Since about 2011, Oakland's Frank H. Ogawa Plaza has been identified by activists and protesters from the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements as Oscar Grant Plaza to commemorate the 22-year-old from Hayward killed by a BART police officer on January 1, 2009, the subject matter of the 2013 film Fruitvale Station. But in an East Bay Express opinion piece also from 2013, Oakland resident Kim Tran argued against the "unofficial" renaming of Ogawa Plaza, which officially remembers a second-generation Japanese-American sent to an internment camp in Utah during World War II who later returned to Oakland and despite being barred from an all-white neighborhood became a city councilman and political activist.
Instead, Tran wrote that "To honor the legacies of both Ogawa and Grant, it makes more sense to rename Fruitvale BART Station as Oscar Grant Station."
This is not a new proposition. Former Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums said he supported the name change in an interview with Youth Radio's Pendarvis Harshaw. Harshaw, Jamon Dru, and Young Gully also produced a hip-hop tribute album named The Grant Station Project, which advocated for changing the station's name. Doing so would be more fitting for Grant's legacy and would not be difficult.
Well, someone isn't waiting around any longer. See above.
Related: Black Lives Matter Now Accepting Donations, Grants Through Bay Area Nonprofit IDEX