Tina Knowles Recalls Night Her Brother Was Beaten by Police: How 'It Changed My Family Forever' (Exclusive)

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24-04-2025

Growing up in Galveston, Texas amid segregation and overt racism, Tina Knowles has seen some heartbreaking things.
In new memoir Matriarch, Beyoncé and Solange's mom, 71, opens up about the beautiful highs and dark lows of her Southern childhood, and in this week's World's Most Beautiful issue she tells PEOPLE that one incident in particular had lifelong effects on her family.
Born Celestine Beyoncé in Galveston, Texas to Agnes, a skilled seamstress and homemaker, and Lumis, a longshoreman, Knowles wasn't always as poised and put together as she is today. On the contrary, 'I was always in trouble. That's why they called me Bad Ass Tenie B, which was not a term of endearment back then. My mother would always say, 'Tenie, something bad is going to happen because your mouth is just too smart.''
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Attending Catholic grade school as a kid, 'the nuns told me that they would break my spirit,' she says recalling instances of traumatic corporal punishment. 'I decided at 5 years old that they weren't. I became a warrior.'
As a little Black girl, the youngest of five siblings growing up amid segregation in the South, she was going to need that fighting spirit. Matriarch shares graphic details of the racial profiling and injustices that plagued her early years and otherwise happy family. But one ordeal, the beating of her older brother Lumis "Skip" Joseph Beyoncé by police in 1967, 'changed my family forever,' she says.
In the book she writes that Skip — who earned his nickname as a kid for always skipping — was a teen returning home from a date one night in a taxi that accidentally dropped him off at the wrong address. The neighbor who saw a man on their porch called the police, but when they arrived and the neighbor recognized Skip she tried to explain that "he's a good boy," Knowles writers.
But it was too late. The officers aggressively arrested him and took him away as his family, who'd been alerted by the neighbor and arrived on the scene, looked on in horror. "'Please don't let them kill my son.' She said it over and over, a sobbing prayer," Knowles writes of her mother's pleas to the one Black officer who was at the scene.
The next day the family was called down to the station to pick up Skip. He was covered in blood having been beaten. 'They could have killed him... we thought he was dead," says Knowles now looking back on the incident. "The constant fear and anxiety my parents had was all from that experience.'
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After that night, "We were harassed by the police for years, and, it kept you, like, on guard all the time," says Knowles who once was arrested by the same officer who'd attacked her brother. "My mother could never really relax." Despite it all, she would resist, taking part in Civil Rights protests to help better conditions for Black people in Galveston.
As she looks over the ups and downs of her life, Knowles says, "the reason why I am the person that I am and I don't have, you know, bitterness and anger and I can still have so much joy in life and love freely is because of my family."
She continues, "My parents weren't the parents that said, oh, you could be anything you want to be. I never heard that. I heard get you a good government job and, you know, settle for less, basically. But on the other side of it, was that your family is everything. As long as you've got your family, as long as you've got God first, life is amazing."
Matriarch is available now, wherever books are sold.
For more on Tina Knowles' life and loves pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, available on newsstands everywhere Friday.
Read the original article on People