Death of Tyre Nichols attracted attention of many political leaders
2023.02.01 10:58
Death of Tyre Nichols attracted attention of many political leaders
By Tiffany Smith
Budrigannews.com – On Wednesday, Tyre Nichols’s friends and family will pay their last respects to the Black 29-year-old father who became the new face of the U.S. racial justice movement after his fatal encounter with Memphis police last month.
During Nichols’ funeral at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Nichols’ adopted hometown of Memphis, the Rev. Al Sharpton will eulogize him, and attorney Ben Crump, another prominent civil rights leader, will give a “call to action.”
Crump stated that the Nichols family invited U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris to join the mourners. He stated that Harris had a private phone conversation with RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother, on Tuesday.
In addition, relatives of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two additional African Americans whose deaths in 2020 at the hands of police in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis became rallying calls for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Crump said in a statement on Wednesday morning that the funeral service was originally scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. local time. However, the start time was pushed back to 1 p.m. (1900 GMT) due to inclement weather and travel delays.
FedEx’s Nichols (NYSE:) Worker who skateboarded and studied photography passed away on Jan. 10 while he was in the hospital for injuries he had sustained three days earlier when he was beaten by Memphis police when they pulled him over on his way home. Crump has called the incident a “police lynching.”
Five of the officers, who were also Black, were fired by the Memphis Police Department after that. Last week, prosecutors charged them with second-degree murder, assault, kidnapping, official misconduct, and oppression.
Two additional officers who were involved in the events that led to Nichols’ death have been relieved of duty, effectively suspended, and an investigation is currently underway. On Monday, the city fire department fired two paramedics and their on-scene supervisor, and the Shelby County sheriff’s department suspended two deputies.
The city released police video of the confrontation on Friday. It showed officers spraying Nichols with pepper spray and beating him with punches, kicks, and baton blows as he yelled for his mother. When Nichols tried to flee, one officer was seen firing a Taser stun gun at him.
At the end of the video, you can see that Nichols was handcuffed, bleeding, and slumped against the side of a police car for nearly a quarter of an hour before getting medical help.
Cerelyn Davis, the chief of police, has called the behavior in the video “inhumane” and said that investigators have not proven that Nichols was driving recklessly when he was stopped, as the officers who arrested him said at the time.
The beating has been condemned by civil rights advocates and Nichols’ family lawyers as the latest instance of an African American victim being brutalized by a racially biased law enforcement system that disproportionately targets people of color, even when the officers involved are non-white.
Memphis, a majority-Black city on the Mississippi River whose racial history was indelibly marked by the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. while he was there to support a local garbage workers’ strike, has seen peaceful and relatively restrained protests in response to Nichols’s death.
During a news conference on Tuesday night at the historic Mason Temple church in Memphis, where King gave his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on the eve of his death, Sharpton paid tribute to Nichols as a kind of prelude to the funeral.
In the presence of Nichols’ mother and his stepfather, Rodney Wells, Sharpton told reporters, “What happened to Tyre Nichols here is a disgrace to this country.” The footage of an unarmed and uninitiated man being beaten to death by law enforcement officers attracted viewers from all over the world.”
In the beginning, Crump praised the city and local authorities for their prompt investigation of the Nichols beating and the filing of criminal charges. However, in recent days, Crump has suggested that police had been less than forthcoming with Nichols’ mother.
Friends and family remembered Nichols, who was born in Sacramento, California, and moved to Memphis early in the COVID pandemic in 2020, as a friendly, free-spirited man who enjoyed skateboarding and recently took a photography class.
He took a daily lunch break from his FedEx job to join his stepfather and a coworker for dinner at his mother’s house, where he lived, with his 4-year-old son.
Another family lawyer, Antonio Romanucci, has stated that Nichols was also a fervent supporter of Black Lives Matter, a cause for which he gave his life, “and essentially what that makes him a martyr.”
