcher, who had fought lynching as a young civil rights attorney in Louisiana. … 

“‘The noose and the newspaper,’ my editorial on Oct. 14, 1998, began: “The tactics being used by the San Francisco International Airport, the Human Rights Commission and large general contractors – the good ol’ boys club – to keep the construction industry segregated are also threatening to put the San Francisco Bay View newspaper out of business. They see the Bay View’s role in informing, uniting and championing the rights of African Americans to public contracts and jobs as an attack on their supremacy, and they want the paper silenced.”

Speaking Black power to the multitudes

“Bay View turns 40, Part 2” tells how bravely Dr. Willie spoke truth to power as an invited speaker at San Francisco’s largest anti-war rally in the lead-up to the Iraq War: “‘350,000 march against war and racism’ declared the banner headline on Jan. 22, 2003, when JR (Valrey) reported I told the multitude from the steps of City Hall:

‘The Black community has been engaged in war ever since we left the shores of Africa in chains over four centuries ago. So if the country is going to start a true anti-war movement, then this anti-war movement needs to begin by addressing the war that the American government and big business via the police are waging on Black communities right here. Then we can span the world.’ It was the largest demonstration in San Francisco history.” Dr. Willie defended his people knowing he’d be punished by the powerful.

New Orleans: Gentrification by genocide

The audacity of the Bay View for daring to challenge the mainstream coverage of Katrina (read more in “This is criminal”) earned even more punishment by the powerful. We called our coverage “New Orleans: Gentrification by Genocide.” Our website, sfbayview.com, was becoming influential nationally; in September 2005, it was visited by 843,608 people.

Popular website, revitalized headquarters gone

Less than a year later, in July 2006, the punishment Dr. Willie was expecting hit him hard. Our website, where traffic had risen to 2.3 million that month, was hacked and destroyed. Ten thousand stories were lost; not a trace has ever been found.

From Feb. 4, 1998, to July 2, 2008, we published the Bay View every week, still without a paid staff. Only when we faced foreclosure on the building we had bought and revitalized after the noose at the airport were we forced to stop. That was a low point. We’d been approved for refinancing the building we still live in but no longer own. “But the loan approval evaporated when the appraisal came in lower than expected,” wrote Dr. Willie in “Part 2.” “Why? It was summer of 2008, when the mortgage crash few knew was coming hit this hood and all hoods like a hurricane, blowing away generations of Black wealth.” 

That sacrifice was especially painful, losing ownership of a building Dr. Willie had transformed from a crack house we’d bought for about $235,000 to what we considered the prettiest building on Third Street, appraised at over $2 million, an almost tenfold increase.

Bullet through the bedroom window

“The Bay View has been blessed with more than our share of awards over the years,” writes Dr. Willie in “Part 2,” “and a few other recognitions of our influence in the struggle for justice: the noose at the airport that signaled the lockout of Blacks from construction in 1998, the website hacking that destroyed 10,000 stories in 2006 and, on May 13, 2010, at 1:45 a.m., someone stood on the roof of the bank next door and shot a bullet through the bedroom window of our home-office that was apparently meant not to hurt us but to scare us.  

“The bullet, which is pictured along with the 2-by-3-inch hole in the window on the front page of the June 2010 Bay View, sailed over my bed, through the open bedroom door and made a dent in the molding of the closet across the hall. Mary was still working behind the next window, easily visible to the shooter, but he chose not to shoot her. We figure only a cop in uniform could be on that roof at that hour and not draw suspicion. But why did he shoot? I think it was intended to scare me into withdrawing from the competition for the contract to build the new Bayview Library and put my community back to work.”

Black low bidder denied $5.1M contract

Dr. Willie explains: “A big stand-alone picture on the October 2010 front page of me handing a piece of paper to a young clerk at City Hall is explained with this caption: ‘On Sept. 22, Liberty Builders owner (and Bay View publisher) Willie Ratcliff signed the $5.1 million contract to build the new Bayview Branch Library and handed it to Rochelle Delavega at the San Francisco Department of Public Works. He must still secure a loan and a bond, huge hurdles for a Black contractor, but he is determined to let nothing stop the people of Bayview Hunters Point from building our library ‘for us by us.’ ‘I didn’t win that contract by myself,’ says Ratcliff. People out here said, ‘Give it to him!’ when asked their opinion by City officials. …

“Then came the December 2010 headline over a story by Joe Debro (our friend and the founder of the National Association of Minority Contractors), ‘San Francisco locks Blacks out from building our own library.’ … It wasn’t the bond, which we got, or the loan that shot down my plans and dreams and those of this job-starved community.

“The City snatched back the contract on the flimsy excuse that our insurance agent was one day late in submitting a certificate of insurance that the City already had on file, and they immediately handed it to the second low bidder, a white contractor, for $2 million more than my realistic bid. That $2 million included a bonus for hiring some ‘minority’ subcontractors who had already committed to work within Liberty Builders’ budget. I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered from the low blow of losing the contract, our last hope for girding our community with good jobs to stave off the exodus of Blacks from San Francisco that has reduced us now to a little over 3 percent of the population.” We hear it was then Mayor Gavin Newsom who ordered that contract snatched.

Kevin Williams: SF Bay View needs and deserves our fundraising assistance

Community pillar Kevin Williams, son of Ruth Williams, for whom the Opera House is finally named after decades of struggle, sums it up: “For decades, the Ratcliffs have stood at the vanguard of truth-telling through the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, giving voice to those long denied one. The Bay View has always been a sanctuary where the voiceless could speak back to entrenched power. For me personally, that space was invaluable. In the early 1990s, when I was barely 40 years old and serving as Senior Discrimination Investigator at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, I was tasked with monitoring billions of dollars in contracts at San Francisco International Airport.

“One of the most searing experiences of that time remains with me: When Liberty Builders, under Willie’s leadership, filed a complaint with my office, his all-Black crew was subjected to a grotesque act of intimidation – a white superintendent (working for the prime contractor) hung a noose inside their construction trailer, plainly visible, and when one worker sought to photograph it, the superintendent sneered, “It’s not for you to take pictures of; it’s for you to put your necks in.” That noose should have been grounds for immediate debarment (of the prime contractor) under federal law. Yet, as in the Jim Crow South, government complicity too often excused even the most flagrant acts of racial terror.

“It was Willie who inspired me not to remain a faceless government official, but to wield my position and my voice for justice. My very first article, ‘Master of the Flying Plantation,’ published in the Bay View, exposed how Black businesses were systematically excluded from airport contracts – right here on the so-called progressive West Coast. No other paper would have dared to publish such a direct challenge to government-sanctioned discrimination. But the Bay View did, and in doing so, it helped pierce illusions and bring truth to light.

“For that, I remain forever grateful. And it is precisely why I believe the San Francisco Bay View is more than deserving of a fundraiser — not merely a one-time gesture, but sustained, long-term support to ensure its survival and vitality for generations to come.

“The Bay View is not simply a newspaper; it is a historical record, a community stronghold, and a continuing instrument of liberation. Preserving it would be your lasting gift, a living legacy that will continue to inspire and empower future generations.”

Thank you, Kevin, and thanks to all who’ve ever had a hand in the Bay View. Readers, please make a mental note that SF Bay View turns 50 years old – a half century – a year from now, in September 2026, and WE MUST NOT LET IT DIE! 

Dr. Willie and Mary Ratcliff can be reached at 415-671-0789 or mary@sfbayview.com. 

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Source: https://sfbayview.com/2025/09/survival-requires-sacrifice/