Standing Up with the Aboriginal Blackmen United

"His thing is a little militant theater," Rawlins says of Richards. "He doesn't seem to mean any harm by it. ... It's theater: It's not straight-up anger."

Richards has definite ideas about how UCSF's local hiring should work. He wants the ABU to be the lead job placement group on the UCSF Mission Bay project. After all, as he preached to his followers recently, the UCSF campus is on Third Street, and that's their territory, all the way up to Third and Market. At the least, he wants UCSF developers to work with CityBuild to do their local placements. But UCSF has decided to handle local hiring on its own.

Josh Edelson

ABU leader James Richards in the Double Rock Baptist Church.

Josh Edelson

Mid-protest, the ABU unloads its grill in front of a UCSF Mission Bay site.

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• James Richards
• University of California-San Francisco
• Ed Lee
• Politics
• Local Politics

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As a result, Richards is starting to beat the drum about the UCSF project. Work has barely started on the Mission Bay campus' new women's and children's hospitals, but last month, the ABU held another pre-emptive protest. Members picketed for a while in front of the almost-deserted site, then piled their signs to one side and fired up the grill. They were standing there, munching their hamburgers and drinking cans of Shasta, as some of the site workers drove out of the gate in a red sports car, their white faces peering out perplexedly at the party.

According to Richards, this is just the beginning. On a recent morning, the ABU meeting was happening inside the church, where Richards greeted his followers, from the pulpit, with the Muslim greeting, "As-salaam alaikum!"

"Wa-alaikum salaam!" they call back.

Soon Richards is thundering about the coming conflict. It won't be like their Sunset Reservoir picketing, or the previous UCSF protests. "You better come on," Richards said, speaking rhetorically to the UCSF developers, "or people going to go to jail, and some bloodshed!"

"This is not going to be no peaceful demonstration, this is going to be some sirens coming!" Richards calls out.

"We going to batter their gates down!"

"When we going?" one of his followers calls out from the pews.

He pauses. "Any minute."