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Protesters in the streets have shouted, “Say your name!” for almost a year. Last week a prosecutor solemnly pronounced it in a Minneapolis courtroom.
“His name was George Perry Floyd Jr.”
An ordinary man, Floyd, 46, was a father, son and brother, the murder of the murder under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer made him a symbol of the vulnerability of northern blacks -Americans under the crushing pressure of racism.
A video of the spectator of the incident ignited protests around the world. Millions of people watched the live broadcast of Derek Chauvin’s trial. On Tuesday, after deliberating for 10 hours, a jury found Chauvin guilty of murder.
“We watched as Derek Chauvin made the 9:29-minute decision to steal George Floyd’s life,” says Melina Abdullah, one of the co-founders of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter. According to her, the global protests following her assassination embodied a collective refusal to accept her life as a single use.
Floyd grew up in Houston, Texas, liked banana and mayonnaise sandwiches and was nicknamed “Big Floyd” for his height. He lost his job during the pandemic and fought opioid addiction.
Now it is also the “Icon of a revolution”, the title of the nearly four-foot-tall painting of his face by Peyton artist Scott Russell at the intersection where he was killed. Visitors stack flowers outside the Cup Foods convenience store, where Floyd allegedly used a fake $ 20 bill, prompting a police call, and a nearby statue with a clenched fist thrown into the sky. A human drawing on the street is drawn with angel wings.
Floyd is a person, says Duane T Loynes Sr., a professor of urban and African studies at Rhodes College, and “a symbol for the United States to see what people mean when we talk about Black Lives Matter. . . You have this insensitive system that doesn’t really interest you [black people] flourishing, who doesn’t really care about his life. ”
He was born in 1973 to George Floyd Sr. and Larcenia “Cissy” Jones Floyd, one of five brothers. He was young when the family moved to Cuney Homes, a housing project in the Third Ward, a historically black neighborhood in Houston.
He always maintained a close bond with his mother, his younger brother Philonise Floyd testified during the trial. “He was a big mom boy,” she said. “He showed us how to treat our mother and how to respect our mother.”
“Perry,” as his family called him, made sure his siblings had clothes and snacks for school, Philonise Floyd said. The brothers played Nintendo video games together Double watering i Bol Tecmo. (George usually won.) The house was full of marks on the wall where he had measured his height, which would eventually exceed six feet.
“He wanted to be taller all the time because he loved sports,” Philonise 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. He left after two years and attended Texas A&M University in Kingsville, but left without graduating to return to Houston.
He was arrested several times on drug charges and robbery between 1997 and 2005, reported the Associated Press. In 2007 he was charged with armed robbery, pleaded guilty two years later and sentenced to five years in prison.
When he was released, he became associated with Resurrection Houston, a new church that was being set up in his old neighborhood. He introduced the pastor to the residents, who he said Houston television station KHOU said that “much of my ministry that I was able to do at Cuney Homes was for George Floyd.”
But Floyd left for Minneapolis in 2014 in search of work to help support his daughter, born a year earlier, and a fresh start. He worked as a security guard in the Salvation Army, where a co-worker, Michelle Seals, remembered him as a sweet character. He later drove trucks and was a Conga Latin Bistro porter, but lost his job when the Covid-19 closed bars and restaurants.
Mary Ginns, a friend of the institute, he told NPR last year, Floyd once told him he would “change the world.”
“We said, ‘We know you are,'” he said. “You’ll be in the NBA… But God put something in to see it differently. that’s exactly what he did. This world has changed. “
Abdullah says that “George Floyd’s name will always evoke a time when the world opened up and some people used it as a time to create change.”
How much will change is an unanswered question. Recently, protesters have taken to the streets again to protest the killings of Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo and Ma’Khia Bryant, three names of dozens of people killed by police across the country during the three-week statement. President Joe Biden urges lawmakers to consider George Floyd’s Police Justice Act, which would ban certain police restraint techniques and try to improve police training.
But while Floyd is recognized as a symbol, remembering his humanity is important, says Anthony Pinn, a professor of religion at Rice University in Houston. “That’s partly the importance of the request to‘ say your name, ’” he says. “Talk about his humanity, remind us that it’s more than what happened to him.”
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