‘These 5 Cowards Look Just Like Tyre Nichols!’ ESPN’s Ryan Clark Decries Memphis Cops For Hurting BLM Movement
ESPN’s Ryan Clark decried the five Memphis police officers who killed Tyre Nichols for harming the Black Lives Matter movement.
The five officers, who were all Black, were seen on video beating Nichols during a traffic stop on Jan. 7, and he died three days later due to the injuries. On Thursday, those police officers, Emmitt Martin III, Justin Smith, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, and Desmond Mills, were charged with murder. Bodycam footage of the brutal attack was released on Friday.
On Monday, Clark was on ESPN’s First Take — sitting beside Stephen A. Smith, Molly Qerim, and NFL Hall of Famer Michael Irvin as the four discussed the bodycam footage. Clark did not mince words about the five cops.
“As you described it, Stephen A., and it’s exactly what all of us saw, and you mention the names of the five police officers who took Tyre Nichols’ life; I think you missed some words,” Clark said, “You missed ‘murderers’ because that’s what they are. And you missed ‘cowards.'”
“I can’t even put into words the amount of hate you have to have,” Clark added. “The amount of hurtful, malicious, murderous intent you have to have to beat a human to death. To be so premeditated, to be so calculated in your evil that you cover up the bodycam. That you scream things that you know aren’t true because you’re setting up your false reports. You’re setting up your opportunities to just do whatever the hell you want to because you have a badge.”
Clark argued that Nichols’ death hurts the Black Lives Matter movement.
“All the times when we get people who push against Black Lives Matter, and you have to explain to them, no, we’re not saying that other lives don’t matter, we’re saying that Black lives matter too because they matter to us,” Clark continued. “Now you can’t even scream that they matter to us because these five cowards look just like Tyre Nichols.”
“These five cowards left homes, left neighborhoods, left houses, left projects that people look just like them, and they just don’t give a damn!” Clark said. “Because whatever the pollution is, whatever the poison is, whatever the rhetoric is, that says someone that looks like Tyre Nichols and Tyre Nichols himself is not worth living, they fed into that.”
The ESPN analyst added, “It wasn’t about Black; it wasn’t about White; it wasn’t about brown, it wasn’t about yellow; it was about blue and the way that blue sees Black. So now, it is another funeral.”
Clark noted that Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant spoke to the media after he saw the bodycam video and proposed he and his First Take colleagues similarly need to use their platform to give voice to the voiceless.
“For Tyre Nichols and his family, for what they have to go through for what they have to suffer through, it is incomprehensible!” Clark said. “And the pain has to be immeasurable, and it’s not right, man.”
Watch above via ESPN.
