Don’t let tragedies simply fade away

There’s a paper sign on a concrete pillar outside of Oakland’s MacArthur BART Station that has a drawing of Nia Wilson’s face. The image is faded, and the paper’s edges are ripped as though someone unsuccessfully tried to pull it down.

Each time I see what’s left of the sign, I think about the days and weeks after Wilson, 18, was stabbed to death by John Lee Cowell. Then the rallies and candlelight vigils at the station seemed endless. New balloons and artwork and even some personal notes covered the sidewalk each day. People who didn’t know Wilson would cry or pray or simply hug near her makeshift memorial by the station’s entrance.

The grief felt permanent. Until it didn’t. And that’s what scares me.

Black people like myself can remember how, in the immediate aftermath, we felt Wilson’s death would change Bay Area culture forever. It had to. And Wilson’s stabbing has continued to spur muchneeded conversations about race relations in a changing region. Her case remains in court, where recently questions of a racial motive — Cowell reportedly called a black woman a n— later that day — were raised.

Before Wilson, we felt the same way about Mario Woods and Oscar Grant. Grant was killed by BART police in Oakland in 2009, and his death made folks discuss unconscious bias in policing, especially on public transportation. Woods, who died of 20 gunshots fired by San Francisco police officers, was a rallying cry in 2015 for Black Lives Matter.

But as the Bay Area’s African Americans — the people most affected both socially and emotionally by these tragedies — move away, the Bay Area populace can begin to see Wilson, Woods and Grant as just faces on posters, murals and pins.

That’s what I fear: Wilson’s death being frozen in time, eventually nothing more than a notable, horrible moment in 2018.

But time won’t diminish the permanent mark on the collective conscience of black residents. Perhaps it’s the reason we unintentionally vault the families of these victims into roles as leaders, whether they want those roles or not. Since they were closest to the pain, we assume they can help us heal.

It often works. After Mike Brown, 18, was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, his parents became national activists. To this day they continue to amplify their voices through media like the New York Times.

Grant’s family helped create a police citizen review board for BART, established a foundation and is working to create a nationwide network of families affected by such violence.

Ansar Muhammad, Wilson’s father, was placed on such a prominent pedestal after his daughter’s death. But he prefers to work in the trenches on a local level. I knew this before meeting him for the first time last year in East Oakland’s Eastmont Town Center — a chance encounter as I talked with residents about a fastfood restaurant they saw as a blight on the neighborhood.

Muhammad was introduced to me as Wilson’s father, first, but then as the voice residents find when they want to improve their predominantly African American neighborhood. Muhammad, who isn’t one for media coverage, smiled and nodded. We didn’t talk about his daughter, instead focusing on the fastfood business, which he said was attracting crime to the area.

“If it was up to me, we would run places like that out of here,” he said.

We parted ways after a few minutes, and I watched as he was stopped multiple times by other community members before leaving the mall. What his daughter came to represent in death — a call for justice and social change — Muhammad is attempting to recreate in life. Black families like his tackle this arduous task without complaining.

The Bay Area’s black population will continue to watch the Cowell trial, at which Cowell on Tuesday admitted to stabbing Wilson and her sister. He also said he believed Wilson and her sisters were aliens and part of a gang that had kidnapped his grandmother.

The trial’s outcome will surely be another social flash point. There will be more necessary and hard discussions about social realities here. For the Wilson and Woods and Grant families, the least we can do is carry on this dialogue with the same energy as when each death first struck us.

The faded Nia Wilson poster at MacArthur BART reminds me that this dialogue too may fade. But we as a Bay Area community, not just black people, owe Wilson more.

That’s what I fear: Wilson’s death being frozen in time, eventually nothing more than a notable, horrible moment in 2018.