Local // Otis R.Taylor Jr.

Oscar Grant’s legacy: A viral video and a movement that continues today

Oscar Grant wasn’t the first black person treated cruelly because of his or her dark skin.

In this country, black folks have been beaten and killed since being locked in iron chains and transported here stacked like cargo on ships.

Grant wasn’t the first black person brutalized by police officers in a video that played on a seemingly endless loop.

That distinction belongs to Rodney King, whose body was used for batting practice by baton-swinging Los Angeles police officers in 1991, the footage captured on a Sony Handycam.

Oscar Grant was first in another way. Videos of his killing exposed police brutality in a fashion that was unencumbered by traditional pipelines and guidelines.

While King’s beating led nightly news broadcasts, Grant’s death was something to Google and watch online, something to rant against on Facebook.

His was the first of the social media era. That’s one of the reasons why the killing still resonates today, why it continues to feed a movement, and why it thrust so many people into activism.

Grant was unarmed and facedown when he was shot in the back by then-BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle on Jan. 1, 2009, on the Fruitvale Station platform in Oakland. Footage of Grant’s shooting was captured by other passengers on their cell phones and digital cameras.

The clips went viral, and protesters hit Oakland’s streets carrying signs, rocks and lifetimes of frustrations. Some rioted. Some marched and chanted, “I’m Oscar Grant.”

Video has evolved in the 10 years since Grant’s death. Remember when it was novel to watch a police shooting on your phone? Now it’s the standard. We expect there to be video. We demand its release. We share our thoughts as we watch on social media.

Social media is the megaphone for modern activism, the cell phone a matchless tool.

“It’s created a much different platform where the community itself now plays a role,” said John Powell, the director of UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. “The community is sort of, in a sense, using cell phones as a defense and even as a positive weapon to affect racism and police killing.”

John Burris, the civil rights attorney who represented Grant’s family, said that whenever he takes on a case, the first thing he looks for is cell phone video — though he notes such footage has been revolutionary only to a point.

“It hasn’t stopped any police shootings, that’s for damn sure,” Burris said.

Videos of people of color being treated inhumanely are now regularly released, like web episodes of a grisly reality show.

As I watched New York police officers rip a crying baby from the arms of Jazmine Headley at a public assistance office this month, it made me think of how mothers must’ve strained to hold onto their children being snatched for sale at a slave auction.

In July 2016, the death of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man who was shot by a police officer in Minnesota, was live-streamed by his girlfriend on Facebook. I’ll never forget the morning I watched as Castile’s hopes and dreams — his life — slipped away from his bloodied body.

For people like Cat Brooks, a nonprofit manager and activist who ran for Oakland mayor this year, Grant’s death was a personal “enough” moment.

“It wasn’t any more or less brutal than other murders, but it changed my life forever, all the way up to what I do now,” said Brooks, a co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project.

After seeing video of Grant’s death, people marched for justice. A decade later, technology has come so far that social media tools make it easy to partake in armchair activism.

Brooks warned that sharing videos and tweeting about them isn’t a substitute for organizing. Activism isn’t about amassing clicks or likes.

“How do we utilize social media to fan the flames that will fuel a movement?” she asked. “That’s the conversation we need to be having.”

Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, said that while social media can shine light on actions by police officers that were once kept private, the impact goes only so far. What’s important is accountability and reform.

“Without organizing, without people coming together and building strategies and solutions to the really big problems that we’re faced with every single day, social media is just a platform,” Garza said.

That’s why this year, Garza and others launched Black Futures Lab, an organization that wants to tap and amplify black political power.

Achieving better representation at the decision-making table, Garza said, will change police culture.

“There are black people who are being mistreated by police every single day,” Garza said. “And, to be frank, the ones that we hear about in the news are the exceptional cases. There are many, many, many other cases every single day that never capture the public’s attention.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. normally appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr