Miss Marilyn

Recently someone asked me to write up a summary of the work of Oakland's Marilyn Washington Harris, whose son, Khadafy, was killed on the campus of McClymonds High School in West Oakland back in the summer of 2000. Marilyn is the founder and executive director of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence. I was asked to write about the background to the problem she addresses, the specific work she does, the impact she has on the community, how she is a leader, and finally to sum it all up. And to do it all briefly. I thought it turned out to be a nice, succinct testament about one of the finest, most courageous people I've ever met, so decided to post it here on the Almanac. First the summary, then the other four sections.

Marilyn Washington Harris aids Oakland's forgotten and its shunned. Since losing her only son to the gun in 2000, and finding no help available, she has dedicated her life to stepping into the immediate aftermath of homicides to provide help, hope and healing to stunned, angry, mourning families. Daily, she guides Oaklanders through the craziness, the hopelessness, and the business -- coroners, funerals, city offices, police -- of being a survivor. In 13 years, at homes, at crime scenes, at churches, chapels and funeral homes, she has aided thousands of families, making appointments and arrangements, accompanying them, protecting them from exploitation and beginning the healing process with patience, love and trust. A government clerk when her son was killed, she has become a vocal advocate for peace, a model of selfless service, an inspiration to a generation of violence prevention workers, and a healer of the city and its victims.

Background (of the problem Miss Marilyn addresses in her work)

For more than three decades now, Oakland has had one of the highest homicide rates in the nation. Police and programs exist for the prevention of violence, but very little has ever been done for the survivors of the killed who, lost and scarred, frightened, often friendless and poor, must continue to live and function in the community. When her son was killed in 2000, Marilyn Harris found that there was no one to guide loved ones through the great uncertainty, through the grim business so suddenly at hand in the wake of the violent death of a son, husband, daughter, wife. Suddenly, in a mental and emotional daze, there are police to deal with, coroners, city clerks, funeral arrangements, often with very limited funds. The opportunities for neglect and exploitation are many. Through the lonely, often bitter process, the anger, sadness and alienation of the survivors are only increased and solidified. To ignore their needs is to let their wounds fester. It is to risk returning them to the community utterly bereft and hopeless. To aid them, is to demonstrate that love and healing are still possible.

What She Does

Sometimes she gets a text, or a colleague calls. Often, the police call Marilyn Harris when there has been a homicide in Oakland. Sometimes neighbors of the killed call; they know it's time for Harris to do her work, as only she can. She steps into the bleakest environments, at crime scenes, in homes under a cloud of shocked mourning. She connects with the sufferers, demonstrates rare understanding in the face of anger, confusion, even hostility, casting a balance between compassion and necessity. She finds the right moment for the business at hand, then provides knowledge, will, and a clear mind. Harris knows the system, from cops to florists to morticians. She makes appointments at funeral homes, at the coroner's office, at victims' services. She meets you there, or drives you, assures you are cared for and not exploited. She scrapes and scrounges for funds if you need them, checks if you have taken your medications, if you need food or childcare. She is with you at the funeral, there for you as you return to life. For many, she becomes for a time the one person they know they can trust and believe in. They never forget it.

Her Impact

More than 1,000 people have been killed in Oakland since 2000, when Harris' son was murdered in West Oakland. Nearly all of the 1000-plus victims' families have been helped through their most excruciating days by the sure hand of Miss Marilyn, as Harris is known throughout Oakland. With a minimal staff and small budget, Harris has almost single-handedly aided thousands of Oaklanders. When her son was killed, there was no one to help the survivors; they were the forgotten people, often shunned even within their own communities. And they would remain bitter, sometimes bent on revenge. Now, instead of returning survivors of the killed to the world alone and lost, she returns people who have begun the process of healing. The impact of her work spreads far beyond the individuals she guides, far beyond the days and weeks after a homicide. Even the police rely on Harris to calm the roiling souls of survivors so they can do their investigative work. To grieving families, she is a vivid reminder that the whole world is not against you. To anyone who knows her, she is a symbol of the possibility of carrying on against the greatest odds. Marilyn Harris saves lives.

Her Leadership

When her son was shot dead in 2000, Marilyn Harris had billboards erected across West Oakland with his picture and the stark question: Do You Know Who Killed Me? We still don't, but ever since then she has been an unapologetic defender and proponent of the victims of Oakland's implacable problem with violence. She is the inspiration for countless survivors and for violence prevention specialists throughout the city. An accomplished public speaker of unimpeachable credibilty, Harris is an articulate and reasoned voice of reality in a city grasping for healing. She has the ear of everyone, from city leaders to wounded and disaffected victims. In her own life, with self-effacing modesty, she demonstrates acceptance without surrender, while cajoling the powerful and the seemingly powerless to move forward, to see reality, to choose peace and forgiveness, and to maintain faith in the city and its people. With her humor, her honesty, her belief in the necessity of love and healing on a personal and a civic level, she is an example of the strength and fortitude to be found deep inside all of us. Every day, she leads individuals towards healing and Oakland toward its better self.

Oakland Violence Prevention Workers Grant and Gutierrez in the Media

In the past couple of weeks, two of the three violence prevention workers I profiled in No Escape, No Surrender (San Francisco Magazine, April 2012) have been featured in local media. First, Caheri Gutierrez and some of the students she works with at Castlemont High School (in the Teens on Target program, out of the nonprofit, Youth Alive) were interviewed for a KTVU news spot. Then Kevin Grant was the featured guest on KQED's Forum program. Caheri and her students talked about life in East Oakland and their work to create change. Kevin talked about trying to keep the peace between gangs and answered some tough questions about the state of things in Oakland here in the beginning a new year. Here are links:

Caheri Gutierrez on KTVU

Kevin Grant on Forum

Oakland's Kevin Grant Awarded California Peace Prize

I've written about Kevin Grant a lot on this blog. He has been a key participant in the city's Ceasefire gang call-ins and was one of the three Oakland violence prevention workers I profiled in San Francisco Magazine in April 2012. Kevin has been tireless in his efforts to keep the peace on the streets of Oakland and to lead young people here to a better way of life. Much of his work is funded by Measure Y. Now he has been recognized, along with two other Californians, by The California Wellness Foundation. They've awarded Kevin their annual Peace Prize. It's a big deal. Here's the press release, with what they had to say about him and his work:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 12, 2012 Contact: Laurie Kappe i.e. communications, LLC (415) 616-3930 Adriana Godoy Leiss The California Wellness Foundation (818) 702-1900

The California Wellness Foundation Announces 20th Annual California Peace Prize Honorees

Kevin Grant

Kevin Grant is a renowned expert in street outreach, violence mediation and re-entry programs. Growing up on the streets of Oakland, Grant himself was in and out of the juvenile justice system at a young age. Released from federal prison in 1989, Grant says he gained from his experience the motivation to change the direction of his life and the compassion to help others like himself. As a consultant, he provides probation and parole re-entry services and conducts trainings and workshops for law enforcement agencies, community service providers and school districts at local, state and federal levels. Grant is the violence prevention network coordinator for Measure Y, which was passed in Oakland in 2004 to fund violence prevention and public safety. He leads skilled street outreach teams made up of members of the community, who intervene to prevent conflict and/or retaliation before they happen in Oakland's most dangerous neighborhoods. 

"I believe that a lot of the violence in our communities is preventable," Grant said. "Through building relationships, we can give the power back to the communities." 

The California Wellness Foundation is a private, independent foundation created in 1992, with a mission to improve the health of the people of California by making grants for health promotion, wellness education and disease prevention.

The Foundation prioritizes eight issues for funding: diversity in the health professions, environmental health, healthy aging, mental health, teenage pregnancy prevention, violence prevention, women's health, and work and health. It also responds to timely issues and special projects outside the funding priorities.

Since its founding, TCWF has awarded 6,544 grants totaling more than $815 million. It is one of the state's largest private foundations. Please visit TCWF's website at CalWellness.org for more information, including a newsroom section devoted to the California Peace Prize and the three honorees. High-resolution photos are also available. Video interview clips are posted at TCWF's YouTube channel.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan Profiled

Unraveling the Tangled Web She Weaves
by Jim O'Brien
in the October issue of San Francisco Magazine

Oakland "Ceasefire" Returns

After a hiatus, Oakland is bringing back the call-ins. Not sure precisely how they will look this time around, but here's a link to my description of the ones I attended in the summer of 2010:

A Violent Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

                      Inside a Gang Call-In

Also please see my October 2014 article in San Francisco Magazine on Oakland's Operation Ceasefire - Guns Down. Don't Shoot.

Insight and Denial in a Jean Quan Quote

With 4 homicides last week, among them the 16-year-old mother of an 8-month-old, Oakland has had 69 killings in 2012, including the 7 slain in the Oikos massacre in April. That is 69 killings in the 32 weeks of the year so far. 

 I interviewed Oakland Mayor Jean Quan on August 10th, for an upcoming profile in San Francisco Magazine. I think it will be in the October issue. We spoke in her office at City Hall for over an hour and covered a wide range of issues, including economic development, crime, the effects of mayoral fame on her life and family, the differences between life in the hills and life in the flatlands and what, if anything, connects or could connect the two seemingly alien parts of Oakland.

Mayor Quan talks quickly, swallows words, and sometimes follows whatever stream her consciousness takes her down. She is capable, in answer to any question, of demonstrating insight and a keen awareness of Oakland's problems before very quickly saying something that sounds like she's in denial.

I don't think her denial is necessarily reflected in her policies or her work. And maybe she sees it as necessary to her role as booster-in-chief of all things Oakland. But I wish she would stop it anyway.

The following Quan quote from the interview is an example that shows 1) how well she understands the depths of the city's generations-long problem with violence; and 2) her willingness to use vague numbers to, at least verbally, brush aside what I believe she knows is Oakland's open wound.

"I think for the kids in the poorest neighborhoods we're really talking about people who for now a couple of generations who just are, their families have been under attack for one thing or the other. You know, have kids who grew up without parents who were lost to the crack epidemic 20 years ago when I became a school board member; the murder rate was twice as high in the city. And a lot of people, so a lot of people think 'oh, it's really high now;' well, it was, it used to be much higher and it's been coming down so that if you look at a map (I think she means "graph" - JO'B), it's like the murder rate's been going down, hit an all-time low the last year of the Dellums administration when we had the most police, it's a little bump up and now I'm trying to get it back parallel, and then on track to being where [we were?], I don't know, we just had a murder today... no informatoin, no information, we've been having about 1 a week, and last year we were having about 2 a week." 

                                                                                                 - Jean Quan, Mayor of Oakland

How to Rate a Visit from President Obama

Sorry, no results found for 'oakland oikos.'

How big must an American massacre be to rate some Presidential consoling? Twelve murdered in the nightmare in Colorado beckoned the President, and rightfully he traveled there to address the stunned survivors and a wounded community. 

Seven dead in Oakland in a massacre in April did not rate a visit.

(Although the President will be in Oakland this month, to give a campaign speech at the beautiful Fox Theater, and to raise money in the town of Piedmont, the exclusive municipal island of unimaginable wealth completely surrounded geographically by Oakland.)

Maybe it is out there somewhere, I hope it is, but as for the Oikos University massacre, which took place here in early April of 2012, I can barely find a Federal government statement beyond this boilerplate from the Secretary of Education:

"I was saddened to learn of the senseless violence and loss of life at Oikos University in Oakland. My thoughts are with the community and families of the victims." -- Arne Duncan.

On the other hand, here's some of the White House reaction to Colorado:

"As we do when we are confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must come together as one American family. All of us must have the people of Aurora in our thoughts and prayers as they confront the loss of family, friends and neighbors, and we must stand together with them in the challenging hours and days to come." 

-- President Barack Obama

The President dedicated his weekly address to the Colorado massacre, as he should have: Remembering the Victims of the Aroura, Colorado Shooting.

Here is a list of the President's weekly addresses in April 2012:

April 7: Easter and Passover

April 14: It's Time for Congress to Pass the Buffett Rule

April 21: Calling on Congress to Prevent Student Interest Rates from Doubling

April 28: Helping Our Veterans and Servicemembers Make Informed Decisions  

                 about Higher Education

What were the differences between the massacres? The obvious difference is the number. How many must be killed in a day by one crazed gunman to inspire the President to come? I honestly don't know the answer, nor do I know what's right, but I suspect you need to get into the double-digits in deaths. Over the course of each year, Oakland does that easily. Many years we reach the triple digits in killings. Last year there were over 100 homicides here. But it is a slow-motion massacre. It takes too long to spark a visit, a Presidential comment, or even much if any debate about gun laws.

Here's a another difference: unlike in Aurora, Colorado, many of the dead at Oikos were immigrants or foreign nationals, some with unfamiliar-looking names, others with names reflective of our immigrants' historic desire to become American-ized; and they were killed not at a famous university like Virginia Tech, but at an obscure school with a name no one was quite sure how to pronounce. The names of the dead at Oikos:

Kathleen Ping

Doris Chibuko

Judith Seymore

Sonam Choedon

Grace Eunhae Kim

Lydia Sim

Bhutia Tshering

Otherness is often key to the emotional processing of homicides. Some refuse to separate themselves from the killing and the killed. But in many parts of Oakland, so long as the killed are not like you, you can deal with the shock and sadness quickly and neatly. You might be moved, but only for a moment. The flatlands, the Deep, the lives and deaths of the victims, they are all a foreign country. Same with the dead and wounded at Oikos. And so, as far as I can tell, and again, maybe I am just not finding it out there, the White House had little or nothing to say to us about the slaughter.

But the White House is all over the killings in Colorado, supposedly a swing state, unlike California.

The Mosquito in Your Ear

Backwards graffiti, Oakland

Oakland's reputation isn't going to change if it has seven killings and a dozen shootings in one week, as it did in early July. A 15-year-old boy was killed. A 19-year-old woman found dead in a sleazy motel. An 84-year-old man found beaten to death in a car. An 18-year-old man killed, allegedly, by another 15-year-old boy. (No doubt the educators and intervention specialists at Youth Alive and the Khadafy Washington Project have their hands full these days.) It is all in the news if you wish to become aware of it. 

Reading about Oakland in old books and magazines, you begin to understand how old and deeply woven into its fabric is the city's other reputation, for hopeless poverty and political stagnation. Originally, much of it was described by outsiders of limited local experience. In one old piece, a long article from a 1966 issue of Ramparts (much thanks to the Project Oakland blog for making it available), the author describes downtown as a wasteland, with no place to eat lunch, unless you belonged to a gentleman's club. (That has changed dramatically. There's plenty of good eating downtown now, and even the outsider New York Times has proclaimed modern-day Oakland as a world-class culinary destination.)

But some of it came from Oaklanders themselves. In a book from 1968, a resident calls Oakland the "shitbox of the west." Apparently it was a common reference, as I have encountered it several times now, including in some of the historical background in Thomas Peele's fascinating book about the assassination of Chauncy Bailey, Killing the Messenger.

I'm reading things mostly from the Sixties and Seventies, written before the wound of the gun and cheap drugs had opened wide in East and West Oakland. In those days, critics saw the city not as violent, but as hemorrhaging figuratively, rapidly losing some apparent economic richness it had possessed, across races and neighborhoods, prior to WW II.

Not that people weren't worried about urban violence in the Sixties, about rioting in particular, as poor, minority neighborhoods in cities across the country burned. Oakland is poor, they said, it's unemployed, its minorities are powerless. Oakland will be next, they said. It wasn't. Oakland avoided riots, while producing instead the politically antagonistic Black Panthers and, later, the socially destructive Black Muslims. And, of course, finally, a propensity for killing, usually one person at a time.

 

Still, the views of some outsiders are slowly shifting. Sometimes you find that their perceptions depend on whether they have ever been to Oakland. That is, if you tell someone who has never been here that you are from Oakland, they seem a little shocked, or else indicate a concern for your safety. It's exasperating. On the other hand, if they have spent any time here lately, often they are impressed to learn you live here. They might even think to live in Oakland is cool. 

An Oakland council member from the hills told me she encountered this latter reaction recently in a conference call with officials of the city of Philadelphia, to whom Oakland was hip, the Brooklyn of the West, as people have been trying to call it for years now. Better than "shitbox," I guess. 

The council member tells me that crime is up a bit up there, but not as much as residents might think. She says that ready access to information these days makes things seem worse than they actually are. Still, she tells me, what crime there is has become more brazen: doors are kicked down, guns are pulled and sometimes fired. She does not begrudge her constituents their fears. She holds well-attended community meetings, where police officers give advice on how to discourage crime and salesmen of video surveillance systems make presentations. Old men email out to anyone who wants them notices of all crimes in the hills. But elsewhere might or might not exist.

Hills and wires, Oakland

 

Talking to residents of the hills today, you encounter sometimes a cynical acceptance, even an embrace, of the gritty reputation of the city, of that "Oakland" that began to be articulated in print in the Sixties. It's easier to accept when you view it from afar, from a place where you can imagine it however you want, instead of live in it against your will, where you can block it out or acknowledge it, depending on your mood. 

 

You can choose not to look. Shade the eyes of your children from the blood of the Deep. You can live a great life in Oakland and never encounter the violence. But what does that mean? Perhaps the only effect the violence has on you is that your house will sell for slightly less someday because it is in Oakland. Perhaps the only effect the violence will have on you is when the sound of another siren sails up from the flatlands, and you feel a momentary nagging, like a stubborn fly, or a mosquito in your ear as you are trying to fall asleep at night.

More on my reading upcoming, and more on my current interviews with politicians and hills residents.

25 Guns

Here is a press release from the march I wrote about in the June 7th post, In Oakland, Seeking the Courage to Surrender. I was talking about surrendering the urge to commit violence, but I could just as easliy have been talking about the courage to surrender your gun. Twenty-five guns may not seem like a lot, but I imagine to the OPD, the notion of 25 guns out of circulation in Oakland sounds pretty good.

The 100% Strong Peace Event and The Gun Buyback–On Saturday, June 2, Messengers4Change and 100 Women Against Violence hosted the 100% Strong Peace Event and Gun Buyback at the De La Fuente Plaza in Fruitvale. Community members marched from East Oakland and West Oakland and culminated at De La Fuente Plaza for a resource fair and gun buyback. The event was held to engage and inform the community about violence prevention and the multitude of resources and services available, while promoting a safe city for children and families. Prior to the event,$10,000 was raised for the gun buyback, mostly in individual/small donations. During the event, Oakland residents who turned in a working gun received a $100 gift card from the event organizers. The Oakland Police Department received a total of 25 guns. Among the various hand guns and rifles turned in, two shot guns had the barrels sawed off. For more information, please contact the Oakland Police Department Media Relations Unit at  
(510) 238-7230 oropdmedia@oaklandnet.com or Jennifer Argueta, Measure Y, at (510) 238-2056 or jargueta@oaklandnet.com 
Messengers4Change and 100 Women Against Violence are meeting this week to discuss our next steps. Our goal is to collect 100 guns, since we still have gift cards left, we are still pushing for that goal.

In Oakland, Seeking the Courage to Surrender

On a gray June morning, in the northwest corner of the parking lot of the AutoZone at 100th and International, the Bishop, in a wheel chair and a white track suit, called for surrender. He besought the group to pray for surrender, to pray for the killers to see the light in -- to see the bright peace of -- surrender. He prayed they would surrender their souls to Jesus, and that in Jesus' message to love your neighbor as yourself they would find the reason and the courage not to pull the trigger.

"There's a spirit we're up against," he said. "God can cast that spirit to the rats, as far as I'm concerned."

Across the boulevard sits St Louis Bertrand Catholic Church. In the 16th Century, the Spanish Dominican worked in the New World to convert the natives to Christ. Now, 450 years later, Bishop Simmons seeks to convert murderous Oaklanders. 

I can imagine faith and Jesus working to pull a young man free from the urge to pull the trigger. But I wondered if a person seeking to prove himself in East Oakland ever could see that defying those who would urge you to commit violence shows greater courage than succumbing to their dark and dead end instruction. Want to be defiant of authority? Want to show how powerful you really are? Then work to leave that life behind. It won't be easy, but it will be right.

The Bishop was preaching to a group of 20 to 25 that morning. The last such march I'd covered, from 23rd and International to City Hall, had taken up the entire right lane of the boulevard and stretched two or three blocks in all, but this was a sidewalk march, a more intimate group, led by young men from Victory Outreach Church. They carried a Measure Y banner, had bullhorns and energy and words. They kept up a remarkably lucid and inspiring monologue all along the long, slow, four mile march, discussing, for any and all within range, peace, love of humanity, love of Oakland, safety for your children, safety for your family. Bystanders cheered and handed out bottled water, drivers honked their car horns, marchers handed out flags to taco trucks and other businesses along the way, pressing them to spread the message of surrender. If I am skeptical of the effect of such marches on the killers, I still admired the marchers and the message.

Along the way, the group stopped three times to remember and pray for the dead. First in front of Bay Coin Laundry, on the spot where the child Carlos Nava was killed. There is a mural depicting him with wings there. Then at the taco truck where five-year-old Gabriel Martinez was killed; there were pictures hanging along the chain-link fence. Then at the entrance to Otaez Restaurant, where the owner, Jesus "Chuy" Campos, was shot dead early one morning in 2011 as he unlocked the door and prepared to go to work.

Carlos Nava Mural, International Blvd., Oakland

The mayor marched with the group, also her husband. The chief of police walked, as well, in civilian clothes, a jacket, jeans and loafers. Their collective presence lent the march a certain legitimacy its small numbers might have failed to do. They walked with the group past the trash-strewn number streets, the urine-drunk bus kiosks, past the dirty facades of the boulevard, past the graffiti announcing that once their was a guy who came along who calls himself "THC" here, there, everywhere, past the businesses and storefront churches, Se Compra Hora, Iglesia Christo Marantha, Low Fee Check Cashing, past the East Bay Dragon's clubhouse, a casino billboard, more graffiti: "Los," "TSK," "GE2." At 69th, three Latino men with shovels, rakes and hoes were clearing the high dry golden grass of a vacant lot and you had to wonder what they would find in that little, long neglected patch of Oakland. They leaned on their handles and watched us as we passed.

In front of a brightly painted, well-kept barber shop I tapped the mayor on the shoulder. "That's a lovely facade," I said.

We were all set to use redevelopment money to help many of these businesses upgrade their fronts, she told me. But the state economy had tanked and the governor had withdrawn the funds. She had been trying to convince the city council to pay for it, but they were reluctant. The City is suing the State to get some of that promised redevelopment money back. 

I handed her my card. On the back I had scribbled the name and date of an article I'd written about three violence prevention workers in Oakland, two former victims of violence, and one formerly incarcerated former Oakland gang member, all working now to create peace. She hadn't read it, said she had little time for reading. I told her I was working on another, longer piece on one of those former victims, on the city and its reputation and its fight against the gun, that I would love to interview her some time. She said to talk to her public safety adviser, Reygan Harmon. Soon a security guard addressed her, quietly, "Mayor," and pulled her away. She had another appearance to make, would meet up with the march at the event scheduled at its destination, a plaza in the Fruitvale District. At that event I approached Harmon. I handed her my card. On the back I had scribbled the name and date of an article I'd written about three violence prevention workers in Oakland. I said I was working on another one and needed to interview the mayor for it. She gave me her card and said to email her, which I did the following Monday, four days ago as I write, but no word yet. I wonder how many emails it will take.

Back before the marchers had reached the plaza I'd caught up with the Bishop in his wheel chair and told him how much I liked his message of surrender. He asked me if I was a preacher. No, I said, just a writer in Oakland.

(For more on the event, see 25 Guns)