Floyd: ‘My daddy changed the world’
Victory against violence and racism reverberates beyond the borders of the United States.
His name has been chanted by demonstrators around the globe, his face displayed on murals across America. Since his brutal death, George Floyd has embodied the black victims of police violence and racism in the US.
On Tuesday, accountability of sorts was delivered: Floyd’s killer, the white former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, was convicted of murder in a case that triggered a moral reckoning on race and white supremacy far beyond America’s borders.
Floyd “was a big man, he was too big for this earth”, his former girlfriend of three years, Courteney Ross, told reporters shortly before the verdict.
Asked how he would have felt about the verdict, Ross said Floyd would say “now is a time for us to come together”.
Floyd, 46, died under Chauvin’s knee on 25 May last year in Minneapolis. The crime was recorded on a mobile phone and Floyd’s final agonising minutes were seen around the world.
The killing, which kicked off the biggest civil rights protests in the US since the ’60s, snuffed out a life marked by hardship but also generosity.
Standing at 1.93m, Floyd was known as a “gentle giant”, a rapper and athlete who had runs-in with the law and addiction but who wanted the best for his children.
His mother, for whom he cried out when he was dying, moved to Houston shortly after he was born in 1973.
He grew up in the Third Ward, a poor, predominantly African-American neighbourhood in central Houston. At Jake Yates High School, he played the role of big brother to a lot of the boys, his younger brother Philonise said.
Floyd dropped out of college and came back to Houston to help his family.
In the ’90s, he threw himself into the hip-hop circuit, with modest success. But he could not escape the violence of Houston’s underground scene and was arrested several times for thefts and drug dealing. He was jailed in the early 2000s for armed burglary for four years.
After prison, he turned to religion and fell in with the pastor of a church in the Third Ward, using his notoriety and his love of basketball star Lebron James to draw young men to the ministry.
Floyd moved to Minneapolis in 2014 to look for more stable employment to support the mother of his newborn daughter, Gianna.
He worked as a truck driver for the Salvation Army and then as a bouncer at a bar.
Floyd wrote on Instagram in 2017: “The shootings that’s going on, man, I don’t care what religion you’re from, man, or where you’re at, man. I love you, and God loves you, man. Put them guns down.”
Ross testified that she and Floyd struggled with opioid addiction. On 25 May, Floyd bought a pack of cigarettes from a shop. The shopkeeper suspected him of using a counterfeit $20 bill and called the police.
Floyd, who had taken fentanyl, a powerful opiate, ended up in a struggle with police. He was forced face down to the ground and handcuffed, while Chauvin’s knee pinned him to the ground.
Floyd is survived by his sixyear-old daughter, Gianna, who said last June: “Daddy changed the world.”
I am feeling tears of joy, so emotional that no family in history ever got this far. We were able to get a guilty charge on all counts. We got a chance to go to trial and we took it all the way. This right here is for everyone that’s been in this situation. Everybody. Rodney Floyd Brother
Painfully earned justice has arrived for George Floyd’s family. This verdict is a turning point and sends a clear message on the need for accountability of law enforcement. Justice for Black America is justice for all of America! Ben Crump Floyd family lawyer
A measure of justice isn’t the same as equal justice. This verdict brings us a step closer, and the fact is we still have work to do. We still must reform the system. Kamala Harris US vice-president