“We’re here today because George Floyd is not here,” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s first African American Attorney General, said on Wednesday afternoon. “He should be here. He should be alive, but he’s not.” Ellison then announced he was elevating the charge against fired Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin to second-degree murder. Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for close to nine minutes, killing him. For the last three of those minutes, Floyd, who was handcuffed, was unresponsive. Ellison also announced he was charging the other three officers involved with Floyd’s death with aiding and abetting murder. Communities of color, already reeling from the disproportionate impacts they are suffering from the coronavirus, exploded in mass protest. George Floyd’s murder, in the crucible of the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and police brutality, sparked a diverse rebellion against the scourge of systemic racism.
Many the world over have seen the video of George Floyd’s murder. Little, though, is known about the life of this 46-year-old African American man. George Floyd will be celebrated with memorial services this week and a funeral in Houston on Tuesday.
George Perry Floyd, a native of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was raised in Houston’s historically black Third Ward. He had two adult children, Connie and Quincy Mason, and a 6-year-old daughter, Gianna. He moved from Houston to Minneapolis several ... Read More →
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