Justice for Tyre Nichols!

The video of the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis Police leading to his death has sparked a visceral response. The overwhelming response to this blatant inhumanity is welcomed and unseen since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops in 2020. Protesters demanding justice for Tyre Nichols take to the streets in Memphis shortly after the release of police footage of his death. In this issue, you will find the statement by the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality.

Part 1 of our 4-part series in celebration of Black History Month

New Statement by the October 22nd Coalition

The Memphis Police Beating of Tyre Nichols: Another Outrageous Murder! We Can Not Win on the Terms Set by This System

Memphis protests

On January 10th, Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black father, son, photographer, and friend, died in a Memphis hospital, after being savagely beaten by five Memphis police officers following a traffic stop. On Friday, January 27th, Memphis police released an hour of footage showing the police attack on Nichols, one day after charging the five officers who beat him with murder.

To anyone with any semblance of humanity, the videos are horrifying and heart-wrenching. To anyone with a sense of justice, the murder of another unarmed Black person should be cause to want to upend this whole system of racism, brutality, and murder, which reforms never seem to touch. Police body cameras, far from bringing “accountability,” only show police brutality from more angles, and Black officers can and do kill with impunity because they play a role in the service of a racist system.

Protests took place Friday night across the country in reaction to the release of the video in New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, and elsewhere. In Memphis itself, hundreds of protesters shut down the I-55 bridge over the Mississippi River between Memphis and West Memphis. It is crucial that all who are outraged support, build, and expand on these protests.

“This happens again, and again, and again, and it must be stopped,” says Carl Dix, co-founder of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation. “They’ve told us for decades that if we just got more Black politicians in office, get Black police chiefs, and more black police, we could end this. In Memphis it was five Black cops who did this, and the chief was a Black female. That is not a way out.”

Nearly three years ago, this country saw a beautiful and powerful uprising throughout the summer of 2020 against racist police terror which unleashed people in ways not seen in decades. People from all walks of life, and most especially those people under the gun of daily police violence with their unyielding determination, shut down cities and towns and forced a halt, however temporary, to “business as usual.” The system was shaken to its core at the prospect of broad sections of society, crossing all kinds of social lines, uniting against the racism and oppression at the heart of this system.

But the system, divided as it is in a bitter struggle between the insurgent fascism of the Republican Party and the stagnant and complicit Democratic Party, has found common cause to stifle such uprisings out of fear that our protest will become too powerful. As the October 22nd Coalition put forward in our position paper, “Fighting Police Terror in an Age of Fascism,” “We are now in an untenable situation where we mainly have an energized, violent, and proudly bigoted movement toward fascism led by the Republican Party on the one hand, and an infighting, turf-defending, and splintered movement beholden to the Democratic Party and its funders on the other.”

The October 22nd Coalition aims to unite all justice-seeking people, from families and loved ones of Stolen Lives, to people living daily under the gun of police terror, to people on campuses and in other communities, and refuse to concede our power in the streets to police repression or fascist terrorists. We must resist attempts to drag the righteous uprisings of the people down dead-end channels led by pro-system reformists, while refusing to let the differences among the people overshadow the fundamental difference between the people and this illegitimate, violent, and racist system.

This Spring, the October 22nd Coalition will be hosting a national meeting to build upon these plans and elaborate a way forward characterized by an inviting and determined militancy to see an end to all these horrors. Justice for Tyre Nichols and All Stolen Lives! | Rise Up in Protest!