Who Tyre was and how it relates to our foundation
To have known Tyre was a rare gift to every life he touched. To be loved by Tyre was to know unconditional love, come as you are, because he had space and understanding for every walk of life. To have a friend in Tyre was to have a bond for a lifetime, no matter how much time passed, with him it was like you were never apart. He was a man searching for the meaning of life with a camera in his hand and he wanted so badly to help people see the beauty in the little things he found all around us. Whether it was the way the sun set behind a bridge in Memphis or the way the neon signs lit up the air on a warm summer night, he saw beauty and value in things that the rest of us took for granted. He cared deeply about his family, his friends, his community and about the future that he would one day hand down to his little boy
A beautiful soul that thrived on dreamy skies, country roads and lifelong friendships…..until the day it was taken from him.
To fill the void of losing someone like Tyre felt like an impossible task, like a canyon opening up in front of you and you are expected to fill this canyon with water using nothing but a cup to pour. It seems unreal, it seems impossible, it seems futile….but love doesn’t stop just because someone passes away. Our love, with nowhere to go, overflowed and began to pour into the vast emptiness, despite how impossible it felt. As time went by, more and more people came to pour their love for Tyre into this seemingly endless void. People that hadn’t seen him in a decade, people that saw him every day, people that had never met him a day in their life but were touched by the light he brought to the world, they all began to pour.
All of this pouring turned Tyres canyon of a void into a stream gaining momentum and as more and more people came to stand with us, that stream became a powerful river teeming with life. He became a source of inspiration for young people performing on stages, artists all over the country flooded social media with amazing pieces for him, blocks of people chanted Tyres name, city’s dedicated monuments and parks to his memory, his artwork was displayed on billboards across the country, his face filled screens in times square and NBA games…. everything Tyre had ever dreamed about starting happening right before our eyes because the entire world was moved by the ideas he had stood for.
It was in that moment that we knew exactly what we needed to do. The only way to honor Tyres life and keep his light alive, we realized, was to keep pouring. Keep pouring into youth that craved opportunity, into young fathers needing support, into neighborhoods in need of safe places for their kids to develop a sense of community and build lifelong relationships, into budding artists who need access to technology so they can bloom, into young students and athletes who, with a little support, can reach their full potential. The Tyre Nichols Foundation was born from relentless hope, deep love, impermeable resilience, a firm belief that anything is possible with your community by your side and one young man’s dream that a brighter future was possible for everyone. Tyres legacy lives on through the lives he touches, still to this day, through the work we do in the foundation. Every ounce of what we do is in his honor and even though his absence, that deep canyon of a void, will be there for the rest of our lives… we will continue to pour into it and bring beauty and life to every little thing it touches. Just like Tyre did.