Memphis Police Pepper-Sprayed the Protest Marshals at the No Kings March

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

The city being used as Trump’s model sent a clear message back.

I was not at the No Kings march in Memphis on Saturday – I was planning to attend with a friend, and on the way, he checked his email to find that he had several fraudulent charges totalling almost 4k that drained his bank account. We never made it downtown.

But, apparently, we missed a showdown between the police and protestors – here’s what seems to have happened.

Several thousand people showed up at Robert Church Park in downtown Memphis. Then they marched – down Beale Street, through downtown, toward MLK Avenue. Every person there, every reporter there, and the organizers all say it was completely peaceful.

The march was literally minutes from being over, and people were heading back to the park.

That’s when Memphis Police rolled up on the rear of the crowd. Multiple squad cars, sirens on, officers approaching on foot. Someone deployed pepper spray – and witnesses say people who weren’t even hit directly were choking from it. Six people got detained. Three were charged and spent about 20 hours in intake before they got out.

Here’s the part that’s gonna make you mad. The three people who ended up arrested were the march’s own safety marshals. That’s their job – they wear orange vests, they guide the crowd, they manage traffic so marchers don’t get hurt. Rueben Burch, Adam Nelson, and David Rahaim weren’t instigating anything. They were the people keeping everyone safe.

MPD’s explanation is that the permit was only for the park rally, not a march, and that people were blocking the road. They say officers spent 40 minutes asking people to move before anything happened. Organizers say that’s not how it went. Adam Nelson said he was directing the last group of marchers back into the park when he smelled mace – before any escalation he was aware of.

Also: the charge they used, “obstructing a highway or passageway,” is a brand new Tennessee law. It passed in 2025. It didn’t even exist a year ago. Our Republican state senator, Brent Taylor, sponsored it. So the legal tool MPD reached for to arrest protest marshals was specifically created by the state legislature last year.

State Rep. Justin Pearson, who spoke at the rally, called what the police did “violent, vicious and unnecessary.” Twenty-five community organizations signed a statement condemning MPD. Indivisible Memphis – the group that organized the rally – put it plainly: “Permits are not the issue. Police violence is.”

Yesterday, Mayor Paul Young placed the officers on administrative leave pending an internal investigation. The three arrested men had their cases continued 30 days in Shelby County court.

Now, you might need a little bit of background to understand why this happening in Memphis, on this particular weekend, is a bigger deal than it might look.

Since last September, Trump sent what the admin is calling the Memphis Safe Task Force into the city. It’s 13-plus federal agencies, the Tennessee National Guard, and local law enforcement, all there under an executive order framed as a crime-fighting effort. The National Guard patrolled neighborhoods, parking outside Black-owned businesses, and doing what a lot of residents have just straight-up called an occupation. Trump flew in last week to hold a roundtable with Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Kash Patel to declare Memphis fixed. Mayor Young didn’t show.

And then Trump said the quiet part out loud: he told Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton that states all over the country are watching what Tennessee does. That Memphis is a model. A test case for how far you can push federal and military power into a Democratic-led, majority-Black city.

The No Kings march was the pushback to all of that. And what happened at the end of it – a crowd of peaceful people getting pepper-sprayed while their own safety marshals were arrested for guiding everyone home – is the city’s answer to being used as a template.

The ACLU of Tennessee is now asking anyone who feels their rights were violated Saturday to reach out. Body camera footage hasn’t been released yet, despite demands from Indivisible Memphis and Rep. Pearson. The charges against the three men are still pending. The officers are on leave but not fired.

Sources