Henry Green

Led by the People's Justice Partnership and relatives of Henry Green and Tyre King nearly 200 people took over City Council Chambers during their weekly meeting to demand justice. City Authorities had prepared new roadblocks to public participation for the event including requiring photo identification to enter the building and extra police on hand. New rules were in place limiting the total number of people permitted to attend the meeting to fewer than the total number of seats in Council Chambers.

It seemed like “just” another police shooting of a black person. By the incomplete statistics available, #SylvilleSmith in Milwaukee is number 183 this year. At the time of this writing that number has grown to 185 in 229 days or one every 29 hours. The total number of deaths by police violence will go up from 730 before this article is prosted. A 23 year old man's life would have been condensed to a blip on the late news as a local story.

Rodney King was the first break in the dam. The beating that sparked the rebellion in 1992 was not new. What was new was video cameras. Now everybody could see the unrestrained violence against the defenseless that America calls “law enforcement.” Consumer electronics have advanced. There are cameras in every phone. Video has now recorded the recent deaths Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. It did not record the less nationally known case of Henry Green V here in Columbus.

“The Democratic party is where social movements go to die" is a saying so old I can not attribute the original quote. In this particular case, the Democratic National Committee was standing ready with a shovel as President Obama leaned in for the eulogy and the Clinton Campaign carried the coffin. Black Lives Matter is not dead, but Clinton needs it brought to heel and buried alive.

“We do not come to this plaza to mourn where he fell, we come to you, we return to the living. There were others before him remember? Yes, you remember. But then the blood was hidden, it was so far. The South's rain washed it from the Earth, far far away. The People's death was as it has always been, as if no-one had died, nothing. As if they were stones falling to the Earth.

The video rolls into this office faster than it can be processed. American police have celebrated the nation's independence with a wave of public executions bringing the total number of unarmed black men killed to 115 in 2016. That is more than twice the number killed in the Pulse Nightclub massacre carried out by private security contractor and former prison guard Omar Mateen.

Henry Green was murdered by police in his own neighborhood on June 6. He was shot without warning by plainclothes police who were there as part of a summer program that is alternately called a “Community” policing program or a “Summer Safety” program. Only the Columbus Police Department is investigating his murder. As his family, along with community organizers from his neighborhood press the city leaders for some real initiative towards justice those leaders have further entrenched themselves and their programs.