In acknowledgement of Black History Month, The Royal Gazette continues the publication of stories throughout February on African-American and global African people, events and institutions, and their contributions in history. Here California State University History and Africana Studies professor MALIK SIMBA briefly examines the life and death of George Floyd and how the latter transformed the struggle for racial justice in and beyond the United States

George Floyd died on Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, on a Minneapolis, Minnesota, street. He was suffocated to death by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who calmly held his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes [there are other reports of the duration being 8min 46sec and 9min 30sec]. Video of the incident quickly went viral, sparking anger, outrage and indignation on a global scale. Except for the videotaping of the incident, George Floyd’s death might have gone unnoticed. It did not, and the world has changed because of it.

At 8.08pm on Memorial Day, Minneapolis police officers Thomas K. Lane and J. Alexander Keung responded to a call from the Cup Food Store on the corner of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue that Floyd was allegedly attempting to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. In a later interview, owner Mike Abumayyaleh stated that Floyd was a regular and pleasant customer, and may not have realised that the bill was counterfeit.

Officers Lane and Keung found Floyd, 46, from St Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb, in the driver’s seat of a nearby car with a passenger, Maurice Hall. Lane pointed his gun at Floyd and then reholstered it when Floyd placed his hands on the steering wheel. He ordered Floyd out of the car and handcuffed him. At 8.14pm, Lane (White) and Keung (Black) walked Floyd to their police vehicle and tried to put him inside. Floyd resisted, telling the officers: “I am claustrophobic.”

At that point, Minneapolis Police Officers Derek Chauvin (White) and Tou Thao (Hmong Asian-American) arrived at the scene in a separate police vehicle. All four officers tried unsuccessfully to get Floyd in the back seat of the first vehicle. At 8.19pm, Chauvin pulled Floyd out of the vehicle and forced him face down on the ground while still handcuffed. Keung put pressure on Floyd’s back while Lane restrained his legs and Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s neck. Thao retrieved a restraint from the police vehicle to control Floyd, but the officers opted not to use it.

Thao then turned his attention to several bystanders who had gathered to watch the incident, including some who were videotaping it on their mobile phones. He acted as a barrier between bystanders and Chauvin and the powerless Floyd to prevent any interference. As Floyd murmured: “I can’t breathe”, bystanders began to repeat these words to the officers, pleading for mercy for the man clearly in distress

Despite protests from the bystanders, Floyd’s own words that he could not breathe, his cry for his deceased mother, his statement “I’m about to die,” and Officer Lane’s suggestion that Floyd be turned over, Chauvin, the senior officer on the scene, refused to remove his knee, saying was Floyd was “staying put where we got him”. As Chauvin suffocated George Floyd, he casually looked at the mobile phone cameras recording him, placed his left hand in his pocket, and continued to apply deadly pressure until well after Floyd had stopped breathing. Floyd was already dead when Chauvin finally removed his knee. Bystanders videotaping the entire eight minutes ensured, however, that the world would view the last minutes of Floyd’s life.

George Floyd was born on October 14, 1973, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His parents, George Perry Floyd and Lacenia Jones, had four other children. The parents separated when George was a young child, and Lacenia Jones moved to Houston, Texas, where she raised her children in a public-housing complex called “The Bricks”, located in the poorest section of Houston’s Third Ward. Floyd attended Jack Yates High School, graduating in 1993. During his high school years, he was an accomplished basketball and football player, a member of the Yates football team that competed for the Texas state football championship in 1992.

Standing at 6ft 4in, Floyd received a football scholarship in 1993 to attend South Florida Community College in Avon Park, Florida, before he transferred to Texas A&M University-Kingsville in 1995 and where he remained through part of the 1997 school year. He interacted with players on the football team, but his name does not appear on the team roster.

Twenty-two-year-old George Floyd’s life began to unravel when he returned to Houston from Kingsville. He, like many young Black men who had played college sport but were not talented enough for professional sports teams, tried his hand at becoming a rapper, adopting the name “Big Floyd”. He was also a member of the hip-hop group Screwed-up Clicks. Unfortunately, Floyd’s life spiralled out of control, and between 1997 and 2005, he spent part of these years behind bars for theft, criminal trespass, and possession of a controlled substance. In 2007 he and others committed an armed home invasion and threatened the pregnant homeowner. For this Houston crime, he was sentenced in 2009 to five years in state prison. He was paroled in 2013.

After his release, Floyd returned to his old neighbourhood and joined Resurrection Houston, a Christian ministry which operated outreach programs in the Third Ward. Floyd delivered meals and ministered to impoverished Third Ward residents. His continuing interest in music led him to local rapper Trae Tha Truth (Frazier Othel Thompson III), who had created his own caregiving outreach programme called the Angel by Nature Foundation, which Floyd joined. In 2013, tragedy struck when Floyd’s mother, Lacenia Jones, had a stroke. While continuing his work with Angel by Nature, Floyd was able to tend to his ailing mother until she recovered. She died in 2018.

In 2014, Floyd moved to Minneapolis to pursue new opportunities. He worked in various jobs, including truck driver and nightclub bouncer. In an ironic twist of fate, in 2020, Floyd began working as a bouncer at El Nuevo Rodeo Club, the nightclub where his eventual murderer, Derek Chauvin, also moonlighted as a security guard. Meanwhile, in 2017, Floyd continued his self-rehabilitation by participating in the filming of a short video on preventing gun violence.

George Floyd’s murder on Memorial Day 2020 added to the long list of deaths at the hands of police and vigilante violence against unarmed Black women and men. Since the beginning of the 21st century, hundreds have been killed. Many of the names are familiar: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner. The deaths occurred in every corner of the United States. In 2020, we also saw the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks among many others. Each of these deaths and those of other victims led to protests and, in some instances, to riots/urban uprisings in specific cities.

The death of George Floyd was far greater in magnitude and impact. That murder was especially shocking because a videotape of the incident showed a policeman’s knee on Floyd’s neck as he cried out “I can’t breathe” numerous times before he died. The publicly humiliating nature of his death struck a visceral nerve among African-Americans, with the policeman’s knee symbolically representing the knee on the necks of all Black people. For the first time, many non-Black people also recognised the racial symbolism as reflecting the centuries-long and continuing Black oppression in the United States.

Floyd’s murder almost immediately generated protests that have continued in some cities into September 2020. It led to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement being supported, according to national polls, by the majority of Americans for the first time in the organisation’s seven-year history. By conservative estimates, these protests have involved more than 26 million Americans in 2,000 cities and towns in every state in the United States, making these the largest protests around one issue in the history of the nation. By the end of June alone, one month into the protests, 14,000 people had been arrested.

Similar protests have taken place in more than 60 nations on every continent except Antarctica despite the global Covid-19 pandemic. Protesters have marched in Istanbul, Turkey; Nairobi, Kenya; Tel Aviv, Israel; Toronto, Canada; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Auckland, New Zealand. [More than 7,000 attended the march in Hamilton, Bermuda.]

The overseas protests have often tied the Floyd murder to similar violence in local communities. In Rio’s impoverished favelas, thousands marched not only for Floyd but also for the hundreds of police killings in their communities. In Paris, the police killing of a Parisian-Arab, Adama Traoe, while in police custody, led thousands to march. Traoe’s sister, Assa, spoke at one rally and said: “What is happening in the United States is happening in France. Our brothers are dying.”

Protesters in Sydney, Australia, combined their outrage over Floyd’s death with the 2015 death of an Aboriginal man, David Dugay, who was handcuffed by police, laid upon the sidewalk, and suffocated. Dugay was heard to say the now infamous words, “I can’t breathe, please let me up, I can’t breathe.”

Japan entered the George Floyd protest campaign on August 27, 2020 when its No 1 female tennis player, Naomi Osaka, whose father is Haitian and mother is Japanese, refused to play in a semi-final of the Western & Southern Open. The directors of the tournament postponed all matches for that day; and when they resumed, Osaka wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt while winning her semi-final match. Osaka continued her support for the Black Lives Matter movement when she, on August 31, 2020, arrived at her first match at the US Open wearing a Covid-19 black mask with “Breonna Taylor” printed in white lettering.

Professional sports leagues, including the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing all conducted at least a one-day pause in their play to honour the memory of George Floyd. Nascar’s only Black driver, Bubba Wallace, adorned his iconic No 43 car with Black Lives Matter etched in bold black. Black Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton protested in London and the Women’s National Basketball Association players also protested.

The NBA, during the 2020 play-offs, adorned its “bubble” court in the quarantined Orlando play-off arena with a huge Black Lives Matter logo, and almost all players had logos on their jerseys such as “Freedom”, “Equality”, “Justice”, “Say Her Name”, “Vote” or simply “Black Lives Matter”. Jamal Murray, a Denver Nuggets star, had a picture of Breonna Taylor on his left basketball shoe and on the right, a picture of George Floyd. A number of the European NBA players also had Black Lives Matter logos in their native languages. Slovenian player Luka Doncic had Enakopravnost on his jersey, which in his language means equality.

On September 1, 2020, even in politically conservative Alabama, the University of Alabama’s head coach, Nick Saban, led his players, with arms locked, on a Black Lives Matter march through the campus. The players released a statement that said: “All lives can’t matter until Black lives matter.”

Coach Saban, standing in the spot where Alabama governor George Wallace in 1963 said “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever,” while trying unsuccessfully to keep Black students out of the institution, uttered different words in 2020: “We are a team, Black, White, Brown. Together, we are a family. We are brothers who represent ourselves, our families, our home towns, our university and our country.”

The magnitude of these domestic and overseas protests prompted police reforms at the local, state, national levels. The most significant piece of legislative reform came in June 2020 when US congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents George Floyd’s old Houston neighbourhood in Congress, introduced the George Floyd Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act, which makes it illegal for police to use deadly chokeholds and modifies the legal protection for police called “qualified immunity”.

Millions of people throughout the world are taking a symbolic knee for George Floyd by marching in unity, chanting “No Justice, No Peace.” His murder has led many voices, once silent on police misconduct, to speak or to act with their chequebooks. Basketball superstar and now Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan has pledged $100 million to social-justice organisations and rapper Nick Cannon produced a George Floyd I Can’t Breathe video, followed by a video from the rapper Common along with singer John Legend.

Inspired by the George Floyd mural painted on the wall of Cup Foods in Minneapolis, just above the spot where Floyd was killed, similar mural tributes emerged in cities across the United States and in European cities including the following capitals: Paris, France; Berlin, Germany; London, England; Madrid, Spain; Dublin, Ireland; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Athens, Greece.

Floyd’s murder has generated further discussion ranging from various media outlets to schools and universities, churches, mosques and synagogues as well as among city councils and state legislatures regarding broader issues of racial and social justice such as ending poverty, providing reparations, removing Confederate statues, enacting immigration reform, addressing the airing of racist films such as Gone with the Wind, and renaming military bases from Confederate heroes to civil rights heroes and, of course, reforming criminal justice and restructuring how police funding will be allocated.

While these national and international events have played out, the indictment of Officer Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers has proceeded slowly. Initially, the Hennepin County District Attorney’s Office charged Chauvin with third-degree manslaughter. However, after a public outcry about this charge being too lenient, Minnesota’s Attorney-General, Keith Ellison, who in 2018 became the first African-American to be elected to that post in his state, upgraded Chauvin’s indictment to second-degree murder. Other officers on the scene, J. Alexander Keung, Thomas K. Lane and Tou Thao, were also charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. All four officers were fired. As the trial of these officers is yet to take place, the world waits to see if Ellison’s publicly stated goal to get “justice for George Floyd” and “obtain a conviction” will occur.

On June 8, 2020, George Floyd was buried next to his mother in Pearland, Texas. His death has already altered what were previously considered unshakeable institutions in US society. Only the passage of time will tell whether these changes will lead to significant and permanent racial justice.

• Simba, M. (2020, September 08) Eight Minutes in May: How George Floyd’s Death Shook the World. Retrieved from https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/eight-minutes-in-may-how-george-floyds-death-shook-the-world/