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.”

Snowden is the most entertaining, informing, and important film you are likely to see this year.

It's the true story of an awakening. It traces the path of Edward Snowden's career in the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and at various contractors thereof. It also traces the path of Edward Snowden's agonizingly slow awakening to the possibility that the U.S. government might sometimes be wrong, corrupt, or criminal. And of course the film takes us through Snowden's courageous and principled act of whistleblowing.

We see in the film countless colleagues of Snowden's who knew much of what he knew and did not blow the whistle. We see a few help him and others appreciate him. But they themselves do nothing. Snowden is one of the exceptions. Other exceptions who preceded him and show up in the film include William Binney, Ed Loomis, Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake. Most people are not like these men. Most people obey illegal orders without ever making a peep.

Students and community people gathered on OSU's south Oval at 5pm today to mourn the death of Tyre King, shot to death by Columbus police last night, September 14. Police stated that the 13-year-old had a BB gun. NBC 4 news reported that Bryan Mason, the officer who shot King, had been involved in another fatal shooting in 2012. News reports throughout the last 24 hours have offered differing facts regarding the shooting. Activists were skeptical of the information about the incident given at the Columbus Mayor's press conference and that there would be any repercussions for the officer's actions. Signs at a memorial at the site of the incident clearly indicate the community's distrust in the city of Columbus and Columbus police and or that anyone will be held accountable. 

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.”