Floyd’s death spurred global push for change, activists say
As Minneapolis braces for trial of ex-cop, so does the world
Richard Wallace had seen it all before, and he wasn’t hopeful.
It was, he thought, the same old story: Police kill a Black person, protests erupt, politicians pledge reforms and corporations offer platitudes about supporting needed change. But Wallace, the 38-year-old founder and executive director of Equity and Transformation, a social and economic justice advocacy group in Chicago, came to realize that this time was different.
This time the victim was George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father of five captured in a sickening citizen video taking his final breaths under a white officer’s knee. And this time, the victim would become a global symbol for change much broader than criminal justice reform.
“George Floyd has taken systemic racism from personal problem to America’s issue,” Wallace said. “It’s clear we’re seeing a growing and maturing of a movement.”
As Minneapolis braces for Monday’s opening statements in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the ex-officer who is charged with murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death, so does the world. Floyd was the spark that set the U.S. ablaze. In the days and months after his death on Memorial Day, millions of Americans, along with thousands in cities abroad, took to the streets in protests that were often peaceful but sometimes violent and destructive.
Even as many new supporters rallied to the Black Lives Matter cause, then-President Donald Trump’s move to transform the unrest into a winning political issue, and his embrace of white supremacism, left the U.S. seemingly more divided on issues than ever.
Still, Floyd’s global impact is undeniable. Federal, state and local governments have taken concrete steps — like supporting reparations and reinvesting in community resources — to address decades of harm visited on Black Americans and other minorities. Corporations, nonprofits, media and the entertainment industry have launched promising diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
People will remember 2020 not just as a year of upheaval over Floyd, but as a year in which people demanded and took bold action toward systemic change, said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist in Minneapolis. But, she added, much more of it is needed.
For Levy Armstrong, the stakes of the trial are high. The former Minneapolis NAACP branch president has watched her community rise up in response to unchecked police violence, only to have their spirits crushed by an acquittal and lack of grand jury indictments in the cases of Philando Castile, a Black man killed by police in a nearby suburb in 2016, and Jamar Clark, a Black man killed by city police in 2015.
“We have for too long lived inside of a culture of ignorance, not just in the U.S. but worldwide,” she said. “I don’t think that this country in particular, but the world itself, has ever had to reconcile the mistreatment, the abuse and the dehumanization of Black folks. But for some people, they’re now beginning to see we have a problem, and we need to begin to take steps to address these problems.”
Her assessment of the international impact of the case is not hyperbole. Some of the protests abroad — in Asia, the U.K., France and other European nations — rivaled American demonstrations last summer.
Community House for Supportive Development, a grassroots nongovernmental organization in Paris, joined five other NGOs in January to launch the first class-action lawsuit targeting France’s police. The suit alleges a culture of systemic and racial discrimination in on-the-street identity checks.
Floyd “was a real catalyst, and not just in France, an earthquake, like a tsunami over the entire planet. In lots of countries,” said the group’s founder, Omer Mas Capitolin, who is Black. “In France today, we are all potential George Floyds.”