Former Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle shot an unarmed Oscar Grant III on New Year’s Day 2009 on an Oakland subway platform.  Grant died hours later at a local hospital.  Amid extensive pre-trial publicity and accusations that African-Americans were prejudiced, the trial was moved to Los Angeles last fall.  The jury in the Los Angeles is made

The shooting of Oscar Grant by former Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle Jan. 1, 2009, was captured on video and shown widely throughout the United States and abroad. Tensions surrounding the case have not abated to this today; indeed, they may have been worsened by the subsequent trial, verdict and sentencing.

Headquartered in the Oakland/San Francisco Bay Area, the movement for justice for Oscar Grant has spread virally and through good old-fashioned community organizing. In Los Angeles, however, where the trial was moved due to pre-trial publicity, many of the activists involved in the justice for Oscar Grant movement feel that a “media whiteout” severely hampered their efforts to generate the same amount of knowledge and concern about the case as the Bay Area had.