Tyre Nichols’ parents turn to governor
Shortly after Tyre Nichols’ death following a traffic stop last year, his grieving parents sat with Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee inside a politician’s Memphis office, where they say the governor offered his support in their quest to pursue justice, said RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother.
That’s a promise Wells wants to see fulfilled after the Republican-led state Legislature on Thursday moved to roll back Memphis traffic reforms that were sparked by Nichols’ death.
With the bill heading to the governor’s desk, Lee stands as the final recourse for Wells and her husband, Rodney, who are seeking an audience with the state’s top elected official — for one last bid to convince him to veto the legislation.
“We just hope he’ll sit down with us and hold his word as to what he told us in the beginning,” Wells told The Washington Post on Friday, hours before the family sent a letter to the governor urging him to “prevent this dangerous legislation from becoming law.”
A spokesperson for Lee didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday evening.
The bill reflects a growing trend among some voters and lawmakers to reverse or change reforms that were initiated after the killings of unarmed Black people — including Nichols, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain — prompted a racial reckoning and intense scrutiny of law enforcement policies.
In Tennessee, the passage of Senate Bill 2572 — which would restrict local governments’ power to enact police reform measures — reeks of a familiar pattern, said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson, whose district includes parts of Memphis.
“It’s like every time at any moment of progress, there’s this attempt to have the institutionalization of overseers in our lives,” Pearson said. “And it is to the destruction and the disruption of democracy, but it is also to the detriment of Black people, who — we — just want to live.”
Nullifying Memphis’ reforms would erase the monthslong battle that the Wellses, activists and community members took on last year to ban police from using unmarked cars and from conducting pretextual stops over five minor traffic violations — efforts that culminated in an ordinance that carries Nichols’ name.
Studies have shown that Black drivers are stopped and searched at higher rates than white drivers — and that pretextual stops don’t usually achieve their stated goal. In Tennessee, a report by advocacy group Decarcerate Memphis found that although pretextual traffic stops had increased in Memphis in the months after Nichols’ death, few of them resulted in felony arrests. In fact, of the 11,626 traffic stops recorded by the Tennessee Highway Patrol in Memphis and Shelby County, only 13 prompted felony arrests, the group said.
Nevertheless, Republicans in the state Legislature touted pretextual traffic stops as a necessary tool for fighting crime.
“If we don’t do this, we will further endanger our community,” Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor, the bill sponsor from Memphis, said Thursday.
That day, the Wellses had made the 62-mile drive from Memphis to Nashville in hopes of convincing Taylor not to send the bill to vote. They say their conversation with the lawmaker left them flat-footed.
“He basically said that if the ordinance was in place, Tyre would probably still have died because he was targeted,” Wells said. “And I said, ‘That’s the whole purpose. That’s what we’re saying: Black men are targeted.’ And that’s the reason why we wanted him to hold off, but he just refused.”
Taylor didn’t respond to a request for comment. According to The Associated Press, the lawmaker argued that moving forward with the bill was in the “best interest” of everyone to have “closure.”
“As a funeral director and as someone who has seen death daily for 35 years, I understand better than most the pain and suffering that this family is going through,” the AP reported that Taylor said. “As much as I empathize with the Wells family and Tyre Nichols’s family and the loss of Tyre, we can’t let that empathy cloud our judgment in protecting 7 million Tennesseans.”
But Taylor and other politicians can’t possibly understand her unbearable sorrow — or the gaping void left in her heart by the death of her beloved and “quirky” son, Wells said.
The pain is one she decided to transform into action, with the hope that other families would never have to understand what hers felt like. “This needs to stop,” Wells said. “It just needs to stop. I’ve seen law enforcement treat a dog better than they treat a Black man.”
Yet her trips to Nashville to plead with legislators — and now the governor — not to erase her son’s memory have left her without the time to fully grieve, she said.