THIS MESSAGE IS for the readers of the Bay Guardian and the Bay View and especially for the 15,000 people – mostly black and mostly from Bayview-Hunters Point – who signed the District 10 recall petition. They – we – are the answer to the Bay Guardian's front-page question: who's behind the campaign to recall Sup. Sophie Maxwell recall campaign, and what do they want?

This recall was part of the historic movement by black people for the right to live and thrive in San Francisco. The pressure by big developers to gentrify Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco's black heartland, has never been more intense, and grassroots activists are fighting back in a thousand ways.

We shrugged at the major media's upside-down speculation that big developers were funding the recall, but it hurt when the Bay Guardian joined their chorus. The truth is that most of the small amount of money paid to the hardworking signature gatherers came out of my pocket.

I couldn't afford it – we were barely able to save our home-office from foreclosure as a result – but when I saw how high people's hopes were to have a strong, effective voice in City Hall, I felt I couldn't afford not to help. Having learned just last week that campaign-spending disclosure is required for a recall – disclosure is not required for many measures until they qualify for the ballot – we'll soon submit a full report.

Of course we're disappointed that the Elections Department found the recall signatures insufficient. We're not confident of their count, as we found extensive inaccuracies in their records. But the question is moot now.

On Aug. 6, the 39th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and long after we'd submitted our petitions, elections director John Arntz told us he interprets an ambiguous city ordinance as giving the mayor, not the voters, the right to choose a successor to a recalled official. If we had known that, there would have been no recall. The words "We demand an election of a successor" are in the petition that 15,000 people signed; those words were approved by Arntz.

Blacks have always had to struggle to claim a home in San Francisco. Right after the Second World War, as blacks who had come to work in the shipyards were transforming the Fillmore into a world-renowned jazz mecca, the mayor asked pioneering black journalist Thomas Fleming, "Mr. Fleming, how long do you think these colored people are going to be here?"

"Mr. Mayor," Fleming said, "do you know how permanent the Golden Gate is? Well, the black population is just as permanent."

Urban renewal – what blacks call "Negro removal" – was the city's response. Bulldozers did to the Fillmore beginning in 1953 what they do in Palestine today. In one of the nation's cruelest ethnic cleansings, they destroyed 200 black businesses and 5,000 homes and uprooted 20,000 people.

Many moved to Bayview-Hunters Point, where an uprising in 1966, sparked when a cop shot a 16-year-old in the back, was put down by National Guard tanks on Third Street and rows of police shooting into the Bayview Opera House, where children had sought sanctuary.

Voting was believed to be the way to get justice; "Vote 100 percent" was the rallying cry then, and it still is. But in recent elections, repression worse than what we saw in 2000 in Florida has kept many from the polls. The 15,000 who signed the recall petition were declaring, "We're not scared anymore!"

Maxwell told the San Francisco Chronicle she wants to work with us. Before the strain of economic exclusion and environmental pollution causes any more deaths, we want her to fight for and win an on-the-job training program enabling our young people to build the maintenance barn to complete Muni's Third Street light rail project. We need her to shut down the old power plants and stop any new ones and to prohibit the giveaway of the Hunters Point Shipyard and any development in it until it's clean.

And we call on all people of good will to champion everyone's right to live and thrive in San Francisco.

Willie Ratcliff publishes the San Francisco Bay View.