Three horizontal stripes add color to the streetlights and poles in and around the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco.

There’s the color red that sits on top. It’s there to remind everyone of the blood shed towards redemption and liberty along with the unity shared for all of the descendants of the African diaspora. The color green sits at the bottom, it’s a symbol of growth that hearkens back to the fertile lands from the Mother Continent.

And in the middle, there is black.

Science debates whether this is simply a shade or an extreme on the light spectrum. But society and history tell us it is a color. And in this context, it’s used to represent the color of a people.

Back in the early 1900s, one of the hit bangers of the time was a track titled “Every Race has a Flag but the Coon”. When the film Birth of a Nation came out in 1915 and made history as the first motion picture to be screened in the White House, the track was given a new life.

And when Marcus Garvey first heard it, he would make sure the song wouldn’t be played again. In 1920, he helped create and unveil the red, black and green Pan-African flag:

“Show me the race or the nation without a flag, and I will show you a race of people without any pride. Aye! In song and mimicry they have said, “Every race has a flag but the coon.” How true! Aye! But that was said of us four years ago. They can’t say it now…”

The Pan-African flags that were painted in this part of San Francisco are a new addition to the area. They were painted just about a year ago thanks to an initiative spearheaded by local city supervisor, Malia Cohen.

“This is about branding the Bayview neighborhood to honor and pay respect to the decades of contributions that African-Americans have made to the southeast neighborhood and to the city,” she said in a statement.

But when compared to what’s going on in the neighborhood, these painted flags inadvertently serve as reminders of what this neighborhood once was and what it now isn’t. This used to be a place where you could be Black and thrive. You could find work and own a home. Now, not so much.

In Part II of this story about the term Frisco, we try and find out what happened.