What the Memphis Five teach us about Black life
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked outside his Tennessee motel room and stood at the railing and met his death with a single bullet to the neck. King was in Memphis to lend support to Black garbage workers in their strike after two workers died in the back of a garbage truck.
On Feb. 1, 1968, Echol Cole and Robert Walker were working a garbage collection shift and to escape the rain they rode inside the garbage compactor which malfunctioned and they were crushed. They died in terror with the trash of the community as their only company.
On Jan. 7, 2023, Tyre Nichols was on his way home from watching the sunset and he was surrounded and beaten to death by five men who were at least twice his size. In his last moments he cried out for his mother who lived a few blocks away.
Cole and Walker died because there was no room for them in the garbage truck. Memphis garbage workers, then, were always Black with the exception of their supervisors who were white.
Memphis, at the time, did not provide its sanitation workers with uniforms, gloves, or even a place to shower before they went home. They were not given these simple items because they were Black. They were not given these things, in addition to low pay, and the city did not recognize their right to be treated better. This is where the 1968 strike and King and his death enter the story.
The garbage workers held up picket signs that said I AM A Man. This is what King came to Memphis for and what he died supporting — the simple statement I AM A Man.
The Memphis strike was part of a centuries long march to have white America recognize this simple truth: I AM A Man.
Tyre Nichols had a mother and 4-year-old son who loved him and needed him. When he cried out for his mother as he knew his last moments on this earth were upon him, he could have cried out I AM A Man.
As the Black skin of Cole and Walker explained how they ended up being in the back of a garbage truck where they met their end, five Black cops brought Nichols his last day. A grown man, like George Floyd before him, met his last day on the ground crying out for his mother.
Racism in America is not the same as it was in 1723 or 1823 or 1923. And let us admit that. But not unlike in 1723 or 1823 when Black men feared the police — either the slave patrols of the south or the slave catchers in the north — in 2023 Blacks are still the targets of policing in America. The reasons are complicated, but regardless of why, Blacks are the targets of policing.
The implicit racism in the perception of Blacks as criminals, to be feared and controlled, does not change because the five officers that took Tyre’s life were Black. Blacks can internalize negative perceptions of Blacks and aggressively police them just as easily as whites. As a historical matter, Blacks being chased down by Blacks for society’s purposes is not new. Many of the best slave catchers were Black.
In 2023 the murder of Tyre Nichols, like George Floyd, has been met with public revulsion and has been answered with the full application of the criminal justice system upon the heads of the officers who killed him.
But those five Black officers did not wake up in the morning and say let’s chase down a Black man and kill him. Rather police experience and practice had taught them that Tyre’s life was not worth protecting as they beat him in the dark. The fact that they were Black themselves is of no account.
The racism in their actions, as the video shows, was in their indifference to Tyre’s right to walk as a free man in America. His life ended with the same indifference that ended the life of Elijah McClain. It was in how and why they attacked him. To the police neither life had value. The racism was in the police officer’s elation in what they did and their shock that they were charged as criminals for it.
The racism in America is also found in Fox News commentators asserting that these Black cops were the natural outcome of affirmative action hiring resulting from the city lowering recruitment standards. The racism is in these same commentators asserting that the actions of these Black officers is the natural result of demands for police reform after the killing of Eric Garner. The racism was in these Black police officers finding no incongruity between being police and beating a Black man to death.
Tyre died alone as two garbage workers did more than a half century ago. Tyre died in Memphis because those five Black officers concluded that I AM A Man did not apply to him.