Protest Reports

On Thursday evening family, friends, and neighbors of 13-year-old Ty’re King gathered in a field on South 18th Avenue in the Near East Side, close to where King was killed by Columbus police Wednesday evening. Over 200 joined the vigil, including the Columbus Day Stars, King’s middle school football team.

Police say that King was fleeing officers who were investigating an armed robbery, and pulled out what appeared to be a handgun. He was shot multiple times by officer Bryan Mason, a nine-year veteran of the Columbus Police Department. A toy pellet gun was recovered at the scene.

“Ty’re King was a 13-year-old boy,” said Amber Evans of the People’s Justice Project. “For black children, playing with toy guns is considered being armed in the eyes of police. But it’s not the same for white children.”

The dogs growl, the pepper spray bites, the bulldozers tear up the soil.

“Water is life!” they cry. “Water is life!”

This isn’t Flint, Michigan, but I feel the presence of its suffering in this cry of outrage at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. No more, no more. You will not poison our water or continue ravaging Planet Earth: mocking its sacredness, destroying its eco-diversity, reshaping and slowly killing it for profit.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been given much deserved credit for protesting racism by sitting out the Star Spangled Banner, which not only glorifies war (which everyone, including Kaepernick is totally cool with) but also includes racism in an unsung verse and was written by a racist slave owner whose earlier version had included anti-Muslim bigotry. As long as we're opening our eyes to unpleasant history hiding in plain sight, it's worth asking why the 49ers is not a team name that everyone associates with genocide. Why isn't Kaepernick protesting his uniform?

Lao Tzu said that silence is a source of great strength. This principle was evident on September 12, when about 400 people of faith marched in silence from the First Congregational Church in downtown Columbus to the Ohio Statehouse.

It was a revival, on a much larger scale, of the Moral Monday rallies held at the Statehouse before the November election two years ago. Started by Rev. William Barber in North Carolina, the Moral Monday movement reclaims the moral narrative from the religious right, which in recent years has defined morality almost exclusively in terms of restricting reproductive rights and condemning LGBTQ people.

Rev. Susan Smith modeled the silent march on an event from the height of the civil rights movement. “An attorney’s house was bombed,” she said. “They marched from the University of Tennessee to city hall. All you could hear was the shuffling of people’s feet on the pavement. When you’re marching and you’re silent, people don’t know what to do, except listen. The power comes in the very silence.”

Members of the Ohio Community Rights Network gathered outside the Ohio Statehouse on September 12 to demand the right to ban fracking wastewater injection wells and shale natural gas pipelines in their local communities. They compared the impact of the proposed Nexus Pipeline on Ohio communities to the threat posed by the Dakota Access Pipeline to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Actors impersonating Ohio Governor John Kasich, Secretary of State John Husted, and the oil and gas industry performed a street theater piece that was both entertaining and deadly serious.

Over Labor Day weekend a group of Columbus residents took action against the systemic racism that drives police brutality by restricting the lifeblood of the system: corporate profits. They held an economic blackout (or boycott) of all large corporate enterprises, including chain stores and banks.

About 100 protesters kicked off the blackout by marching from Franklin Park to the King Arts Complex, where organizer Karla Carey explained the blackout strategy. “This weekend we’re asking that if you have to spend money, that you reinvest it in the black community, to keep the black community thriving.”

African Americans only spend about 3 to 5 percent of their dollars in black-owned businesses, Carey said. “Economically, we need to have our voices heard. This makes a difference to the big chains and corporations.”

The discussion then turned to police brutality.  “Ron O’Brien has held the office of County Prosecutor for 18 years,” Carey said. “Not one Columbus police officer has been indicted in a police-related shooting. If you’re OK with that, then don’t vote in November. But if you’re not, vote for Zach Klein.

The 13th Amendment is celebrated for abolishing slavery. But many Americans are not aware that it includes a legal exception for continuing slave labor in the prison system: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

After the amendment was passed, many former slaves were arrested on petty or trumped-up charges, and returned to being slaves within the prison system. Part of what continues to drive mass incarceration in the U.S. is the profit motive: millions of inmates are forced to work for little or no pay. With the highest per capita prison population in the world, U.S. prison labor is a huge industry.

On August 27 prison abolitionists, anarchists, socialists, and other opponents of the prison industrial complex marched from the Ohio Statehouse to support a nationwide prison strike planned for September 9, the 45th anniversary of the prisoner uprising at Attica, New York State’s most notorious prison.

Why would the Ohio Green Party Co-Chair end up addressing Bernie Sanders delegates in Philly during the Democratic Party convention? I found myself with them in a pizza place in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania at the behest of the mostly-California-based Election Justice organization.

After a Donald Trump town hall reached capacity Monday afternoon, about 150 Trump supporters who had been turned away milled around the vendors of campaign merchandise outside the Columbus Convention Center. Trump falsely told his supporters that thousands were turned away “for political reasons.”

One merchandise hawker tried to turn the setback into an opportunity. “$5 off all Trump gear if you couldn’t get in!” he shouted over a bullhorn. Then he started to heckle protesters across the street who held signs saying “Wall off Trump,”  “Love Not Hate,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “No Más Trump.”

Protest organizer Rubén Castilla Herrera also had a bullhorn. “We’re black, brown, white, queer, straight, immigrants, women, men,” he said. “We’re a diverse community, and we’re to tell you that Trump is not welcome here!”

A Trump supporter grabbed the hawker’s megaphone. “How can you say that black lives matter?” she said. “All lives matter!”