George Floyd

George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020, and the video of it produced the largest protests in American history. He grew up in the Third Ward of Houston, was a school athlete, worked security and drove trucks, served a prison sentence, and moved to Minnesota in 2014 to start again, working as a bouncer until the pandemic closed the bar. He was arrested outside a shop over a suspected counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes while he was prone and handcuffed, saying that he could not breathe, calling for his mother, and then falling silent, while three other officers stood by and bystanders pleaded and filmed. The footage was recorded by a seventeen-year-old, Darnella Frazier, who later received a Pulitzer citation for it. Protests followed in some two thousand American towns and in dozens of countries, at a scale estimated between fifteen and twenty-six million participants in the United States alone. Chauvin was convicted of murder in 2021 and sentenced to twenty-two and a half years, and the three other officers were convicted of federal civil rights offences. The legislative response was far smaller than the protests, and the federal bill named after him has not passed. The Minneapolis department was later found by the state to have engaged in a pattern of race discrimination, and a federal investigation reached the same conclusion. The city paid his family twenty-seven million dollars, the largest such settlement in American history at the time. What the protests changed and what they did not is argued about continuously, which is itself part of the record.

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