“A riot is the language of the unheard.” This is how Martin Luther King, Jr., explained matters to Mike Wallace, of CBS News, in 1966.
That language is now being heard across the United States with an uprising that began in Minneapolis and has spread to dozens of American cities, where there have been hundreds of arrests, curfews declared, National Guard troops summoned. The proximate cause is the video images of yet another black man killed by an officer of the law, the death of George Perry Floyd outside Cup Foods, on Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue South. Floyd joins Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice—a lineage that goes back decades in the American story.
But before he was a horrific video image, an entry in the history of injustice, George Floyd was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and came to Houston with his mother when he was very young. He was raised in the Cuney Homes, a housing project in the Third Ward, a historically black neighborhood. In 1981-82, a woman named Waynel Sexton was Floyd’s second-grade teacher, at Frederick Douglass Elementary School. After hearing of Floyd’s death, Sexton posted on Facebook a facsimile of her pupil’s composition for Black History Month: “When I grow up, I want to be a Supreme Court Judge,” Floyd wrote. “When people say, Your honor, he did rob the bank, I will say, Be seated. And if he doesn’t, I will tell the guard to take him out. Then I will beat my hammer on the desk. Then everybody will be quiet.”
Sexton told me that she was saddened and “appalled” when she saw the video of her former pupil’s death. “I went right upstairs and put my hands on that paper of his. I always keep some memento of my students. I remember I always told the children during Black History Month, ‘Well, we have studied all these famous people. What kind of famous person will you be in the future?’ I remember that he was so influenced by our lesson on Thurgood Marshall.” Under the image of Floyd’s composition, Sexton wrote, “How could his dream have turned into the nightmare of being murdered by a police officer? It just breaks my heart.”
At Jack Yates Senior High School (named for a clergyman and a former slave), Floyd grew to his full height, six feet seven, and was a fine basketball and football player. Some star athletes at Yates have ended up in the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. Floyd attended South Florida Community College, where he hoped to play basketball. But he gave up community college after a year, tried Texas A. & M. University, in Kingsville, and finally returned home to Houston, where he became active on the local hip-hop scene. In the mid-nineties, performing as Big Floyd, he recorded “Sittin’ on Top of the World” at the home studio of Robert Earl Davis, Jr., better known as DJ Screw, a master of the slowed-down, mellow “chopped and screwed” technique of remixing.
With time, Floyd “got into trouble,” his friend Meshah Hawkins told Michael Hall, a writer for Texas Monthly. “He fell into the things a lot of the guys in the neighborhood were doing.” There were arrests for theft and drug possession. In 2009, Floyd pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and was incarcerated for the next four years at the Diboll Unit, a private state prison in East Texas. After being paroled in 2013, he worked at a church called Resurrection Houston, assisting people in the housing project where he’d grown up. The next year, Floyd moved to Minneapolis and became a security guard at a club and restaurant called Conga Latin Bistro, where he was known as friendly and hard-working. However, with the onset of the pandemic and the general shutdown of bars and restaurants, Floyd, like millions of other Americans, found himself out of work.
On May 25th, he was arrested, accused of trying to pass a fake twenty-dollar bill to a clerk at Cup Foods. Not long after encountering officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, he was face-down on the street; a white police officer named Derek Chauvin dug his knee into his neck and kept it there while three other officers stood guard. In videos taken by onlookers, Floyd begs for mercy. He calls out for his dead mother: “Mama, I’m through!” He tries to get the attention of bystanders, saying, “They’re killing me, man.” He says, “I can’t breathe!” This was the repeated plea, six years ago, of Eric Garner, a black man arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on the street and put in a chokehold by police.
The videos are impossible to watch without revulsion and anger. First, there is the sheer heedlessness of the act. Chauvin, who has been charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, kept his knee and weight on Foley’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, nearly three minutes past the point when he became utterly unresponsive, according to the criminal complaint. “He’s a human being!” one of the bystanders says, but Chauvin does not relent. What also makes the video so devastating is its familiarity, the way it rhymes, in its stark cruelty, with countless acts of racist violence through the years and decades.
Now, in the wake of several days and nights of protest across the country, there are many voices calling for calm. One such call came from Courtney Ross, Floyd’s girlfriend, who told a reporter for WCCO, in Minneapolis, “You can’t fight fire with fire. Everything just burns, and I’ve seen it all day. People hate, they’re hating, they’re hating, they’re mad. And he would not want that.” Another came from John Lewis, the congressman from Georgia and King’s close comrade in the civil-rights movement. In a statement, Lewis, who is suffering from late-stage pancreatic cancer, said that watching the Minneapolis videos reminded him of the murder of Emmett Till, in 1955, and all that followed—“the recanted accusation, the sham trial, the dreaded verdict.” Then Lewis makes his plea: “To the rioters here in Atlanta and across the country: I see you, and I hear you. I know your pain, your rage, your sense of despair and hopelessness. Justice has, indeed, been denied for far too long. Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit-in. Stand-up. Vote.”
John Lewis has repeatedly put his life on the line for justice and civil rights; it is impossible not to honor, even revere, him. But the human capacity for patience and endurance, in the face of blatant injustice, is not without limits. The ballot also has its limits. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, are liberal-minded members of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party; in the end, that did not protect the life of George Floyd.
Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Global Network, said that although she deeply respected Lewis, she differed with his emphasis. “It’s a familiar pattern: to call for peace and calm but direct it in the wrong places,” she told me. “Why are we having this conversation about protest and property when a man’s life was extinguished before our eyes?
