At this Weekend’s SF Hip-Hop Festival, an Examination of Black Displacement

While watching the likes of Digable Planets, the Dogg Pound and Souls of Mischief this Saturday at the first annual SF Hip-Hop Festival, Bay Area rap fans will also get something more: a lesson in Black displacement.

That’s due to the efforts of Hodari Davis, who’s curated an art- and data-driven project, Exhibit A, to be projected onscreen during performers’ sets at the Midway in San Francisco. The exhibit addresses anti-Black policies — urban renewal, overpolicing, redlining — that have caused San Francisco’s Black population to decline consistently from 13.5% in 1970 to just 5.4% in 2025.

“The goal is to kind of get these data points in front of people so we can start pressuring the city to make some different policy choices,” Hodari says.

Naturally, the day-long festival’s primary draw is the musical lineup, with San Francisco hip-hop icons like Mix Master Mike, San Quinn, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and RBL Posse alongside up-and-comers like Paris Nights and Seiji Oda from across the Bay Bridge.

The intersection of civic policy and hip-hop may seem less prominent in San Francisco than in the East Bay, home of political rappers like Paris and the Coup. But Davis points to the long tradition of San Francisco graffiti, and the ways it’s challenged political norms in prominent spots around the city to make visible “the kinds of social justice resistance that we sometimes hear in rap from the East Bay.”

To that end, an upstairs graffiti exhibition and blackbook session on Saturday will include San Francisco artists such as Apex, Bukue and Omen2. In the hallway outside the concert hall will be an exhibit dedicated to the work of Mike “Dream” Francisco. And panel discussions, including one hosted by KQED’s Pendarvis Harshaw, will take place in a side room throughout the day.

But it’s Exhibit A, with work by Malik Seneferu, Ahmad Walker, Andrew Wilson and the Black Panther Party’s legendary artist Emory Douglas, that will provide performance backdrops to exemplify the notion — popularized in hip-hop by KRS-One — of “edutainment.” A bit of turntablism flair from Rob Swift, a bit of “Big Steppin’” from Stunnaman02, and a bit of education on San Francisco’s rates of incarceration, mental health and income inequality.

“What happened in the Fillmore, what happened to Bayview, with regard to dispossession and poverty, and the diminishing population of Black people in San Francisco … it’s a pretty intense story,” Davis says.

The SF Hip-Hop Festival takes place Saturday, July 19, 1–9 p.m. at the Midway (900 Marin St., San Francisco). The night prior, on July 18, New York rap legend Rakim leads a panel discussion on AI in hip-hop at the Midway with Sway Calloway, Davey D, Adisa Banjoko and others.