How a neighborhood battle started over painting 'Black Lives Matter' on SF's Bernal rock
“I was very shocked when the following morning, I went by and the whole front of the rock had been covered with copper paint,” said Makarova. “Even though the rock is temporal and the message changes, there’s an unspoken courtesy rule to never change it quicker than a week. And usually it lasts a month. It was a purposeful act of silencing.”
So she painted it again — this time, with a memorial for Alex Nieto, who was killed by San Francisco police on Bernal Hill in 2014. But the next morning, she once again found her message painted over.
“So we said we would paint it every single day if we had to,” said Makarova.
This has now happened a total of five days in a row: Someone paints over the rock in the night, and during the day, Makarova and other artists repaint it with a Black Lives Matter message. Neighbors have rallied around the efforts to keep this message on the rock, even setting up shifts to watch over it on Sunday night.
Rocky Smith, a Bernal Heights resident who took a shift very early Monday morning to watch the rock, said he caught the person in the act.
“At 5:10 a.m. I was walking back toward the rock, and suddenly I could see somebody spray painting the rock,” said Smith.
He said he approached the woman and asked her why she was painting over it.
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“She said, ‘It's time for some pizza, something nonpolitical,’” said Smith. “I asked if it was something about Black Lives Matter that she didn't like, and she said, ‘I don't like the politics, this is a nice little community. I don't want the violence. I don't want the politics. I just want to go for a walk and have a nice day.’"
Makarova didn’t meet the woman herself, but if she ever comes face-to-face with her, she says she would ask: “Do you understand that black people cannot go for a walk or have a nice day any single day of their life? […] There are so many who think they're just not being political, but they are not working actively against the system that allows these injustices to happen.”
Smith said that the intention of the overnight watch was never to confront the woman or to try to stop her, but rather to have a dialogue and find out her motivation. Besides, no one owns the rock — he says it’s technically her right to paint over it every night and for others to repaint it.
Smith says they will not continue the overnight watch because what’s going on here is more important than the rock itself.
“The hope is rather than it being about her, it should be about amplifying the message,” explained Smith. “And the ironic thing is this person who keeps painting over it, they don’t want to be reminded of [Black Lives Matter] but literally every time they do that, it’s getting more and more attention. It’s giving a lot of people including myself satisfaction that what she's doing is kind of backfiring.”
In addition to repainting the rock each day, Makarova and other artists, including Micah Rivera and Manny Fabregas, have begun attaching QR codes to the rock and encouraging Bernal Heights residents to donate to different causes (including Campaign Zero and City of Dreams) each time it is repainted.
“This is not about protecting the rock,” said Makarova. “Take that energy and put it towards other ways to further the cause.”
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