At Oakland’s Black Panther Party Museum, a Phone Booth Rings With Birthday Wishes for Oscar Grant

A phone booth, a quiet room

OAKLAND, Calif. — The first thing visitors notice is the silence.

Inside the Black Panther Party Museum in downtown Oakland, a restored phone booth stands under a cluster of birthday balloons. The metal is scuffed from years on New York sidewalks. Family photos of Oscar Grant — cradling his baby daughter, laughing with friends — are taped to the plexiglass.

Pick up the receiver and the quiet gives way to a stranger’s voice.

“Happy birthday, Oscar,” a caller says. “You should be turning 40 today. We still say your name.”

The installation, Happy Heavenly Birthday, Oscar, opened Feb. 1 at the museum and runs through April 11. Timed to what would have been Grant’s 40th birthday on Feb. 27, it is the latest stop for 1-800 Happy Birthday, a national art and memorial project that turns decommissioned pay phones into interactive monuments for people killed by police.

Housed in a museum founded to preserve the legacy of the Black Panther Party — which began organizing in Oakland in the 1960s in response to police brutality — the show links a well-documented killing on a BART platform in 2009 to a much older history of confrontation and resistance.

“This exhibit is for everyone to see, because it brings you into the reality of what has happened in our society with the loss of life unnecessarily,” said Wanda Johnson, Grant’s mother and head of the Oscar Grant Foundation. “And it brings you to a place where you have that care and concern and a desire to want to do something about the senseless loss for those individuals.”

Oscar Grant’s death—and what the public saw

Grant was 22 years old when he was shot and killed in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009, on the platform of Fruitvale Station in Oakland. Bay Area Rapid Transit police had responded to reports of a fight on a train heading back from New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Videos recorded by passengers showed officers pinning Grant face down on the platform. While another officer restrained him, BART Officer Johannes Mehserle drew his handgun and fired a single round into Grant’s back. Mehserle later testified that he meant to use his Taser.

The footage spread quickly online and on television, fueling street protests and drawing national attention in the years before the Black Lives Matter movement took shape.

Mehserle was charged with second-degree murder. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter in 2010, and a judge sentenced him to two years in prison. With credit for time served and good behavior, he was released in June 2011 after about 11 months in custody. Civil lawsuits brought by Grant’s family led BART to pay a total of $2.8 million to his mother and young daughter.

The images from Fruitvale — and the 2013 feature film Fruitvale Station, based on Grant’s final day — fixed his death in the public record. The Oakland exhibition asks a different question printed on wall text near the booth: “Have you ever wondered who Oscar Grant would have been today?”

Turning grief into a shared ritual

On a nearby monitor, a short film, Happy Birthday Oscar Grant, Love Mom, shows how Johnson and relatives have marked his birthdays over the years. Johnson, now a pastor and activist, describes a private ritual that has persisted long after the marches ended.

“Every year since his death,” she said, “I say a prayer to Grant on his birthday… ‘Oscar, I wish we had that time when we had gumbo and was able to laugh and hug again. You’re forever in my heart.’”

The installation invites visitors to step into that intimate space. Inside the phone booth, callers can listen to a curated selection of birthday voicemails left for Grant from across the country and overseas. At a small table, they can write their own messages on cards that staff tack onto a growing wall of handwritten notes.

A national project built from old phone booths

The Oakland version of 1-800 Happy Birthday focuses on Grant, but it is part of a broader effort launched by filmmaker Mohammad Gorjestani and his San Francisco-based studio Even/Odd. What began as a series of short films — Happy Birthday Oscar Grant, Happy Birthday Mario Woods, Happy Birthday Philando Castile — evolved in 2020 into a voicemail hotline where the public could call in and leave messages for people killed by police.

Gorjestani and his collaborators later acquired about 20 decommissioned New York City phone booths as the city removed them from sidewalks. Working with Brooklyn nonprofit WORTHLESSSTUDIOS and advocacy group Campaign Zero, they refurbished the booths as shrine-like installations.

The first large-scale exhibition opened in Brooklyn in 2022. Each booth was dedicated to a different person — referred to by the project as a “celebrant” rather than a victim — and decorated with photos, clothing and other objects supplied by families. Messages left on the project’s hotlines were edited into audio loops visitors could hear by picking up the handset.

“What this offers is an understanding that these individuals are much more than what the headline would suggest,” said curator Benjamin “BJ” McBride, a WORTHLESSSTUDIOS fellow who works on the project. “It offers us a space to speak their names, to tell their stories. And marks that birthdays continue even after they transition.”

The archive now includes more than 30 hours of recordings for celebrants such as Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Stephon Clark and others. A public booth in Brooklyn’s McCarren Park operated 24 hours a day for several months, and a short film about Michael Brown’s 28th birthday documented family members using a booth in Ferguson, Missouri, to address him directly.

In December 2025, the Mellon Foundation and other funders announced about $1 million in support to take the project on a multiyear national tour. A Guardhouse installation at Fort Mason in San Francisco opened in January, followed by the Black Panther Party Museum exhibition in Oakland. Future stops are planned around Garner’s birthday in New York and Philando Castile’s in the Midwest.

Organizers say they are responding to an ongoing trend that has dropped from the headlines but not from official tallies. Researchers have found that the number of people killed by law enforcement nationwide has remained steady or risen since 2014, and 2024 recorded more deaths than any year in the past decade, even as large-scale protests have waned.

Placing Grant’s story in a longer Oakland history

At the Black Panther Party Museum, the project is framed within a longer story.

The museum opened in January 2024 in a 3,000-square-foot space on Broadway, established by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation to preserve the Panthers’ history and community programs. Exhibits highlight the party’s free breakfast program, health clinics and the 1968 killing of 17-year-old Panther member Bobby Hutton by Oakland police.

“This aligns directly with the founding mission of the Black Panther Party to confront police brutality,” said Dr. Xavier Buck, the museum’s founding director and lead curator. “Oscar Grant’s story is all of our story.”

Buck said Happy Heavenly Birthday, Oscar is the museum’s first contemporary art exhibition, a deliberate move to connect mid-20th century organizing with current debates over policing and public safety.

“We’re talking about how we organize and how we heal, and what we do when our own government is turned against us,” he said.

For Johnson, the work is personal before it is historical. Her Oscar Grant Foundation runs youth education programs, including summer science and technology classes, and operates monthly support groups for mothers whose children were killed by police.

She sees the exhibition — and the strangers’ voices now filling the booth — as a way to keep her son’s name from becoming only a case file or a movie title.

“It brings you into the reality,” she said, “and it brings you to a place where you have that care and concern.”

In the museum, visitors listen as callers remember Grant’s smile, promise to keep pushing for change, or simply say, “We haven’t forgotten you.” When they hang up, a steady dial tone replaces the voices until the next person lifts the handset and another birthday wish begins.