Meant to be protectors, police became tormentors
“Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying,
Brother, brother, brother There’s far too many of you dying.”
Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going on”
In a passage of her masterful memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou writes that when she and her brother, Bailey, were being raised by their grandmother in Stamps, Ark., her grandmother worried when Bailey was out late.
Her fear was shadowed by the legacy of lynching. She was scared that her grandson would be targeted by a hate group like the Klan.
“The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons, and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose,”angelou wrote.
In 1989, concerned about violence in the Black community, an all-star group of rappers and hip-hop artists came together as the Stop the Violence Movement to record the song “Self-destruction.” In it, Kool Moe Dee raps:
“I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan
And I shouldn’t have to run from a Black man.”
On the night of Jan. 7 in Memphis, Tenn., Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, had to run from five Black men — five Black policemen — because he foresaw the impending violence in the aggression with which they approached him for a traffic stop.
When they caught him, video shows they inflicted on his frail frame the violence that Angelou’s grandmother feared would be inflicted on her grandson by the KKK.
When they caught him, he became the incarnation of every Black parent’s nightmare, including, probably, the parents of the five Black officers who did to Nichols what
the klan routinely did to Black men and women — terrorize and beat him.
That Nichols’ killers were Black officers doesn’t detract from the numbers showing how police are more likely to stop Black drivers than white drivers.
There are great police officers across all ethnic lines, as well as bad police officers across all ethnic lines. Tragically, it’s the bad officers who too often encounter Black drivers.
The five Memphis officers were part of a special outfit, called the Scorpion unit, which has since been disbanded. But their abuse of Nichols made
them no better than a street gang.
The city of Memphis has handled the Nichols case as well and quickly as any city has handled a high-profile case of police brutality.
Before Friday night’s release of the video, the officers had already been fired and charged with murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. That’s why the protests across the nation were peaceful. Additionally, two other policemen have been relieved of their duties and three members of the Memphis Fire Department have been fired.
Yet these people were hired and supposedly trained. No one on the scene that night intervened to stop the police from assaulting Nichols; no one tended to the badly beaten young man who would die three days later; no one shortened the 23 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.
“I’m just trying to go home?” Nichols pleaded with the officers before making a run for home.
In 2020, when George Floyd screamed for his mother, who’d been dead for two years, he was seeking divine intervention, asking for an angel to deliver him from his suffering.
When Tyre Nichols cried for his mother, who was 100 yards away from him at home, he knew that she was still on this Earth and if she heard him, she’d come with angels’ wings to protect him.
She didn’t hear his cries, but the police officers — his tormentors — did, and yet there are times in the video when at least one of them calls Nichols “Bro.”
Bro? Bro! The brother was supposed to be Nichols’ keeper, his protector.
In “What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye observes there are too many mothers crying and too many brothers dying; he also pleads, “Don’t punish me with brutality.”
Marvin’s and Tyre’s pleas were ignored, and now another mother cries after another brother has died.
“Father, father!” Marvin cried. “We don’t need to escalate.”