Project Diary: the letter

Victim info

This picture is of a stack of notes given to the Oakland mayor’s office over the years that Libby Schaaf was running the city. Each yellow and lined page holds a small bit of information about a person killed on the streets of Oakland during her years in office, something about the life they lived, about the family who loved them.

The notes were prepared by staff of the Khadafy Washington Project, a Youth Alive program where crisis responders support traumatized survivors of the killed in the immediate aftermath of Oakland homicides. The information was used by the mayor to compose a personal note to the family of each victim. Libby Schaaf would write the personal notes by hand, at the bottom of an official letter of condolence from the city. It was a unique municipal policy, to send these official letters; I don't know of another city that had done such a thing.

The idea of sending a letter to the family of each homicide victim had emerged from a meeting with Marilyn Washington Harris in the weeks after Libby had been elected but before she was sworn in. In a recent interview, she told me how, coming in to office, she knew she wanted to do something for the survivors of each person who would be killed while she was in office. So she’d asked for a meeting with Marilyn.

“What I wanted to do was get her wisdom about how should I, as the Mayor of Oakland, show up when someone is murdered,” Libby told me. We were having tea at a cafe in the Dimond one morning earlier this month. She'd brought the stack of notes in the picture above to our interview.

“The letter was Marilyn’s idea” she said. “One, it’s a physical thing that doesn’t go away, that people can keep, if they so choose. And then, I didn’t want to just send a form letter, so I wanted to put my hand on it, and Marilyn wanted it to be a physical thing, not just a phone call. And the letter, also, as opposed to a phone call, respects that most people need some space, some space, they don’t necessarily want everyone in their face.”

In the book this Project Diary anticipates, I will have a lot to say about the contents and meaning of the letter from the mayor that Libby and Marilyn instigated. I was around, working closely with Marilyn back in late 2015 when the letter was proposed and composed. (One staff member of the incoming mayor said to me, "You always show up, like a bad penny.") I remember, back then, feeling skeptical about the impact the letter would have on the grieving. I was wrong.