By Malik Washington, Destination Freedom Media Group / The Davis Vanguard
The Ruth Williams Opera House did not need to be reminded where it stands.
It stands in Bayview-Hunters Point—one of San Francisco’s oldest Black neighborhoods, a community that has buried generations while carrying the unhealed legacy of radiation, heavy metals, and government neglect left behind by the Hunters Point Shipyard. It stands in a place where public health has never been theoretical, where policy failures show up in shortened life expectancy, asthma rates, displacement, and silence.
On this night, seven candidates seeking to govern the world’s fourth-largest economy stepped onto a stage shaped by that history.
The debate—hosted by the Black Action Alliance and made possible through the leadership of Theo Ellington, Executive Director of the Ruth Williams Opera House—was more than a forum. It was a test of whether California’s would-be governors could speak honestly inside a community that has learned to listen carefully for what is not said.
Ellington, who was instrumental in securing the Opera House as the venue, understands that symbolism matters. He is not only a cultural steward but also a declared candidate for San Francisco’s District 10 Board of Supervisors in November 2026. The building he protects has become a civic commons—a place where power is invited in, but not deferred to.
Seven Candidates, One Republican, Many Versions of California
The lineup reflected California’s political spectrum—six Democrats and one Republican.
Steve Hilton, the lone Republican on the stage, wasted no time framing the evening as a referendum on Democratic governance. He blamed “16 years of one-party rule” for California’s cost of living, poverty, and gas prices, calling for an end to what he labeled a “climate crusade.” His pitch was blunt, populist, and intentionally disruptive—offering $3 gas, tax cuts, and deregulation, without addressing how those policies intersect with environmental justice or communities like Bayview-Hunters Point that have already paid the price for lax oversight.
The Democrats did not engage Hilton head-on. Instead, they competed with one another over experience, biography, and moral authority.
Photo credit: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-04-02/former-federal-health-chief-xavier-becerra-announces-run-for-governor
Xavier Becerra framed himself as a crisis governor—son of immigrants, former Attorney General, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services—citing more than 120 legal victories against the Trump administration, defense of the Affordable Care Act, DACA, and pandemic leadership. When immigration took center stage, Becerra sharpened his message.
“We will police the immigration police,” he said—twice, after a technical interruption required him to repeat his answer. He spoke of parents arriving with $12 in their pockets, of buying a home and retiring in California—not Idaho, not Arizona, but here. He pledged investigations and prosecutions of immigration enforcement that violates the law, invoking a Spanish proverb: Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres—tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Matt Mahan centered trust—arguing that Californians no longer believe government tells the truth. His appeal focused on unsheltered homelessness, public safety, and restoring credibility through “real answers, not easy ones.”
Tom Steyer leaned into independence from special interests, wealth as insulation rather than aspiration. He spoke of walking away from business, taking the Giving Pledge, and delivering billions to the state without costing taxpayers a dollar—casting himself as a reformer who cannot be bought.
Photo credit: https://www.kqed.org/news/11707127/tony-thurmond-wins-close-race-to-become-californias-next-top-school-official
Tony Thurmond grounded his case in education, housing, and immigration resistance. Free preschool. Free meals. Billions for mental health. A promise to build two million housing units. A tax credit to offset rising costs. And a commitment to challenge ICE, including legislation to tax companies that operate detention centers.
Antonio Villaraigosa invoked civil rights lineage—Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, from a single mother raising a family in a tough neighborhood. He listed executive achievements: crime reduction, graduation increases, job creation during recession. Experience as both history and qualification.
Betty Yee closed the opening round with fiscal memory—growing up in a studio apartment with immigrant parents, doing bookkeeping for a family dry-cleaning business at eight years old, never forgetting how hard each dollar is earned. She positioned herself as the underdog who knows how budgets touch real lives.
The Debate Beneath the Debate
On paper, the topics were immigration, affordability, public safety, and Proposition 36.
In practice, something deeper was unfolding.
When the conversation turned to criminal justice and Prop 36, candidates wrestled with a contradiction California knows well: how to end mass incarceration without abandoning people to addiction, mental illness, and death on the streets. Calls for restorative justice collided with acknowledgments that treatment without accountability fails, and incarceration without rehabilitation destroys.
One speaker reminded the audience that California built 24 state prisons while building only four UC campuses—an imbalance with generational consequences. Others spoke of diversion programs, community policing, paid job training, and STEAM pipelines as alternatives to cages.
What remained largely unspoken—especially inside Bayview-Hunters Point—was how environmental harm, public health, policing, and incarceration intersect.
This is a community where contamination was not accidental, where government assurances once masked radioactive soil, where accountability arrived late, if at all. Yet as climate, housing, and public safety were debated, the legacy of the Hunters Point Shipyard hovered quietly—unnamed, unresolved.
Climate policy was discussed as cost.
Public safety as staffing.
Housing as units.
But for Bayview, these are not abstractions. They are cumulative.
A Stage That Remembered
The Ruth Williams Opera House has held performances, funerals, graduations, and organizing meetings long before it hosted gubernatorial candidates. Its walls have heard promises before.
What made this night different was not that candidates spoke—it was where they spoke, and who convened them.
The Black Action Alliance did not host this debate to provide optics. It hosted it to demand presence. Theo Ellington did not secure this venue for spectacle. He secured it so that power would have to enter a space shaped by Black history, Black survival, and Black expectation.
And Bayview listened.
Not for applause lines—but for recognition.
Not for ideology—but for accountability.
Not for who spoke the loudest—but for who understood that governing California means reckoning with the places it has treated as expendable.
The debate will be replayed on screens. Polls will be tallied. Talking points will circulate.
But long after the microphones were muted, Bayview-Hunters Point remained—still carrying the unanswered questions, still waiting to see which of these candidates understands that leadership begins not with ambition, but with acknowledgment.
Because in darkness, democracy fails.
And in Bayview, the light has always been earned.
As we always include, here’s our song/video for this article:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Malik Washington is a San Francisco-based journalist and co-founder of Destination Freedom Media Group, an independent nonprofit newsroom dedicated to accountability reporting at the intersection of civil rights, public integrity, and community survival. He has been a published journalist for over 14 years.
His work—published in partnership with the Davis Vanguard—focuses on government power, criminal justice, environmental justice, and the human consequences of policy decisions too often insulated from public scrutiny. Washington’s reporting amplifies the voices of impacted communities while insisting on documentary evidence, transparency, and the unvarnished truth—especially when institutions demand silence.
His work appears on platforms such as Muck Rack, examining the intersection of justice, governance, and community.
You can reach him via email: mwashington2059@gmail.com or call him at (719) 715-9592.
Suggestions or leads on stories are always welcome.
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