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The familiar smiling face of Oscar Grant now looks out from a new place: The concrete walls of the station where he was killed.
Grant’s image has become iconic in Oakland in the decade since he was fatally shot by a BART police officer, sparking a new era of video-driven scrutiny of law enforcement. In the mural, “Long Live Oscar Grant,” officially unveiled Saturday at Fruitvale station, he appears with a mustache on his upper lip and a black beanie over his head, surrounded by olive branches, water and a silhouette of the Oakland skyline, a white dove flying above him. A street just outside the station has been newly christened Oscar Grant III Way.
“This is us,” Refa One, the artist who painted the mural, told a crowd of Grant’s loved ones, activists, Oakland residents and city and BART officials. “This is not just my art, this belongs to the Oscar Grant movement — you did this.”
Wanda Johnson, Grant’s mother, said the mural is another sign that her son “did not die in vain.”
“He died so that we could come together in this spot,” Johnson said. “I believe that there will be a sense of peace in this place, there will be a sense of healing in the place, there will be a sense of love in this place.”
Speakers at Saturday’s ceremony invoked the legacies of 22-year-old Grant’s life and the shooting that ended it on New Years Day 2009. His death was an incomparable tragedy for his family, said Grant’s uncle, Cephus “Bobby” X Johnson, willed into something positive through activism. It was a wake-up call, less than two months after Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president, signaling just how far America still had to go in rejecting racism, Pastor Tommy Smith said. And it was a turning point, others said, demonstrating the power of cell phone video and social media to document and spread awareness of police misconduct.
“That, to me, was the beginning of Black Lives Matter,” said Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, who represented the Grant family. “And it started right here with Oscar Grant and the manner in which the community came together.”
Witnesses on nearby BART trains in those early morning hours recorded footage that showed an unarmed Grant lying face-down on the Fruitvale Station platform when BART police officer Officer Johannes Mehserle stood over him and fired a single shot into his back. The footage raced around the world as anger swelled in Oakland.
Prosecutors would eventually charge Mehserle with murder, an action that remains rare nationwide even as scrutiny of police has escalated. Mehserle said he intended to use his Taser on Grant but didn’t realize he had grabbed his gun instead. A jury convicted Mehserle of the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter; he served 11 months of a two-year prison sentence before being released on parole.
Isaiah Martin remembered watching news coverage of Grant’s killing in the living room of his family’s home in Hayward that New Year’s Day. Martin was 9 at the time.
“I was afraid to go to BART,” Martin said. “I just remember being really scared as a youth, because I was like, ‘That could’ve happened to anyone — that could’ve happened to me.'”
Now 19, Martin attends Dartmouth College with a scholarship from the Oscar Grant Foundation. Asked what he thinks of the new mural, Martin says he never knew Grant, but has learned about him from Wanda Johnson and friends of Grant’s who coach the basketball team Martin played on when he was growing up — the Oscar Grant Ballers. The team’s logo is a basketball sporting a black beanie like the one Grant wears on the walls of Fruitvale Station.
The mural, Martin said, “really shows Oscar Grant as a person.”
