A hero’s welcome for Floyd in the most tragic of homecomings
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, 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.
“We were black and poor,” said one old friend from the Third Ward who declined to be named. “If you were black, you were poor, that was just the way it was.”
“It was beyond poverty,” said James Walker, another childhood friend. “Some days you didn’t have food.”
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 round.
His brother, Philonise, joked at Floyd’s memorial in Minneapolis last week that they would eat bananamayonnaise sandwiches when the cupboards were bare.
“We didn’t have much, but we had a house full of love,” said another brother, Rodney.
Even by the standards of Houston, life in the neighbourhood was tough. Around 28 per cent of its households qualified for food stamps. Employment was low and gun crime high.
This didn’t stop an eight-year-old George having big dreams: his second-grade teacher said he wrote in an essay that he wanted to grow up to be a Supreme Court justice.
His teenage years, however, were marred by a series of tragedies that sent his life in a different direction.
When he was 15, his close friend and a big-brother figure was shot and killed.
Two others, on his basketball team, were murdered shortly after they graduated from high school.
Floyd, a gifted athlete, decided not to go professional. Instead he turned to music. He was an early contributor to the development of Houston’s hip-hop scene, and a keen rapper. He became something of a community leader and mentor to young men from the projects.
The next decade was a struggle for Floyd. He was in and out of work and “fell into the things a lot of the guys in the neighbourhood were doing,” according to old friends.
After several arrests for theft and drug possession, Floyd was charged in 2007 with armed robbery. After his release on parole a decade later, he decided he needed to make a change.
In a video he posted on Instagram, he told followers: “I’ve got my shortcomings and my flaws, but these shootings that’s been going on – I don’t care what hood you’re from … put the gun down, man. We’ve got parents out here trying to bury their kids.”
He moved to Minnesota to be near his maternal aunt, taking up a job at the Salvation Army by day and providing security at a restaurant by night. In March, however, he was laid off with the coronavirus pandemic shutdown.
On May 25, Floyd was arrested on a charge of trying to pay for a packet of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill at an off-licence in the Powderhorn Park neighbourhood of Minneapolis.
The police were called, and the rest is history.
In Houston, residents have been shocked by the global reaction to his death. Floyd had not become a faceless statistic like other black men killed by the police each year.
Unlike the rest, his death was caught on camera. In his last words he called out for his mother Cissy, who passed away in 2018: “Mama, I can’t breathe,” he screamed, until he couldn’t.
That moment of helplessness resonated with many Africanamericans across the country who had also suffered police brutality.
The Texan city – the most ethnically diverse in the country – has seen some of the biggest protests.
“Say his name! George Floyd!”, a 60,000-strong crowd chanted outside the City Hall on a recent Tuesday.
Floyd’s family has been front and centre.
In the Third Ward, a graffiti mural depicts Floyd as an angel with wings, wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the words “ghetto”.
Mr Bonds said he and his two daughters, Gloria, 12, and Joy, 13, had been out marching every day in west Texas.
“They won’t have to have the life I had growing up, we can’t go back from this now,” he said. “This is their time.”
‘Everybody in the world knows who George Floyd is now. Presidents, kings and queens, they know him’