How to Honor Tyre Nichols

A Lesson from the Black Lives Matter movement

Tyre Nichols was beaten to death by Memphis police for an alleged traffic violation in January. He was 29. There is video of the beating, which I refuse to watch or link to in this space.

Instead, I want to tell you about something I learned from the Black Lives Matter movement in the months after George Floyd’s murder.

Tyre Nichols, in a photo provided by his family. He loved photography. “My vision is to bring my viewers deep into what I am seeing through my eye and out through my lens,” Nichols wrote. “People have a story to tell, why not capture it.”

I was running my business then, so my media at the time was heavily skewed toward business-related topics. There were many headlines about how businesses were responding to the increased awareness. I read a stream of stories about how businesses were changing hiring policies, adding diversity language to their ecosystems, and making leadership changes to meet the moment.

Among this advice, I also stumbled upon more personal guidance. It was so simple.

Deliberately fill your feed with more Black voices.

There were numerous articles at the time with lists of popular accounts of Black Americans and what each person was into, so you could follow people who shared a passion of yours. Here’s an example.

My social media of choice is Twitter, so I spent a fun afternoon back in 2020 following random people from these lists. I remember so distinctly deriding myself…