Hundreds of community members add flowers, candles and photographs on Sunday to an altar for healing for local civil rights activist Thairie Ritchie at the Black Lives Matter mural in front of Santa Cruz City Hall. Ritchie tried to self-immolate at the site on Jan. 20 just hours after President Donald Trump took his oath of office and the local Martin Luther King Jr. Day march brought hundreds of people past the mural. Ritchie was treated on scene and then airlifted to an out-of-area burn center where he is now being treated. Photo: Shmuel Thaler/Santa Cruz Sentinel
A light, misty rain fell over Santa Cruz Sunday afternoon as hundreds gathered in the downtown area to honor the life and pray for the recovery of a prominent local activist who set himself on fire in front of City Hall less than two weeks prior.
Thairie Ritchie, a well known Santa Cruz community organizer, reportedly self-immolated Jan. 20 atop the Black Lives Matter mural on Center Street in downtown Santa Cruz, only a few yards from the city’s power center. According to police scanner recordings from that day, first responders around the 5 p.m. hour were at the corner of Locust and Center streets in response to a “male who set himself on fire.” The response was triggered only a few hours after the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day march had finished inside the neighboring Civic Auditorium and President Donald Trump had taken his oath of office for the second time in Washington.
Ritchie’s family, friends and acquaintances quietly poured into the open-air patio of Bike Church Santa Cruz on Sunday, the second day of Black History Month, with many carrying flowers as they embraced one another with tears in their eyes. The smell of incense and burning sage was carried by the crisp winter air as the sun set behind a gray curtain of clouds that covered the more than 300 people that had assembled to collectively process the incident.
Inside space had been cleared to set up a vigil for Ritchie, 29, with photos, candles and seating along with cookies and other snacks. Pens and paper were passed around for visitors to write private notes that many hope he will soon read as his recovery begins.
Ayo Banjo, a friend of Ritchie and the designated media contact for the event, said that Ritchie was awake Sunday and recovering in an intensive care unit. He said “a lot” of Ritchie’s body was covered in burns but declined to share a percentage, adding that the recovery process is estimated to take about six months.
“He (Ritchie) means a lot to us because he was all about community and everybody here from all different walks of life, all different races, all different genders, all different places, come together because we celebrate his representation,” said Banjo. “He is the example of what I think makes America, America. The ability to bring everyone together around issues that are beyond us and bigger than us. And I think that message has to be communicated.”
Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker confirmed to the Sentinel that Santa Cruz fire and police teams responded Jan. 20 to an individual on Center Street who was actively on fire. He said the fire was quickly extinguished and the individual was transported to medical care.
“This was a tragic incident and our hearts go out to those impacted,” wrote Huffaker in an emailed statement. “We recognize this was a traumatic event and that the community is grieving. The City is supportive of the community holding space, grieving, and supporting one another through this challenging time.”
Ritchie’s motivations for the self-immolation remained unclear Sunday, though there was some speculation swirling about a letter or series of letters Ritchie had left behind, as reported by Lookout Santa Cruz, which was first to share news of the incident.
Asked if the city was in possession of a letter authored by Ritchie, Huffaker appeared not to respond directly, writing: “Our intent has always been to respect confidentiality, familial requests for privacy, and legal restrictions placed on the City’s ability to respond. We remain committed to transparency and compassionate communication and will continue to support our community.”
When asked again about the possible existence of letters, Huffaker stressed that any potential answers to why the self-immolation occurred can only come from the individual, their family or their community, and the city will not speculate. In addition to the city acting within constraints of state and local privacy and information sharing code, Huffaker also said the police department’s standard practice is to return any property taken as evidence to the rightful owner, and this case was no exception.
“I understand that there are members of the community and the media that believe the City is withholding evidence,” wrote Huffaker, “but I want to make clear that the City has shared everything that it can under the law.”
Friends and fellow local activists, for their part, insist that there is a message behind Ritchie’s actions even if his words are yet to emerge. This includes Abi Mustapha, founding member of the Equity Collab and a local artist who helped lead the effort to create the Black Lives Matter street mural in Santa Cruz in 2020.
“While his story is not necessarily mine to tell, one thing I can say with certainty is he was sending a message very publicly and purposefully,” Mustapha wrote in a recent social media post. “By keeping it quiet we take away his power. He took this action out loud. It is not for anyone to silence it. While I don’t advocate for this action I honor his statement.”
Instances of self-immolation amid moments of political strife have occurred since at least the 1960s. One of the more well-known incidents came in 1963 when Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death in Saigon in protest of the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. The extreme, often deadly protest tactic was observed as recently as February of last year when 25-year-old Air Force airman Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, saying in a livestream of the event that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.”
After convening at the bike church courtyard, Sunday’s vigil-goers eventually moved onto the street for a half-mile march to City Hall where another vigil and street closure was planned after permits had been approved by the city, according to Huffaker. Participants held bouquets of bright flowers and roses as night fell and the leader of the march shouted call and response chants that included Ritchie’s name, “Black Lives Matter” and “Free, free Palestine.”
Hundreds of bouquets were eventually placed atop the Black Lives Matter mural painted in bright yellow letters, alongside candles and more photos of Ritchie. Organizers set up a microphone and loudspeaker so that some of Ritchie’s oldest and closet friends could reflect on the moment and the way Ritchie had given them inspiration over the years.
“I want to keep pushing his message forward and keep fighting for what he was fighting for,” said Marissa Molina, who has known Ritchie since he was 14 years old. “I don’t want us to lose that hope of change.”
Molina, overwhelmed with emotion, played a brief tribute for Ritchie on a Native American flute to an enraptured crowd.
Isaac Collins, a Santa Cruz-based musician and poet that goes by the artist name “Lyrical I,” read a poem he wrote for Ritchie called “How many?” He told the Sentinel that, for him, the experience had been a reminder of the need to make mental health services more widely available to the local Black community.
“How many more of us are going to keep being silent and pretend that mental health of men of color don’t matter when it has to be addressed more than ever,” Collins said, reciting his poem. “How many more marches, protests, speeches do we have to make to sacrifice for our freedom? Our right to exist and our cities that will hide away from the real issues that we are facing right now.”
Huffaker said that Santa Cruz police had concluded that the act was not criminal in nature, and no further investigative action had been taken since Jan. 22. He said the city’s process of information sharing was made within a privacy and legal framework based on state law.
“The City never intended to diminish the gravity of the situation,” he wrote.
Thairie Ritchie taking a knee on the Black Lives Matter Mural in front of Santa Cruz City Hall during the March Toward Love and Courage in June 2023. Photo: Kevin Painchaud/Lookout Santa Cruz
Quick Take: In lighting his own flesh on fire in a seemingly placid and sunny seaside college town where unredressed racial violence lurks beneath the surface, Thairie Ritchie bore witness to a world that is on fire and hurtling toward the abyss, write activists at Santa Cruz Black. He self-immolated while standing on the Black Lives Matter street mural, which cars heedlessly drive over every day in front of city hall in downtown Santa Cruz. The group offers a tribute to him and his message.
Thairie Ritchie set himself on fire in a town that is less than 2% Black but prides itself on its liberal politics.
Even though we were not present at the moment Thairie self-immolated, we cannot unsee what he did. In setting himself ablaze while standing on the Black Lives Matter street mural in front of Santa Cruz City Hall, he demanded to be seen. Although we cannot speak for Thairie, we are obligated not to turn away but to bear witness to our brother, our son and our comrade – and to act accordingly.
Thairie is alive, and we say, with the fullest power of our being, “Live, Thairie, live!”
Yet, we understand that Thairie reckoned with the likelihood that he might not live and that most who set themselves on fire as he did perish as a result. We understand that his was a sacrifice not only of flesh and health, but also, potentially, life.
Thairie, who had held a candle at demonstrations and vigils to call attention to the horrors of the world that go unacknowledged, both near and far, chose as a potentially final act to shine fiery light on a statement, “Black Lives Matter,” that cars heedlessly drive over every day in front of city hall in downtown Santa Cruz.
We cannot – and we refuse to – ignore the message his act imparts.
The politics of self-immolation are a politics of martyrdom not only in the sense of sacrificing one’s life for a cause, but also, in the etymological sense of martis, from the Greek, for “witness.” In lighting his own flesh in a seemingly placid and sunny seaside college town, Thairie was bearing witness to a world that is on fire and hurtling toward the abyss.
It is hard to escape the rebuke in his act. On two acknowledged occasions since 2020 when Black Spring gave rise to visionary local abolitionist organizers like Thairie, the Black Lives Matter street mural has been defaced and desecrated. According to Santa Cruz law enforcement, in the recent 2024 case, however, destroying the Black Lives Matter mural is not considered a hate crime.
Down is up, violence is peace, might is right, genocide is defense, and police repression is safety. This is the world – one in which power inverts the truth, coercing submission – that Thairie labored to transform. He registered the contradictions of these horror-filled times in his fateful act, and his timing – precise, clear, and intentional – was a damning indictment. On a day meant to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., the White House, with all its plantation implications, was retaken by a demagogue who insisted that “Black Lives Matter” was “a symbol of hate.”
By setting himself alight, Thairie aligned himself with a tradition of Black leaders martyred for their vision of a more just world. Like his revolutionary elders who dared speak out against this nation’s unrelenting anti-Blackness, its genocidal foreign policy, the terrorism of the police and the immiseration of the working poor, Thairie sought to compel moral clarity where there was none.
What does it mean to keenly feel the pain and suffering of the world – to be woke, in the Black radical sense of the term – when others have willfully shut their eyes and adjusted themselves to injustice? In a widely circulated photo from 2023, Thairie takes a knee at the Black Lives Matter street mural where he returned this past Jan. 20. What was he bearing witness to?
In Santa Cruz, where unredressed racial violence is the truth behind the beautiful mirage that greets visitors, Thairie understood what lurks beneath the surface. In social media posts, he spoke about how “racism is very much alive here in ‘progressive’ Santa Cruz.”
In July 2020, Thairie posted a photo of a man giving a Nazi salute in order “to shed light upon the hidden institutional and systemic racism in our community.” In his efforts to create structures of community safety as a counter to policing, Thairie tirelessly worked to challenge the structural violence that conditions the status quo. That he was driven to set his body on fire in order to open our eyes must give us all pause.
Last spring, Thairie enacted solidarity through his steady presence at the UC Santa Cruz Gaza solidarity encampment. Always thoughtful and observant, he came onto the university campus to be in community, lend strength to the student struggle, and refuse the normalization of the U.S.-backed genocide that Israel has perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
There was beauty in Thairie’s indivisible commitment to justice. He understood, to quote from Assata Shakur, that “any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well. … Each time one of imperialism’s tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.” At least four people in this country have self-immolated to call for Palestine’s liberation, for an end to U.S. complicity in genocide, and to make plain the right of Palestinians to life.
As with these self-immolations, Thairie has spoken collective truths that have gone unrecognized. He has held up a mirror to the pain of the world and the pain we see and feel here in Santa Cruz but many choose to disregard. Two Fridays ago, Thairie opened his eyes, but he was already woke.
Wake up, Santa Cruz. Wake up, world.
Santa Cruz Black works to empower and sustain a thriving Black community in Santa Cruz County. The organization builds community, fights for racial and economic justice and works in solidarity for the liberation of oppressed peoples both locally and around the world. In an area that is ideologically white by design, subordinating the histories and realities of communities of color, Santa Cruz Black is committed to education that amplifies the presence, lived experiences and struggles of Black people.
RE “Aaron Bushnell”
What Bushnell’s desperate act exposes is that some 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices such as the current US-Israeli Holocaust of the Palestinians, just like all the “bad German people” during the Nazi Holocaust, whom they are happily pointing the finger to as examples of OTHER PEOPLE who are bad and evil in their deep dishonesty, self-delusion, and madness.
He pointed exactly this reality out in one of his last statements:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Now WHY is it that 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices? Because “advanced” humans have a malignant disease called a “Soullessness Spectrum Disorder” …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
Because of this big truth Bushnell is pointing to lots of truth-hating cowardly soulless people resort to slandering Bushnell as mentally disturbed or fanatical, having been suicidal (he was not), etc. or try to misrepresent him negatively in some other form –anything in order to NOT see the real truth about themselves. But that is no surprise of course because…
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” — Gustave Le Bon, in 1895
“America is the greatest exporter of violence the world has ever known. So wear your patriotism on your sleeve and be proud. You are a depraved citizen of the world’s worst killer nation.” — Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., economist & former US empire official, in 2015
“The US empire is quantifiably the most destructive and tyrannical force on this planet, by an extremely massive margin. No other power has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions and displacing them by the tens of millions. No other power is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, starving people around the world with blockades and economic sanctions, staging proxy wars, color revolutions and coups all over the earth, and working to destabilize and destroy any nation anywhere on this planet who dares to defy its dictates. Only the US empire is doing this. No other power comes anywhere remotely close.” — Caitlin Johnstone, Independent Journalist, in 2024
“I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine, at the hands of their colonizers (=the genocidal US empire and its genocidal Israeli colony), it’s not extreme at all.” — Aaron Bushnell, shortly before he set himself on fire
If you have been injected with Covid jabs/bioweapons and are concerned verify what batch number you were injected with at https://howbadismybatch.com
“We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.” — Aaron Bushnell, in 2023