Tuskegee University head coach Benjy Taylor is set to announce a lawsuit against Morehouse College and two on-campus police officers. It stems from a bizarre incident after a college basketball game back in January.
He was walked out of the gym in handcuffs.
The college basketball coach will be represented by two prominent civil rights attorneys. Full details of the legal filing will be announced on Friday morning.
What happened to Benjy Taylor at Morehouse?
Taylor recently concluded his fifth season as the head coach of the Golden Tigers. Tuskegee University is a private HBCU on the west side of Alabama.
Its basketball team traveled to Morehouse College in Atlanta on Jan. 31.
The home team ultimately defeated the visitors by a final score of 77-69. Players from both teams met near the scorer’s table for the customary postgame handshake line.
As Tuskegee went down the line, a group of Morehouse football players — who were extremely vocal throughout the entire game — got behind Benjy Taylor. They tried to join in on the postgame handshakes and continued to heckle his team in defeat.
Benjy Taylor said that a group of football players from Morehead had been vocal all game from their seats next to the Tuskegee bench.
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) February 1, 2026
He went to the end of the handshake line after the game and some of the football players were behind him the line.
He tried to diffuse the… https://t.co/sVyPEZGGnS pic.twitter.com/hSAPgQTTHV
When Taylor asked a nearby police officer for help, the officer went in a very different direction. Instead of enforcing conference protocols and removing the football players from the court, he put the visiting head coach in handcuffs and walked him out of the building.
Both Taylor and Tuskegee athletic director Reginald Ruffin were just as confused as they were outraged by what happened. There are conference-mandated security protocols in place to avoid this kind of hostile interaction, which are used at all levels across member institutions.
Morehouse was in direct violation of the protocols.
Taylor asked the police officer to help deescalate the situation and remove the football players from the playing surface per conference rules. The officer chose instead to label the head coach as the aggressor and make a spectacle. He put him in handcuffs and perp walked him out of the gym in a parade of hubris.
The Tuskegee basketball coach is going to file a lawsuit.
Multiple videos of the incident provide a better account of how it all went down in real time. The videos appear to discredit the officer’s account of what happened. They show that Benjy Taylor was not hostile. He was simply asking for assistance.
The 58-year-old is prepared to fight back.
Coach Taylor will be represented by renowned national civil rights attorneys Harry Daniels and John Burris, and Gerald Griggs and Gregory Reynold Williams. They are big names!
Daniels has worked with clients like William McNeil Jr., Bishop William Barber and Andrew Brown Jr. Burris has worked with Rodney King, Tupac Shakur and the family of Oscar Grant. Griggs is the former president of the NAACP in Georgia. Williams has deep ties to college basketball.
The head coach will join his attorneys at 11:00 a.m. EST on Friday morning to “announce the filing of a lawsuit against Morehouse as well as campus police officers.” The news conference will feature remarks from both Taylor and his attorneys.