Harris slams police officers
Funeral triggers renewed calls for reform in law enforcement. TYRE NICHOLS BURIED IN MEMPHIS
Civil rights leaders, family and friends came together in a Memphis church on Wednesday to bid farewell to Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old African-American whose fatal beating by police shocked the nation – and triggered urgent calls for reform.
“We mourn with you and the people of our country mourn with you,” Vice-President Kamala Harris told the young man’s family during a rousing service punctuated by gospel music and emotional speeches.
Anger is still simmering over Nichols’ death on 10 January, three days after he was beaten and kicked in a traffic stop by five black police officers – rekindling a national debate about brutality in law enforcement.
Calling out the officers over the deadly “act of violence,” Harris urged Congress to pass a stalled reform Bill named for George Floyd, whose murder by police in 2020 ignited waves of unrest across the country and beyond.
Speaking though tears, Nichols’ mother RowVaughn Wells joined Harris in calling on lawmakers to act – flanked by the veteran civil rights leader Al Sharpton who delivered the eulogy for her son.
“We need to take some action,” Wells said. “Because if we don’t, the next child that dies – that blood is going to be on their hands.”
During the ceremony, Nichols was remembered as “a beautiful soul, a son, a father, a brother, a friend, a human being, gone too soon,” in the words of Reverend J
Lawrence Turner.
Mourners were shown pictures shot by Nichols, a keen photographer.
“All I want is my baby brother back,” said Keyana Dixon, his older sister, who noted that even as police were beating him, her brother remained polite asking them to “please stop”.
Another relative read a poem inspired by the footage of his fatal encounter with police, titled “I’m Just Trying To Go Home.”
In a sign of the far-reaching resonance of Nichols’ death, Harris was joined at the funeral by the director, Spike Lee, and by relatives of other black victims of police violence, including George Floyd’s brother Philonise Floyd.
Also present was Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a botched raid on her Kentucky home in 2020.
Like Floyd, Taylor has become one of the icons of the Black Lives Matter movement seeking police reform and racial justice. –