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Left to Right: Bomani Moyenda, Avesha Clarke, John Fleming, Elias Kelley
This week Central State University presents a play that rewrites recent history. Local poet and activist Bomani Moyenda has written his first play, “What’s Done in the Dark.” The play creates a fictionalized case based on the police killing of John Crawford III and a community’s struggle for accountability.
Kathleen Galarza What s Done in the Dark is poet and activist Bomani Moyenda s first play.
In the summer of 2014, John Crawford was walking the aisles in the Beavercreek Walmart and saw a BB gun for sale. He picked it up. Another customer called 911. The police came and killed Crawford within seconds. After Crawford’s death, Bomani Moyenda helped organize weekly vigils. More than 200 people staged a die-in at the Walmart on Christmas Eve that year, shutting down the store and bringing police cars from all over. Then Moyenda met Crawford’s father at one of the vigils.
to find voice in a whisper.” Martin Luther King, “Why We Can’t Wait”
Last year, Bomani Moyenda turned down an attempt by the Yellow Springs Martin Luther King Day Planning Committee to give him a Peacemaker Award.
This week he explained to the community that he did so because he was “unable to reconcile” himself as a peacemaker. After all, past recipients have been “real sweet people,” like Andrée Bognar, Willa Dallas, Isabel Newman and Phyllis Jackson.
“[Those are] the kinda people you just want to run up on and hug on,” Moyenda said. “I mean people just don’t do that to me. Some people even cross the street when they see me.”