Who But the Lord?

 When the news came down yesterday that the officers involved in the death of Tyre Nichols had been acquitted, I watched for the first time the body cam footage that the whole nation saw a couple years ago.

I probably should have watched it earlier, but somehow I managed not to follow this case closely, when it was in the headlines in 2023. Seeing the news about the results of the criminal trial yesterday was the first time I had paid any serious attention to the details. 

The footage is indeed hard to stomach. Several scenes show the officers repeatedly striking Tyre Nichols across the face, while they have his arms pinioned behind his back. He is obviously defenseless and unresisting—but the police take turns beating him senseless. 

Just as hard to take, however, is how the arrest footage begins. Nichols is forced onto the ground while the officers scream at him. They keep bellowing "get on the ground," while he tries—calmly and in a level voice—to tell them that he is already there. 

None of us likes to think we live in a police-state where our lives are insecure. None of us likes to think that a casual encounter with officers on duty could lead to being beaten to death. 

So, when we see videos like this, we often—no matter our political priors—try to find some way to excuse the cops and point to something the arrestee must have done wrong. 

We do this not just because of implicit bias or some pro-police narrative—but because we want to convince ourselves that we, at least, are safe. There must be some reason why it happened to him—he must have brought it on himself in some way—and why it couldn't happen to us. 

And the people who argue in this way can say: well, Nichols was speeding. Or: he shouldn't have run from the cops. But the speeding doesn't explain why they were still shrieking at him after he was already on the ground. 

The running from the cops doesn't explain why—after he had already been chased down and pinned—they beat him mercilessly, taking turns, then left his seemingly-unconscious body slumped against a car. It doesn't explain why they beat him so badly he died three days later. 

Most of us don't think that speeding or running are capital offenses in this society. But they became crimes for which one can be extrajudicially murdered, in Nichols's case. 

Look as we might, then, for an excuse—we don't find one. We aren't safe, in a society where police routinely treat people this way. Our rights are not secure. There is nothing to protect us—most especially, if we are Black (which I am not). 

This is what unsettled me most about that footage. The lack of any shield for an ordinary civilian, who was just trying to get home from a long day of work delivering packages, against the armed agents of the state. 

I was reminded, in watching the footage, of Langston Hughes's poem, "Who But the Lord?" 

 I looked and I saw

That man they call the Law. 

He was coming down the street at me. 

I had visions in my head 

Of being laid out cold and dead 

Or else murdered

By the Third Degree. 

The poem is one of several Hughes wrote about police brutality—lines that seem disturbingly prescient in the post–George Floyd world. 

The speaker of the poem goes on to invoke God's protection: 

Oh Lord, if you can 

Please save me from that man!

Don't let him make a pulp out of me!

But the Lord he was not quick—

The Law raised up his stick. 

And beat the living hell 

Out of me!

That was the fate of Tyre Nichols too. And God did not intervene. "All this, with God's consent, on thee?" as Thomas Hardy once wrote. Or, as Hardy wrote in a different place: "Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, [...] he was in a journey, or he was sleeping[.]"

Now I do not understand [Hughes continues]

Why God don't protect a man

From police brutality. 

Being poor and black,

I've no weapon to strike back—

So who but the Lord

Can protect me?

The Lord did not protect Tyre Nichols. Neither did the human community nor the arm of the state. Indeed, it was the arm of the state that delivered the beating that ended his life. 

"But," some may protest, "the arm of the state did intervene." Regardless of the outcome of the criminal trial that ended yesterday, after all, the officers did face civil penalties. The federal government did undertake a civil rights investigation that vindicated Nichols. 

But that all came from the federal government we used to have. Our new, post–January 2025 Justice Department under Trump is not likely to do the same. 

Indeed, just days before the verdict came down exonerating the officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death, Trump issued a new executive order titled, in part: "Unleashing America's Law Enforcement." 

Among its various provisions, the order offered pro bono federal legal support to officers accused of brutalizing suspects. Trump appears to be planning to enlist in this effort the services of the law firms he recently extorted for free work. 

It would seem that the federal government, then, is going to be leveraging its extraordinary power and resources—not to prevent civilian deaths, incidents of police brutality, and civil rights violations like this from happening in the future—but to ensure there are many more of them. 

The federal government, then, is not going to save us. We are not safe. Our rights are not secure. 

"Who But the Lord," then, can help us, indeed?