I was greatly moved when the Reverend Al Sharpton invoked Martin Luther King in his eulogy for Tyre Nichols: “In the city where the dreamer laid down and shed his blood, you have the unmitigated gall to beat your brother,” Rev. Sharpton said of the police officers involved. “How dare you.”
His point is not just that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, or that the men who murdered Nichols are destroying King's legacy. Sharpton made clear that King's dream is the best way to combat divisiveness, police brutality, and racism. To look into the content of a man's character, not at his skin color. The police officers who brutally murdered Tyre Nichols are individual men responsible for their actions; they represented a total breakdown of law and order and a shocking brutality. They did not behave like human beings or treat Tyre Nichols like a human being. "You thought you threw Dr. King's dream in the pit," Sharpton said to the killers, because they are black. But race was not the point. "What happened to the dream?" he asked. Restore it. "God will do for us what we do for ourselves," said Al Sharpton, indicating that we all have a mountain to climb, and must keep climbing it until we're free of police brutality.
It is noteworthy that Sharpton did not invoke that prophet of victimhood, Ibram X. Kendi or anyone else remotely connected with the so-called anti-racism movement. He pointed us back to Dr. King, where we should have remained all along.
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