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Street protesters shouted “Say his name!” for almost a year. Last week a prosecutor said solemnly in Minneapolis court.
“His Name Was George Perry Floyd Jr.”
46-year-old Floyd was an ordinary man whose father, son and brother. The black American who had a serious murder under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman became a symbol of his vulnerability to the rotating pressure of racism.
A video of the incident sparked protests around the world. Millions across the country watched a live replay of Derek Chauvin’s trial. On Tuesday, after 10 hours of deliberation, a jury found Chauvin guilty of murder.
“We saw Derek Chauvin make a 9:29 minute decision to steal George Floyd’s life,” says Melina Abdullah, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter section in Los Angeles. He says global protests over his murder have led to a collective rejection that could have thrown his life.
Floyd grew up in Houston, Texas, liked banana and mayonnaise sandwiches and was nicknamed “Big Floyd” because of his height. He lost his job in the pandemic and struggled with opioid addiction.
It’s the same now “Icon of the Revolution”, the artist Peyton Scott Russell, who sits at the intersection of the murdered man, is the title of a painting almost four feet high on his face. As visitors pile flowers outside the Cup Foods convenience store, Floyd allegedly used fake $ 20 bills, calling police, and a statue of a clenched fist entering the sky. A human outline on the street is drawn with angel wings.
Floyd is an individual, says Duane T Loynes Sr., a professor of urban and African studies at Rhodes College, and “It’s a symbol for America when people talk about what Black Lives Matter means. . . You have this awful system that doesn’t really matter [black people] flourishing, they don’t really care about their lives. ”
Born in 1973, George Floyd Sr. and Larcenia “Cissy” Jones Floyd, one of five siblings. He was young when the family moved to Cuney Homes, a housing project in Third Ward, a historic black neighborhood in Houston.
She always had a close bond with her mother, as her younger brother Philonise Floyd testified during the trial. “He was a great mother boy,” she said. “She showed us how to treat our mother and respect our mother.”
“Perry,” as his family called him, made sure his siblings had school clothes and snacks, Philonise Floyd said. The brothers played alongside Nintendo video games Double drip and Tecmo ship. (George usually won.) The house was full of marks on the wall that measured its height, which would eventually reach more than six feet.
“He wanted to be taller all the time because he loved the sport,” Philonis said.
Floyd played basketball and football in high school and won a scholarship to attend a community college now known as South Florida State College. After two years, he went to Texas A&M University in Kingsville, but left without graduating to return to Houston.
He was arrested several times for drug and robbery between 1997 and 2005, As reported by the Associated Press. In 2007, he was charged with armed robbery, convicted two years later and sentenced to five years in prison.
When he was released, he took part in Resurrection Houston, with a new church located in his old neighborhood. He introduced the neighbors to the pastor, who tell Houston TV’s KHOU was “I did a lot of my ministry at Cuney Homes because George Floyd.”
Floyd moved to Minneapolis in 2014 looking for work to help his daughter, who was born a year earlier, and start a new home. She worked as a security guard in the Salvation Army, where a colleague Michelle Seals recalled that she was sweet. He later drove trucks and was a Conga Latin Bistro salesman, but lost his job when Covid-19 closed its bars and restaurants.
Mary Ginns, a friend of the institute, he told NPR last year Floyd once told him he was going to “change the world”.
“We know it,” he said. “You’ll be in the NBA. . . But God put something in Himself to see it in a different way. He probably didn’t know what he was saying then, but he did just that. It has changed this world. “
According to Abdullah, “George Floyden’s name will create a moment when the world opened up and used moments as moments to create change.”
It is an unanswered question of how much will change. Recently, protesters took to the streets again to protest the killings of Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo and Ma’Khia Bryant – three names among dozens of people killed by police across the country in the three weeks they have testified. President Joe Biden urges lawmakers to consider the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would ban certain police restraint techniques and seek to improve police training.
Although Floyd is recognized as a symbol, it is important to remember his humanity, says Anthony Pinn, a professor of religion at Rice University in Houston. “This is, in part, the importance of the request,” he says. “To talk about his humanity, to remind him that it’s something more than what happened to him.”
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