Photos: Sonoma County protests for racial justice

Thirty years ago, the verdict of a Los Angeles court case galvanized people across the U.S. to protest systemic racism and police brutality.

Four Los Angeles Police Department officers were charged with assault and use of excessive force in the March 1991 brutal beating of Rodney King. In April the following year, a mostly white Simi Valley jury acquitted the officers, and the city broke out into what would be known as the Los Angeles Riots of 1992.

Social upheavals reverberated throughout the rest of the country, animated by one of the first viral videos depicting anti-Black police brutality, broadcast into homes all over America.

In Santa Rosa, on May 2, 1992, hundreds marched through Old Courthouse Square to protest the verdict of the case. They carried signs calling for justice and held hands in prayer at the end of the rally. One person held a sign that read, “We’ve entered a time warp! This is really 1963!”

The demonstrations 30 years ago in support of Rodney King — like the civil rights marches 30 years before that — are eerily similar to more recent uprisings against institutional racism in law enforcement.

In June 2020, at the height of national unrest and protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, thousands took to the streets in Santa Rosa to march against police brutality. One such protest arose from a vigil at the Roseland Dollar Tree for Andy Lopez, who was shot and killed by a Sonoma County sheriff's deputy in 2013.

After nearly nine years, the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Lopez on Oct. 22, 2013, remains one of the most tragic events in recent Sonoma County history. Protests went on for days after Lopez’s death. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and months turned into annual vigils and demonstrations in his honor.

Protests against systemic racism may have surged in the county over the last 10 years, but local civil rights advocacy is nothing new.

Civil rights pioneer Platt Williams led several protests in the 1950s to challenge segregation and racial inequality, including the county’s first protest against Jim Crow laws. Williams founded the Santa Rosa chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1953 with fellow activist Gilbert Gray. Educator and civil rights advocate Willie Garrett, along with Gray, helped raise funds to establish the Community Baptist Church in Santa Rosa in 1951.

In May 1962, Williams, Gray and Garrett organized Santa Rosa’s first-ever sit-in at the Silver Dollar Saloon, where the owner refused to serve Black people, according to a 1986 Press Democrat article by Gaye LeBaron.

Sixty years after Santa Rosa’s first protest for civil rights and equal treatment, local activists continue the fight for justice.

For more information on the history of local civil rights pioneers, check out “Glimpses: A History of African Americans in Santa Rosa,“ by the late Rev. Ann Gray Byrd, daughter of Gilbert and Alice Gray.

See the gallery above for photos of civil rights protests in Sonoma County over the last three decades.