Say Her Name: Tessa Majors

Huge and well-rendered murals of George Floyd can now be found in such places as Houston, Texas; Gaza, Palestine; Nairobi, Kenya; Idlib, Syria; Manchester, England; Karachi, Pakistan; and Belfast, Northern Ireland. In more than one, he is drawn with angels’ wings. Floyd, who was black, died unjustly in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, but he was no angel.

A more outrageous killing took place in New York City six months earlier, and—to my knowledge—no murals have been painted to commemorate the victim, a White college student named Tessa Rane Majors. I will endeavor to summarize her life and sad death in these pages.

Born in Charlottesville, Virginia on May 11, 2001, she had a younger brother and parents named Inman and Christy. Her father, a teacher of creative writing at James Madison University, hailed from Knoxville, Tennessee. The Majors surname and Knoxville might cause sports fans to sit up and take notice. Yes, she was the great-niece of former University of Tennessee football star and coach Johnny Majors.

She rode horses, ran cross-country, danced, played bass guitar, composed songs, once dyed her blond hair green, volunteered in political campaigns and wrote articles for a C-ville newspaper. By all accounts, she was an excellent student. The Barnard College class of 2023 had an 11.3% acceptance rate, the lowest (“low” here means very challenging) among American women’s schools. Its 4-acre campus sits directly across from Columbia University in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. Majors and her parents surely discussed the many issues involved in picking this college. Apart from the academics and the cultural opportunities of living in Gotham, they must have considered personal safety. There have been town-and-gown conflicts (Columbia and Barnard students on one hand and locals on the other) since the 1930s. The area has seen its share of decline, so-called urban renewal and gentrification.

In 2010, according to the United States census, Morningside Heights was 46% White, 23% Hispanic, 13% black, 13% Asian and the rest “other.” Majors, as indicated above, was White, and the three young men who so cruelly took her life are black. Two geographical markers of uptown Manhattan are Barnard and Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater on 125th Street. It takes just 10 minutes to get from one to the other.

Majors’ choice for higher education had tragic consequences. Attending the hometown University of Virginia, the University of Tennessee or JMU where her father still teaches all offered their own advantages. But she was independent and wanted to test her wings, and where better to do that than in NYC? Majors may have scoffed at any suggestion of danger. But then again, had Barnard informed current and prospective students and their families about a recent upsurge in violent crime in Morningside Heights (as stipulated by federal law), they might well have demurred. At any rate, her parents and brother took Majors north in late August and got her situated in a campus dormitory. About 100 days later, they would be bringing her back to Virginia in an urn.

Before going any further, I must say that—like George Floyd—Majors was not an angel. Pretty young Tessa apparently liked to smoke marijuana. She went to Morningside Park on the cold evening of December 11, 2019 to buy a bag. (This park had a truly frightening reputation in the 1980s and 1990s with muggings, murders and open-air sex all too common. In spite of improvements since then, it can still be dicey at night.) So she did before heading back to campus. Majors could not have known that three black predators named Zyairr Davis (13), Luchiano Lewis (14) and Rashaun Weaver (14) had agreed to leave their nearby housing project and “rob some people.” They spotted her and evidently concluded that a young White female unaccompanied by a friend(s) would be a soft target.

Majors had begun to walk up a set of stairs between the park and Columbia when she encountered Davis, Lewis and Weaver. They uttered a couple of ghetto put-downs before demanding that she empty her pockets. No weakling, she refused and fought them. As Davis and Lewis grabbed her, Weaver sought to snatch her smart phone. Enraged when she bit his finger, he used the knife he had brought to stab and slash her repeatedly. During this traumatic event, Majors screamed, “Help me! I’m being robbed!”

She fell, and they took her money, phone and dope, and ran. Majors managed to stagger up the stairs, bleeding all the way. (A barbaric and cynical quote issued by one purveyor of black-on-White crime is “White girl bleed a lot.”) Majors collapsed outside the guard house. She might have survived, but the man was doing his rounds. When he returned 30 minutes later and called 911, she was whisked to nearby Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital and pronounced dead. The New York City medical examiner attributed it to multiple stab wounds to her torso, one of which had pierced her heart.

Feeling only scorn for these three black killers, I choose not to go into detail about the legal proceedings against them other than to say a combination of DNA, surveillance tapes and confessions proved them guilty of robbery and second-degree murder. Due to their age, they all got 18 months in juvenile detention—light punishment indeed. I draw your attention to the fact that Weaver’s father is incarcerated and his mother, Katima Minton, has a stabbing on her rap sheet. Like mother, like son!

This whole story makes my blood boil. Tessa Majors had lived just 18 years when Davis, Lewis and Weaver robbed and killed her. As usual, the media did all it could to hide or downplay the race of the criminals. To come out and state that three black guys murdered a White college student is improper and insulting to the dignity of the black community, right? Some would posit that the “incident” was not racial at all, to which I say get real. Within the last five years, I have read of black men murdering White female students at the University of Texas (my alma mater), Texas A&M University, the University of Utah and the University of North Carolina. The bigger picture is that black males between the ages of 13 and 40 comprise just 3% of the population in the USA, but they commit 57% of violent crimes. The death of Majors rather obviously fits in this brutal context.

Was Barnard’s failure to notify students and their families about rising crime in Morningside Heights a mere oversight? Possible, but no less likely was that an unpleasant reality was simply kept muted. What I find so very ironic is that if Majors had lived, she probably would have joined in some of the Only Black Lives Matter marches in New York after the death of Floyd.

It seems that black people in the USA have ratcheted up their level of self-righteousness since May 25, reveling in their victimhood. And in so doing, they have harped on White racism, White privilege, White guilt and White shame. It’s a challenge not to respond in kind. After all, in the present case three black guys robbed and murdered one of my people, and we did not riot. When it comes to interracial violent crimes, we are far more often the victims than the victimizers. I know that some black people freely admit that there are unsavory aspects to their culture; not only does this retard black social and economic progress, it hurts innocent White people like Tessa Majors.

A candlelight vigil was held for the young woman at the main entrance of Barnard College soon after Davis, Lewis and Weaver committed their senseless crime. And guess what? Quite a few of the people there were black. They, too, were horrified by what had happened and wanted justice for her. Two of them were holding signs with her name, albeit misspelled. This gives me a measure of hope for the future.