By: Dean Weiner

The Reverend Al Sharpton on Saturday blasted the officers charged with beating Tyre Nichols to death of being a “disgrace to our race.”

“Do you think cause you were black we wouldn’t say nothing?” fumed Sharpton while speaking at a rally to more than 100 people at his National Action Network headquarters in Harlem.

“These black guys thought they could get away with it doing it to a black guy,” the reverend said. “You know you couldn’t get away with doing that in Tennessee to a white guy. You’ll find out you ain’t getting away with it doing it to a black guy.”

The New York Post, which is usually a very pro law enforcement newspaper reports, Disturbing body-cam footage released Friday shows Nichols being beaten, pepper sprayed, and tasered by the cops during a traffic stop on Jan. 7. The 29-year-old, a FedEx worker and father of a four-year-old boy, died three days later in the hospital.

The five officers were fired and arrested, each charged with aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct, and official oppression, in addition to second-degree murder.

Four videos totaling about 66 minutes show the blow-by-blow of the Jan. 7 police beating that ended with Tyre Nichols’ death in Memphis.

The first video, taken from a police body camera, shows cops with guns drawn swarming Nichols’ car, which was stopped at a red light.

One officer yanks open the door and yells at him to “Get the f–k out the f–king car!”

“Damn, I didn’t do anything!” the 29-year-old FedEx worker is heard responding, as the cops wrestle him down, screaming, “Get on the f–king ground!”

The footage shows an uncuffed Nichols sitting on the ground telling the officers, “Stop!” before he lays down on his side and one cop yells, “Put your hands behind your back before I break them!”

One of the officers has a Taser pressed into Nichols’ leg.

“OK, stop … You guys are really doing a lot right now. Stop!” Nichols says. “I’m just trying to go home!”

As one cop tells him, “Man, if you don’t lay down —” Nichols yells back, “I am on the ground!”

He can be heard moaning incomprehensibly.

More cops eventually arrive at the scene, and Nichols is seen on the ground in a prone position and then propped up against a cop car.

At one point in the video, the cops complain about accidentally pepper spraying themselves.

“I sprayed myself,” one cop says.

Sharpton’s comments are tame compared to his history of provoking violence; this is a vast improvement in his rhetoric.  One of his most infamous actions has been buried in history, the Freddie’s Department store fire.

National Review reported long ago:

In 1995 a black Pentecostal Church, the United House of Prayer, which owned a retail property on 125th Street across from the Apollo Theatre, asked Fred Harari, a Jewish tenant who operated Freddie’s Fashion Mart, to evict his longtime subtenant, a record store called The Record Shack owned by black South African Sikhulu Shange. African American activist Al Sharpton led protests outside the Harlem store over several weeks against both the planned eviction of The Record Shack, and because Freddie’s did not employ any black workers.

Sharpton told the crowd of protesters: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.”