...loving son brother mother sister aunty athlete musician classmate snappy dresser fun-loving uncle father friend or fan...

LaRhonda was a teacher in West Oakland who was befriended by Khadija, Marilyn’s daughter, and then became very close to Marilyn. She knew...

If she remembers anything, perhaps she remembers not being alone at that moment of despair.

This is live-preserving work, it is the work of helping traumatized, devastated people begin to be reborn...

KWP crisis responders are interrupters of hate, savers of the lives of the living; they prevent retaliation. They deliver love.

She had raised this person who possessed the vision necessary to discover, and deliver a previously unrecognized human right

Four of the pieces I wrote for San Francisco Magazine about Oakland. Together, they present a picture of a fascinating, complicated,...

So did she rise, after stark loss, economic struggle, civic neglect, disillusionment, obscurity, isolation, out of darkness, out of Oakland.

They don’t care who their daddy has been running around with, they don’t care if daddy don’t have a job, that he ain’t had a bath...

Her faith was strong, girded and steely, if rarely worn on the sleeve. Tragedy did not diminish it...

“They said that when they went to raid their house, they would have shrines, they would have that that dreadlock, hanging on their wall."

I can't seem to get over the destruction -- spiritual, cultural, literal -- of West Oakland.

Every folder on West Oakland is full of plans for its revitalization and each plan implies the failure of the last, right up to today.

Ashley rested her hand on Jennifer’s head and leaned on the casket for the first and only picture of the two of them together.

I’m not a foolish woman. I know he was on loan from God for a short period of time. It’s never going to be long enough.

To a dark deserted back country of the mind...

He'd seen her on the news, talking about her lost son, about what the city needed to do for its wounded and traumatized families...

Even that night that K didn’t come home -- that early August night in 2000 -- when you hear his sister describe it, you realize how...

Back when Khadafy Washington was killed, at age 18, in August of 2000, the violent killing of a black man in Oakland seems often to have...

I think Marilyn discovered a previously-unrecognized human right to support after the violent death of a loved one...