The walk from the bus stop to Dewey Academy, a continuation high school on Second Avenue in East Oakland, can often be treacherous for female students.

When she went to school, 18-year-old Nia Wilson — like her black, Latina and Asian classmates — had to make her way through a gantlet of threats: solicitations as if they were prostitutes by men with wads of cash; offers from pimps trying to recruit them to strut in skimpy clothing on International Boulevard; and thieves trying to steal their phones or money.

That’s why Marrika Lopes, one of Wilson’s teachers at Dewey, spent class time talking to her students about protecting themselves.

“As a young lady growing up in Oakland, I know what it’s like,” said Lopes, who taught an expanded-learning class titled Wise Youthful Leading Women.

The point of her class wasn’t textbook learning. Rather, it was providing the girls with a safe space to talk about how they felt about the world — and how they felt the world saw them.

When Lopes realized that it was her former student who was brutally stabbed by a random stranger on the MacArthur BART Station platform Sunday, she broke down in tears.

Lopes described Wilson as an infectious personality.

“You knew when she was in the room. You knew when she was around,” Lopes said. “To me, she just represented life — a young girl growing up in Oakland and doing her best to get through.”

Certainly, Wilson’s slaying has many BART passengers thinking about their safety, and I’m one of them. But for many women of color I’ve spoken to who work with girls, Wilson’s horrific death has prompted a larger discussion about the safety of black women and girls in public spaces.

That’s because too many young girls of color who grow up in Oakland know the dangers of simply walking down the street or standing at the bus station.

Now they have to worry about standing on a BART platform.

This is one reason hundreds of people marched through Oakland’s streets after a vigil shouting Wilson’s name — because Oakland can’t overlook the daily obstacles women like Wilson must navigate and endure.

Lopes told her students she understood what they faced.

“I know what you’re battling against, trying to keep yourself safe, always having to look over your shoulder,” said Lopes, 32, who was raised in East Oakland and grew up riding public transportation to school.

Wilson’s death reminded Brooklyn Williams, a youth development professional in Alameda County, of what it felt like for her to walk around as a young woman on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. She recalled that during her freshman year of high school she and her best friend started wearing baggy clothing and hoodies to walk from their apartment complex to the corner store.

They wanted to look like boys to escape advances from men.

“You learn how to navigate as best you can,” she said. “No one told us that specific strategy. We kind of intuitively figured it out.”

Williams continued: “From a youth development standpoint, our girls need so much, and we do the best that we can as a community to make them feel protected, to make them feel valued, to offer these counter-narratives so that they can also see the value in themselves.”

Girls Inc. of Alameda County — a nonprofit organization that prepares girls from neglected neighborhoods to navigate gender, economic and racial barriers — encourages girls to be smart and bold and not to shrink from challenges.

And always to be aware of their surroundings.

“Her murder brings light to how unsafe our girls are,” Odette Rushing, a 24-year-old program leader at Girls Inc., told me. “I am Nia Wilson. Any other young girl is Nia Wilson. That could’ve happened to any of us.”

Julayne Virgil, the Girls Inc. CEO, said Wilson’s death puts fear into other young girls.

“To me it was an example of what we’re up against, the devaluing of girls,” she said. “This is the physical manifestation of their devaluing.”

Black people, whenever they are not in black spaces, are hyper-visible because of the marker of skin color, according to Nikki Jones, an associate professor in the African American Studies department at UC Berkeley. In other words, blackness can draw attention for reasons beyond a black person’s control.

“If they have particular kinds of class markers, that might make them stand out as to what others think to be a certain kind of black woman that fits with these kinds of stereotypes that circulate about black women as always open, always available, hyper-sexual,” Jones said. “So just being in public space can, for some people, trigger that set of stereotypes, and makes the behaviors and actions of black people in public space more suspect and come under closer scrutiny than others.”

We don’t yet know why Wilson’s killer singled her and her sister out of a crowd. The assumption by many is that it was a racially motivated attack, though city leaders and investigators have said the motivation is unknown.

For many like Williams, the attack is connected to the deeper issue of the vulnerability of black girls, who she said begin thinking about their safety before they’re teenagers. Now, Williams said, youth educators like herself have one more story to warn these girls about.

“At the end of the day, I would like to see that her death is not something that just becomes a news cycle,” Williams said. “I would like to see this as a movement to reclaim the protection of our girls.

“You have to try and make meaning and to use it for something good. That’s part of our survival. That’s how we keep going.”

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