In the electric cloud of grief and pain and power I had witnessed at each service, my sense of my role had undergone a change.

Marilyn on KTVU Channel 2

When through my open window I hear the call of a sideshow...I hear all of Oakland.

As Oakland politicians were set to crow about a 34% drop in homicides from 2023 to 2024, violence surges at the year's turning...

I remember a very stern-faced and serious KD, his bold, confrontational eyes staring into the eyes of a city...

No trial, no hearing, there is no due process for the dead.

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,...

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.

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...

The book is a story of people surviving what at the outset appeared to be impossible to survive.