Black Mystery Month Series

ficers decided to bring him to jail; the jail authorities refused to accept him, given the extensive injuries Torres suffered from the police and demanded he be brought to a hospital.

The senior officers decided--instead of taking him to a hospital--that Mr. Torres needed to be taught a lesson and disciplined. Senior officer Stephen Orlando arranged to have the officers meet them at the Commerce Street bridge, two blocks from the Houston City Jail. There, the police beat Jose Campos Torres and pushed him into the Buffalo Bayou.

Campos Torres survived Viet Nam and died at the hands of the Houston police.

Two days later, the Torres family filed a missing person

However, Brother Tyre Nichols has been beaten down by Blacks wearing the same Blue that killed all the others. I said I wasn’t going to write about this sh!t no mo’!

But Tyre Nichols is dead y’all. He died after he got a bad case of the Blues. And you know the Blues are always harder on Blacks than anyone else. But the Blues don’t ‘scriminate,' and that's why all of America should stand up against this genre of the Blues.

Gil Scott-Heron makes it plain and plural at the end of Jose Campos Torres.

“I had said I wasn't going to write no more poems like this, but the battlefield has oozed away from the stilted debates of semantics. Beyond the ques- tionable flexibility of primal screaming. The reality of our city, jungle streets and their Gestapos

Has become an attack on home, life, family and philosophy, total. It is beyond the question of the advantages of didactic niggerisms.

The (Maryland Farmer expletive) dogs are in the street.

“In Houston maybe someone said Mexicans were the new niggers

In LA maybe someone said Chicanos were the new niggers

In Frisco maybe someone said Orientals were the new niggers

Maybe in Philadelphia and North Carolina they decided they didn't need no new niggers.

I had said I wasn't going to write no more poems like this!”

I had said that I wasn’t going to write no more articles like this because the crux of what needs to be said has been said. Nobody listens. We suffer a temporary reaction, put salve on our wounds and wait for the next taxpayer-sponsored atrocity!

So, excuse me if I don’t care to see that inhumane video or wax eloquently on the whole farce we know as “policing.”

Some of us have reached our threshold on needless pain and endless political posturing. It’s past time for a revolution, and according to the sophist Gil Scott-Heron, that Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

And like I said, I won’t be writing no articles about the Revolution, ‘cause I ain’t no snitch!