Jordan Davis was killed over loud music.

R.I.P JORDAN DAVIS/FACEBOOK

Jordan Davis was killed over loud music.

Now people were copying photos online from my kids, my wife, my mother, my brother, his wife, anybody they could find. My work as a writer on police brutality was causing my loved ones problems. Early on my wife and mother both asked me if I could consider doing something else, but I just kept writing. Even though I wrote three stories a day, five days a week, I still felt like I just couldn't keep up with the injustice.

On Nov. 22, a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was breaking no laws and endangering no one, was shot and killed by the Cleveland police. After they shot him, police ignored him as he bled out there on the ground. Tamir actually fought to live until the next day, but died after surgeries. This one crushed me. My daughter was 12, my young son was 8. Tamir Rice was the youngest known police shooting victim in years.

When I heard that his mother was missing work to find her way through the pain of all that she was experiencing, nearly a thousand of us chipped in to raise money for her to live off of. In early December of 2014 we raised close to $60,000 for Tamir's family in just a few days. These families, though, are being pulled in a hundred different directions. As Tamir's mother fired one attorney and replaced him with another one, he decided to take his legal fees out of the funds we raised for her. I was furious.

Conservatives then created the lie that I stole money from Tamir's family. I wasn't prepared for that one. Somehow, that lie has endured to this very day.

Some days, the negativity of what people say to me or about me, gets to me. Other days I ride above it. If I disconnect and ignore it, I'm aloof. If I fail to respond to lies that are told, they don't actually go away, but grow. In the fog of it all, I just keep writing. It's an incomplete and imperfect contribution to this modern Civil Rights Movement, but it's the best I have.

I've been a writer my whole life, but I never imagined writing would help me find my way own through, and help some of you find your way, through the maze of injustice in America. I'll keep writing and hope you keep reading.