Editor’s note: Twenty years ago, reporter Bill Dries interviewed a first-hand witness to one of the city’s most notable episodes involving police, the fatal beating of Elton Hayes in 1971. Calvin McKissack, who was with Hayes that night, died in 2017 but his words from 2001 come back to life on the 50th anniversary of Hayes’ death this month. 

Not too far from Wolfchase Galleria, across U.S. 64 and near the mostly unmarked graves of the Shelby County Cemetery, sits another modest cemetery where the names are known.

“You know Black people are buried here,” the woman in a storage building outfitted as the office of Galilee Memorial Gardens said when asked that day 20 years ago about the location of a specific grave from 30 years previous.

I nodded. “Elton Hayes,” I repeated as she wrote it on a Post-it note and told me to come back the next day. The grave would be marked with a tiny red flag.

At the same time the next day, a young man walked me from the tiny office at the back of the cemetery to the “Everlasting Life” garden by the cemetery entrance and stepped back a few feet from the tiny red flag by the headstone.

“Can I ask you something?” he said after about a minute. “Who was he? What happened to him?”

Civic memorial for George Floyd includes police and mothers

‘We were young boys. … We were scared.’

That year marked 30 years since the 1971 death of Hayes, a pivotal event in the city’s long history of race and violence and the politics of both — yet one that barely resonates as the list of those who had died at the hands of police has grown to include those not yet born when Hayes died.

The Oct. 15 anniversary that year of Hayes’ death was overshadowed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that occurred about a month earlier.

The indictment, trial and acquittal of four Memphis Police officers and four Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies left no one convicted for the homicide to this day, now half a century later.

Below: A timeline of the events surrounding Hayes’ death

Everyone with a badge in and around the roadside where Hayes and two teenage friends were beaten claimed they never touched him and that they didn’t see who was beating him.

No one claimed they used justifiable force in killing Hayes.

The beating was in a ditch off Lamar Avenue in Capleville at the end of a car chase with police. It came to involve sheriff’s deputies when the chase crossed what was then the city limits. No one was there but law enforcement officers.

Calvin McKissack, who died in 2017, was one of the other two teenagers in the pickup with Hayes the night of his death. In 2001, 30 years after the killing, McKissack still lived in the Orange Mound neighborhood where he, Hayes and George Barnes began their ride that Oct. 15 evening in Barnes’ father’s pickup.

“We were just young boys out riding,” McKissack said in an interview at the time.

The trio left Barnes’ home by putting the truck in neutral and pushing it out of the driveway and onto the street before starting it up so his father wouldn’t hear it.

Incoming NCRM president sees role for museum in ‘critical race theory’ debate

At South Parkway and Worthington, Barnes squealed the tires of the truck, which drew the attention of a passing police patrol car. The unlicensed Barnes, only 14 at the time, later told The New York Times he wasn’t sure why he sped off, but he did. 

The chase moved to side streets and at one point, McKissack said, they had decided to get back on South Parkway, pull over and wait for police.

“We knew we were going to have to take a beating,” Barnes said.

A disputed gunshot that all involved agreed they heard was the turning point to the violent end of the chase.

McKissack said they heard what sounded like a gunshot at Lamar and Prescott. Police officers in the area said they heard the same thing.

McKissack insisted they didn’t shoot at police, and police said they never fired at the truck.

Barnes pulled onto Lamar and other police cars, as well as Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies, joined the final leg of the chase.

“We were young boys. … We were scared and we didn’t know what to do. So we run,” McKissack said, insisting the pursuing police officers never got close to them.

“They never did get up to us where they could get up beside us or holler at us – none of that,” he said.

Ida B. Wells statue unveiling spotlights new issues

As the truck approached Stepherson Road on Lamar, with lots of blue lights behind them, McKissack said a fire truck had been pulled across Lamar.

“We were rolling fast. So when we pulled off, we pulled off to the left,” he said. “By us going so fast, we were going toward the ditch.”

The truck screeched to a stop short of going into the ditch, one wheel partially off the pavement.

For a few seconds, the three teenagers waited and Barnes was ordered out of the driver’s side on the road while McKissack and Hayes were ordered to get out of the passenger side by the ditch.

“The ditch was full of Shelby County officers – full of them,” McKissack said. “Next thing I know – bloop – in the head. After I got hit in the head about the first two or three times, I just buried my head into the ground.”

He could hear Hayes screaming nearby, although he was unsure exactly how close Hayes was to him.

“They kept beating me. I just looked back to see if I saw Elton. They started beating me and I balled up,” McKissack said. “These were grown men using all of the force they could.”

Eight law enforcement officers would later be charged, tried and acquitted in the beatings. A ninth officer was charged with dereliction of duty.

Out of the ditch, bleeding from a head wound that took numerous stitches to close and limping, McKissack was put in the back seat of a patrol car where Barnes was already waiting – slightly injured from having been beaten on the road.

“I said, ‘Where’s Elton at?’ ” McKissack remembered. “He said, ‘They done already took him away.’ ”

McKissack was taken to the old John Gaston Hospital, where he was put on a gurney in the emergency room. He noticed another figure lying in the same general area.

“They pulled the curtain around and said, ‘Don’t look there,’ ” McKissack remembered. “I was scared. I heard them walk away and as soon as I heard them walk away, I looked over to my left. I saw this dude laying on this bed. The top of his head was missing.”

At the time, McKissack said he didn’t recognize the person but later realized, “That was Elton.”

“But he was living then,” he said with the faintest memory of temporary hope.

New MPD dashboard to record excessive force complaints, reports

When Hayes’ mother, Gussie McGowan, finally saw him in the hospital, he was bloody and swollen “with a tooth hanging halfway out his head,” she later testified, according to published reports. “He didn’t have a chance,” she added. 

Overnight, police told reporters Hayes had died and Barnes and McKissack were injured in a car crash at the end of the chase.

When reporters saw the truck intact with no signs of any collision the next morning, it became apparent that what police said initially did not match the evidence.

Following Hayes’ funeral and the attempted police coverup, riots erupted in different parts of the city with Binghampton and Orange Mound seeing the worst of the violence and arson.

“The community was still very much unsettled regarding racial progress,” Memphis attorney Walter Bailey recalled. “The turmoil and unrest lingered.”

During the riots, several businesses burned and a 3-year-old toddler was struck by a police car as he crossed the street. Stax star Isaac Hayes, who was not related to Elton Hayes, met with Mayor Henry Loeb to explain that some of the political and police tactics were invoking violence instead of quelling it.

The entertainer was very concerned about a “cool it” strategy of talking to those in the streets and urging them to go home without addressing violence by police.

The fury eventually settled, but Bailey said “people never forgot about Elton Hayes and what police did to him.” 

New Shelby prosecution unit targeting police brutality off to fast start

Shouldering the blame

Barnes and McKissack testified at the trial.

McKissack testified that he didn’t see who was beating him or Hayes.

The fourth time during the interview 30 years later that I asked if he saw who beat him and who was in the ditch, McKissack said, “I wasn’t trying to look up. Those folks were coming down on me with blackjacks. I wasn’t trying to look up and see who it was.”

But he added that he and Barnes never believed anyone would be convicted of beating them or killing Hayes.

“It seemed to me like it was set up, the way they did it,” he said of the trial. “I believe they charged a few of them.”

Those accused claimed police leadership and prosecutors had chosen the eight defendants randomly.

Police leadership and investigators said officers on both departments as a group were not cooperating at any level.

Jay Hubbard, who later became the city’s first police director – a position created in the aftermath of Hayes’ death – said years later that he believed those charged were a mix of those who may have been responsible and those who weren’t.

Top cops: The 12 Memphis Police directors

“Instead of singling out the officers responsible, the entire department has had and will have to shoulder the blame,” Hubbard said after he left the position. “It’s not fair to the vast majority of the dedicated, responsible officers we have. But I don’t know what the police department could find when two other judicial bodies failed to affix the blame.”

Barnes and McKissack pulled their punches in the trial testimony later because win, lose or draw they were both going to go back to life in Orange Mound and a police presence.

But the first generation of the city’s Black elected leaders began demanding answers to questions about how Hayes really died.

That included the three Black Memphis City Council members – James Netters, J.O. Patterson Jr. and Fred Davis. They were on the same City Council that just a few years earlier had weathered the 1968 sanitation workers strike.

The group also included newly elected Shelby County Quarterly Court member Walter Bailey as well as then-state Rep. Harold Ford and Ford’s brother, John, who had upset Netters in the October 1971 city elections.

John Ford would take his seat on the council in January.

Hayes was buried in what was then a remote part of Shelby County. Two days of violence, including arson and looting, began that afternoon.

McKissack returned to classes at Melrose High School as the Orange Mound community repaired the physical damage and boarded up burnt buildings.

McKissack remembered John Ford in particular coming to his home and warning him.

“He said, ‘Whenever you go to school, make sure there’s a crowd with you.’

Ida B. Wells statue unveiling spotlights new issues

“So, every time I went somewhere there was always a gang of people,” McKissack said. “The nights when we went to football games, I had the whole neighborhood. I got threatened a lot – a whole lot. They didn’t get a chance to do it.”

Thirty years later, he remembered the advice and Ford favorably. Even walking with a large group of friends, McKissack said police patrol cars were still a frequent presence.

“They would ride by,” he said of police, gesturing with a pointed finger. “Saying, ‘We’re going to kill you.’”

Protesters gather at site of fatal gas station shooting

Newer faces, same concerns

Today, almost two decades after McKissack was interviewed, a sign on the gates of Galilee Gardens shows it has recently opened to visitors and is emerging from receivership.

The state of Tennessee took over the cemetery in 2014 and appointed a receiver after a new owner scrambled the map of burials with newer gravesites atop old ones and little if any paperwork.

The tidy and efficient office by the New Hope Garden from 20 years ago is gone. There is less of the rural feel to the area than there was even 20 years earlier but still a sizable wooded buffer between the cemetery and a new Tesla car dealership to the south.

When McKissack died in 2017 at the age of 60, it was 46 years to the month after his life changed and his friend was killed.

Lynching site’s a reminder of past victims

The cemetery records are online these days after years of untangling and reconstructing records from the different owners of Galilee. Those records now allow visitors to find Hayes’ gravesite without any flags – still in the garden of “Everlasting Life,” across the entrance from “Gethsemane” with “Paradise” in the distance and down the hill by the tree line.

Even with all that has changed in the 50 years since Hayes’ death, the storyline still resonates even if Hayes name isn’t known.

During the city’s George Floyd protests in 2020, Danielle Inez, chief of staff to county Mayor Lee Harris, wondered aloud about how the world might treat her son, Joseph, then 5 years old, as he grows older.

“Right now, he’s cute. But we’ll all blink and he’ll be 15,” she said.

“Black mothers wrestle with the fear that someone will take our sons from us on purpose,” said Inez, who wasn’t born yet when Hayes died at the age of 17. McKissack was 14. Barnes was 15.

“I assure you that George Floyd’s mother feared for his life every single day of his life,” she said. “Our sons were born guilty, guilty of being Black in America, guilty of being a target for the system that is designed to do exactly what it’s doing today.”

Recommendation for police force of 2,500 raises questions of coordination

‘It really wasn’t necessary’

There are no flowers in the vase on Hayes’ headstone 50 years later and it looks like there haven’t been for some time. His mother, who died in 2005, is buried next to him.

Anyone who knows where to look in Orange Mound, underneath all that has grown over in 50 years time, can perhaps see the faintest signs of the scars left by the trauma.

“It really wasn’t necessary for it to happen — not the way it did,” McKissack said in 2001 as he talked about questions from his son. That son was 6 years old at the time and overheard family members talking about the beating.

“He asked them, ‘They beat my daddy like that?’ He knows it happened,” McKissack said as the boy played in another room after giving the visiting reporter a close and thorough look up and down.

Staff reporter Yolanda Jones contributed to this story.