By Ann-Marie Alcántara
If you use the Montgomery BART station, start thinking about an alternate route for Friday: a mass protest is being planned to shut down the station from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Both in a Facebook event and an Indybay post, the organizers have labeled the demonstration as “BART Friday: No Business As Usual.” The list of demands is short: for charges and fines to be dropped against the 14 protesters arrested for blocking a BART train on Black Friday last year, to “disband the BART police,” and for low-income BART passengers to receive a ticket discount.
The event is being held this Friday to “reclaim [Martin Luther] King’s legacy,” as part of a project by the Anti-Police-Terrorism Project and due to the federal holiday honoring Dr. King next Monday. Plus, planning the event on a Friday will clearly embody a main message from the organizers that “as long it remains business as usual to gun down Black women, men, and children in the streets of this country, there will be no business as usual anywhere or for anyone.”
Two hashtags associated with the demonstration are #MLKSHUTITDOWN and #BARTFriday, with numerous tweets already popping up discussing the event. Organizers are urging anyone who’s going to join to be on time and to bring a metal spoon. So far, over two hundred people have responded that they are going to attend on Facebook, with over 3,000 people invited.
The entire flyer is attached below with more information. You can follow @SFBART to stay up on any possible delays.
[h/t SFist; Top photo courtesy of Steve Lambert/Flickr.]
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