Project Diary: "justice is roaming the earth"

A 2008 Senate Resolution

Had a long conversation with Marilyn last week. It was one in a years-long series of conversations, at diners, in cars, in homes, at offices, in parks. Each time, I ask and she patiently answers questions from all over the map, about her life growing up in Sarasota, about coming to California as a young woman, about raising her own family in West Oakland, about her own loss and her quarter-century now of working with the survivors of homicide victims in the immediate aftermath of killings in Oakland, about her quest for justice for her murdered son and for all survivors.

Because underlying her work is an absolute conviction that the love she shows traumatized survivors is profoundly just; it is fulfilling a human right to support after violence, one that would otherwise be denied. If you can’t find justice in the system, at least you can get the help due to you as a victim in distress, a distress caused in part by the circumstances of our city and our world. Even if you've had your day in court, there is a dark, personal chasm in which you now exist. You have been pushed into it by events, and it is only right and just that someone from your community should reach into that chasm to help you begin the long climb out.

In important ways, Marilyn’s years spent reaching into those dark chasms to help, through her own Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence and through Youth Alive's Khadafy Washington Project, have been an attempt to keep her son’s name out there, to remind the world that legal justice was not achieved in the case of Khadafy Washington's murder in 2000. No one was ever arrested.

“Justice is roaming the earth,” she told me last week.

We were sitting in her house. Her cute but wheezy French Bulldog was feinting and barking incessantly, sometimes at his own reflection in the glass of a framed California Senate Resolution passed and presented to Marilyn by Senator Don Perata back in 2008. Now the Resolution was on the floor, leaning up against some low shelves in her living room, like she didn’t really know what to do with it.

“But Justice doesn’t stop by everybody’s house," she said. "And it doesn’t let everybody catch up with it.”

She continues to do the hard work for survivors in the aftermath of violence, at least in part, “in the hopes that justice will stop by my house and say ‘Here I am.’”