Terry Williams is a born-and-raised San Franciscan — he’s called Alamo Square home his whole life. But on Sunday, he found a package containing racist slurs, death threats and a doll painted in blackface outside his house, telling him to “get out.”
“They said they’re going to exterminate me, eradicate me, that I don’t belong in this neighborhood,” said Williams, 49. The essence of the message, he said, was, “It’s not a Black neighborhood no more — get out of here, you don’t belong here.”
The doll had the words “Get out of the Alamo Square district” on the front, as well as a small plastic grenade and Ku Klux Klan imagery.
It was the second threatening package left at Williams’ home in the last two weeks; early on April 26, he found the first, which also contained a doll painted in blackface — a racist caricature of Black people stemming from 19th-century minstrel shows — with a noose around its neck, racist slurs written on the doll and printouts of racist imagery.
Since then, Williams said life has been more stressful for him and his parents.
“I see it in my mom; she’s smoking cigarettes,” Williams said. “And it’s just little things like she’ll tell me, ‘Where are you going? You call me when you get where you’re going.’”
On each occasion, Williams called the police, who came and retrieved the packages. Officers are investigating both incidents as potential hate crimes but are “unable to confirm that these incidents are connected,” a San Francisco Police Department spokesperson wrote in an email.
Supporters plan to rally in Alamo Square Park at 10:30 a.m. Saturday to “raise awareness” of the racist threats against Williams and pressure police to prioritize the investigations, Williams’ neighbor Katrina Queirolo told KQED.
“I hope they do their job, but in my opinion — what I’ve been through with SFPD and my history with trying to report stuff and get stuff handled for Black people — they don’t do it,” Williams said.