Lawyers for five Black police officers pleaded ‘not guilty’ to charges that they murdered Tyre Nichols, a young Black man who died after a police beating in Memphis, Tennessee, last month.

Videos of the incident showed the five officers repeatedly kicking and punching Nichols in a traffic stop close to his home on 7 January, three days before he died in hospital.

The incident drew national attention to the issues of police abuse and mistreatment of African Americans, specifically from Black Lives Matter (BLM), saying:

‘Although the media has spent a great amount of time drawing attention to the fact that the police officers are Black, as if that is important, let us be clear: ALL police represent the interest of capitalism and impel state-sanctioned violence. Anyone who works within a system that perpetuates state-sanctioned violence is complicit in upholding white supremacy. Assimilation into a system that is anti-Black is one of the most dangerous weapons stemming from white supremacy.’

The ongoing cry, like the playing of a violin, of BLM and their left-wing backers in the political world and mainstream media is that, like George Floyd’s death at the hands of white officers in 2020, Nichols was another victim to white supremacy that began when Africans were brought to America as slaves. Indeed, books like The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2019) by  Nikole Hannah-Jones highlight this, presenting slavery not as an exploitation of enforced and unwanted labour for economic profit, but as the manifestation of white racism.

What BLM, Hannah-Jones, and others willingly fail to point out is that the slavery of Africans in America was a slave trade.

In other words, Hannah-Jones and other like-minded people neglect to admit that the slave trade originated from Africa—the Africans were caught and sold by their own kind to white men. Instead of holding those African nations equally accountable, they put exclusive blame on white men.

There is also the phenomenon that Blacks in colonial America owned other Blacks as slaves, which they altogether refuse to acknowledge.

Blacks Owning other Blacks

In R. Halliburton’s Free Black Owners of Slaves: A Reappraisal of the Woodson Thesis, Halliburton writes that free black people owned black slaves ‘in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery.’ And it did not stop there. 

In fact, for a time, free black people could even ‘own’ the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Also according to Halliburton, free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler ‘regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade.’ 

Revisionists like to claim that when Blacks owned slaves, they did so only for humanitarian reasons, which justified the ‘technical’ slave status of whomever had been purchased. These historical facts were reported by Carter G. Woodson in his publication Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 183 (1924). Free Blacks, in fact, used slavery to apply pressure or punishment on others.

For example:

’Some of these husbands were not anxious to liberate their wives immediately. They considered it advisable to put them on probation for a few years, and if they did not find them satisfactory they would sell their wives as other slaveholders disposed of Negroes. For example, a Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased his wife for $700; but, on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750, gaining $50 by the transaction.‘

Abortion: A Tool to Eradicate Blacks

There is also the crime of abortion, which Planned Parenthood (PP)—a ‘health’ centre that provides abortions—was originally founded to target Black Americans.

PP was established by enthusiastic eugenicist Margaret Sanger in 1916. Sanger’s racist views were well-established, declaring that ‘minorities (including most of America’s immigrants) are inferior in the human race, as are the physically and mentally handicapped.’

Sanger, the devout racist she that she was, created the Negro Project designed to sterilise unknowing Black women and others she deemed as undesirables of society, saying:

‘Coloured people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.’

PP, despite last June’s US Supreme Court sentence that overturned Roe v. Wade, which effectively limits the procurements of abortions, is the largest abortion provider in the US. Reportedly 78 per cent of their clinics were in minority communities. Blacks make up 12 per cent of the US population, but 35 per cent of the abortions in America.

As the fashion mogul and Grammy-winner Kanye West had said during in a 2021 interview, Black Americans are ‘in genocide’ because of an ‘abortion culture’, which prior to the aforementioned Supreme Court sentence, one thousand Black babies were aborted each day.

Racial discrimination has unfortunately always been a part of the human race, as was in the US South with the disenfranchising ‘Jim Crow’ laws, a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that lasted for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. Tyre Nichols’ death should never have happened. Whether the five Black officers involved will be declared guilty or not, resides in the hands of the jury. Yet to say that it was another case of white supremacy is a far stretch. That being said, those involved in groups such as BLM only divide society by drawing a line of demarcation between ‘Blacks and whites’. They neglect the fact that the very race they are seeking to defend has been equally as guilty as those whom they accuse of malice.