Hero’s welcome in tragic homecoming
George Perry Floyd left his hometown of Houston in Texas for Minneapolis, hoping to turn his life around. He would return, he told family, when he had ‘‘made them proud’’.
Never could they have imagined he would come back to them in a coffin.
Yesterday (Monday local time), the son of Houston, who in life struggled to find his place, was in death given a hero’s welcome.
Floyd’s death two weeks ago, after a Minnesotan police officer knelt on his neck until he could no longer breathe, was recast on millions of screens across the country.
The 46-year-old’s name has since become a rallying cry, galvanising one of the largest civil uprisings in modern American history.
‘‘Everybody in the world knows who George Floyd is now,’’ said Reginald Smith at a memorial for his friend of 35 years.
‘‘Presidents, kings and queens, they know George Floyd.’’
Thousands came to pay their respects at the Fountain of Praise church in Houston at a public viewing before his final farewell today.
American flags and state troopers lined the route to the church, with people from the neighbourhood hawking T-shirts bearing Floyd’s face.
Some fell to their knees in a gesture that has taken on great significance in the Black Lives Matter movement, before kissing the gold casket.
‘‘This is far greater than the civil rights movement, this has become a global issue that can no longer be ignored,’’ said Harry Bonds, 50, who drove five hours with his daughters to attend. ‘‘This is a new dawn.’’ To family and friends he will always be ‘‘Perry’’, the ‘‘friendly giant’’ of few words and a big heart, who loved his children and would do anything for his four younger siblings.
His family moved to Houston from North Carolina when he was a boy.
He came of age in the Cuney Homes housing project in the city’s gritty Third Ward.
When he wasn’t at school, he would hang out with friends at nearby Emancipation Park.
During the Jim Crow era, when laws enforced racial segregation in the South, until they were finally abolished in the 1960s, it had been the only park open to black city residents.
As a young African-American growing up in Texas a decade later, he found blacks and whites were allowed to mix but little else seemed to have changed in the conservative state.
Floyd’s mother, Larcenia, or ‘‘Cissy’’ as she was known, flipped burgers to put food on the table, but even then there was not enough to go around.
His brother, Philonise, joked at Floyd’s memorial in Minneapolis last week that they would eat banana-mayonnaise sandwiches when the cupboards were bare.
‘‘We didn’t have much, but we had a house full of love,’’ said another brother, Rodney. – The Daily Telegraph