San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A troubled life — and a troubling death
In the end, Floyd couldn’t avoid the mean big city streets
George Floyd is returning home to Houston on Tuesday to be with his mother, “Cissy,” his biggest fan, the center of his world.
Floyd missed her last breaths two years ago, while he was living in Minneapolis, trying to get a fresh start. Her name is tattooed on his torso.
On Tuesday, after the procession winds through the Bayou City, he will come to rest in Houston Memorial Gardens in Pearland, the same cemetery as his mother.
It's a heartbreaking homecoming for friends and family who describe Floyd as a dreamer who wanted desperately to be in the NBA, to make it big, to forge a new life away from the poverty and the violence.
Despite his successes — becoming the first of his siblings to graduate high school and go to college
— there were setbacks, arrests, and, in the end, a death that galvanized protests across the globe.
He became the catalyst for a pivotal moment in civil rights history — the day a black man was fatally pinned beneath the knee of a white police officer, his plight recast on millions of screens around the world.
Every living U.S. president, the Dalai Lama and the pope spoke his name and condemned his death following an arrest after he was alleged to have tried to spend a fake $20 bill.
“Everybody in the world knows who George Floyd is today,” said Reginald Smith, Floyd's friend for more than 35 years. “Presidents, kings and queens, they know George Floyd.”
George Perry Floyd Jr. was born in 1973 in Fayetteville, N.C., the third and last child of George Perry Floyd and Larcenia Jones Floyd, before the couple split up. Floyd's father moved to New York and had two more children.
His mother stayed with the children in a North Carolina trailer park, where she met the Houston native who became the father of her two youngest sons, said Floyd's eldest sister, Zsa Zsa.
Floyd's father was a nurse, but he spent much of his career as an R&B and jazz guitarist with the group Chocolate Buttermilk Band.
The band played backup at concerts and clubs for Teddy Pendergrass, B.B. King and James Brown. Zsa Zsa says it once had a gig at New York's Apollo Theater. Floyd Sr. died of an aneurysm in
the early 2000s.
Floyd’s mother, known to everyone as “Miss Cissy,” brought her children with her to meet her new boyfriend’s parents in Houston. They never left.
His mother found an apartment and later settled in Cuney Homes, a low-rise public housing complex commemorating Norris Wright Cuney, an African-American politician during Reconstruction in Texas who championed educational opportunities for blacks.
The Third Ward in Houston was rough, especially Cuney Homes, known as “the Bricks,” said James “Coach Chuck” Walker, who knew Floyd since childhood.
“It was beyond poverty,” Walker said. “Some days you didn’t have food.”
“We all grew up poor,” said childhood friend Vaughn Dickerson, “and Floyd’s household was a little bit poorer than ours, but there was never a day when he let that affect his daily living.”
Floyd’s mother flipped burgers at Guidry’s, a fast-food stand. Floyd and Dickerson often stopped by there on their school lunch break for a quick bite. But putting food on the family table was a challenge. They sometimes ate banana and mayonnaise sandwiches, Floyd’s younger brother, Philonise, remembered at the Minnesota funeral Thursday.
His mom’s tiny home was a hub, a refuge for anyone who needed a place to stay, a shower or a meal. She was calm and evenkeeled, like her eldest son, said her neighbor, Sheila Masters.
“We didn’t have much, but we had a house full of love,” Floyd’s brother, Rodney, recalled at his funeral in Minnesota.
“I tell you, when you don’t have money, that’s where the love comes in,” said Angela Harrelson, Floyd’s maternal aunt in Minnesota. “If you truly love each other, you love each other so much you don’t even realize you’re poor.”
As the eldest brother, Floyd took on the mantle of jokester and role model.
“Floyd was looked upon to be the savior for his family,” Dickerson said. “If it was a somber mood, you could count on him to have everyone laughing.”
His mom would say, “Well, Perry, you need to do this and that. You’re a leader in the family. You’re a man,” Walker said.
“He didn’t mind doing it,” Harrelson said. “He tried to be the example as much as he could. And there was a lot of pressure, too, not having a father figure around. And that was really, really hard for him.
“He always talked about how his goal was to build his mom a house when he was old enough.”
She missed him terribly after he moved, family members said. She died in May 2018. Raising five kids on her own in a cramped apartment, she tried to protect them from violence.
“It wasn’t weird for you to walk down the street and pass up somebody who’d been shot to death on the sidewalk. It wasn’t weird to hear that a little girl got raped in an alleyway. That was the norm,” his friend Walker said.
“You have to imagine what that does to children,” he added.
Making it through high school to college, like Floyd did, was a huge accomplishment.
The Cuney Homes neighborhood where Floyd grew up still struggles with many of the same problems he confronted as a child. Nearly 69 percent of residents are below the poverty line.
The struggle also extends to Yates High School, where Floyd was a two-sport athlete. The school received a “D” from the Texas Education Agency in 2019, and nearly 80 percent of students there qualified for free or reduced lunches.
Big dreams
Floyd spent most of his free time outside, shooting hoops or tossing a football, often trash talking.
“You didn’t have to worry about Floyd going around and busting windows because he was playing basketball,” Dickerson said.
He said teachers mostly were black and set the bar high and championed students’ potential, advocating for them to get out and go to college.
Yates basketball coach Walter Johnson and football coach Maurice McGowan were huge influences on Floyd, pushing him to develop his skills and make something of himself.
Making varsity was a big deal because although Yates didn’t have the best facilities, uniforms or training equipment, it had one of the top programs in the state for both sports.
McGowan stepped in as a father to the players, Dickerson said.
“He grabbed us. He said, ‘I see greatness in you. You’re going to be the best, on the field and in school,’” Dickerson said.
By 10th grade, Floyd had made varsity in both sports.
That year, a stellar, four-sport athlete named Carl Owens, a bigbrother figure who lived across from Floyd in Cuney Homes, was shot and killed. Two other Yates teammates, Quovatous Jackson and Harold “Baytown” Johnson, were killed not long after graduation.
Floyd knew the obstacles he was up against and what he had to do to be successful, Dickerson said.
Floyd’s mother and Zsa Zsa watched Floyd play, including a 1992 loss to Temple in the state championship, where he had three catches for 18 yards. Zsa Zsa also remembered seeing Floyd suited up on the floor of the Astrodome, where Yates played regularly in the ’90s.
“It was amazing,” Zsa Zsa said. Floyd would clown around in the end zone, kissing the chalk and trying to be in the right spot to get caught on the TV cameras. But he had genuine talent, even NFL potential, teammate Jermaine Venters said.
Floyd was the first of his siblings to finish high school, in 1993. It was a day of sheer joy for Floyd, friends recalled.
Alumar Flewellen saw Floyd, an older kid, as someone with real ambitions and goals who was “really focused, and he had drive.”
“He used to always say ‘I‘m gonna change the world,’ ” said Mary Ginns, who attended Yates with Floyd. “He always said that, like ‘I’m gonna be something, I’m gonna make a difference, I’m gonna change the world.’”
Floyd also had an affinity for hip-hop. He was friends with Robert Earl Davis Jr., aka DJ Screw, who pioneered a new Houston sound by slowing down records and cutting in repeated phrases.
He’d make “screw tapes” by getting rappers to freestyle over the tracks. Screw would invite guys over to his place for the recordings, said Reginald “Bird” Oliver, a fellow Yates student who also participated in the sessions.
Many of the original members, including Davis Jr., associated with “chopped and screwed music” have since died from an array of causes, reports show: Davis Jr. of a possible overdose; “Big Hawk,” John Edward Hawkins, in an unsolved shooting; “Big Mello,” Curtis Donnell Davis, in a car accident; and “Big Moe,” Kenneth Doniell Moore, after a heart attack.
Floyd also worked for years as a security guard for Cal Wayne, a local rapper whom Floyd’s mom took into their home after Wayne’s mom went to jail.
Off to college
In the early 1990s, George Walker, a basketball coach at South Florida Community College, came to Houston to recruit players. He was impressed by Floyd’s athleticism.
“I was looking for a power forward and a center,” recalled Walker, who now lives in Missouri City. “He was a football-basketball combo player. He really liked basketball more, so we decided to offer him a scholarship.”
Over the next two years, the coach got to know Floyd’s mother and his family.
“She was very proud of him,” Walker said. “She wanted him to do something with his life. She wanted to get him out of the environment he was living in.”
Floyd headed off for the cattle ranches and orange groves of central Florida, where his teammates ribbed the city kid for his Texas drawl.
“It was like paradise to him,” said Marvin Lawton, whose older brother played on the team with Floyd.
The team played well, and Floyd was a key starter. He was the team’s big man, bristling with energy, former teammate Demetrius Gray said.
He remembers Floyd as funny, loving and respectful.
But Jermaine “Big Stu” Stuart, one of Walker’s recruits from the Bahamas, who was an inch taller than Floyd, was so rattled by Floyd’s aggressiveness on the court that he threatened to go back home, Gray said.
“He was wide-eyed, and his mind was set on making it to the NBA,” Lawton said.
Walker, the basketball coach, said Floyd passed his classes, worked hard as the team’s starting center and was well liked.
“George was just a regular guy,” he said. “Fun to be around, happy-go-lucky. Did what he was supposed to do, on and off the court.”
But for reasons that are unclear, Floyd left South Florida in 1995 without a degree.
He made his way to Texas A&M University-Kingsville, where he majored in sociology. Records indicate he was not on any formal athletics rosters and did not earn a diploma.
Venters, Floyd’s high school friend, said the strain of college weighed on Floyd because his mother was struggling financially, and he was trying to support her and put himself through school.
“It took a mental toll,” Venters said, “and he ended up coming back home.”
Floyd’s Third Ward neighborhood presented the old struggles, heartbreaks and temptations he’d left behind in college.
“A lot of times when you come home, you’re prone to getting yourself in trouble,” said Michael Staley, who grew up with Floyd in Cuney Homes.
Struggling back home
Court records show Floyd first was arrested in Harris County in 1997, when he was charged with selling less than a gram of drugs.
He bounced in and out of jail and prison over the next decade, with two theft cases, three drug charges and a trespassing case.
The home address he gave police during those years was his mother’s residence in the 3500 block of Nalle Street, near Texas Southern University. In between, he had odd jobs, but nothing 9to-5.
In 2004, former Houston police officer Gerald Goines arrested Floyd after Goines said Floyd bought a small amount of crack cocaine from him. Floyd pleaded guilty and received a 10-month state jail sentence, court records show.
Goines since has been at the center of a huge scandal after leading a case that led to the deaths of two people in a botched raid. The Harris County district attorney’s office is re-investigating his cases, sending notices to thousands of defendants convicted based on Goines’ casework over the years, including Floyd.
Dane Schiller, a spokesman for the DA’s office, said officials have not determined whether Floyd was arrested on false grounds.
“Our civil rights division is looking at that arrest as part of their ongoing investigation,” Schiller said.
Floyd’s last arrest was his most serious, an aggravated robbery charge involving a deadly weapon in 2007. He was accused of being part of a home robbery by six men and pistol whipping a woman in front of an infant. He pleaded guilty.
But friends told stories about Floyd taking risks to make peace in the neighborhood.
Not long before he went to prison, Floyd was riding through Third Ward with Cal Wayne, his younger friend who was taken in by Cissy, when he spotted trouble.
Pull over, Wayne remembers Floyd saying.
A group of men they knew had been beating up a stranger and trying to force him into the trunk of their car, Wayne said.
Wayne said he told Floyd it was none of their business. But Floyd was upset. Wayne pulled over.
Wayne watched from his car as the 6-foot, 6-inch Floyd walked into the melee and split them up.
What’s going on? Floyd asked over and over, urging them to stop.
“He stayed long enough until we had an understanding,” Wayne said. “He squashed the whole thing.”
That moment 15 years ago encapsulates for Wayne everything that Floyd was to those who lived in his neighborhood. It captured his bravery, grace and unshakable faith Floyd had in other human beings. He had trust. He had stature. Somehow it worked. Until it didn’t. ‘God is good’
Floyd served four years at Diboll, a minimum-security prison near Livingston, for the robbery conviction.
After prison, Floyd began seeing Roxie Washington, the mother of his third child, Gianna, who now is 6. The relationship didn’t last.
But this time Floyd was determined to be a part of his child’s life, Floyd’s friend, Tiffany Cofield said.
Floyd would pick up diapers in the middle of the night if Washington asked.
He would tell Cofield, “I gotta do this because of Buttercup,” using a pet name for his daughter.
Cofield remembers Floyd walking up and down the sidewalk in front of his mom’s house in Third Ward, pulling Gianna around in a toy wagon:
“He looked so proud pulling this little thing with his daughter in it,” she said. “He would center everything he would do around her.”
Floyd became interested in Christian rap about a decade ago and encouraged people to attend the Church in the Bricks, a street ministry held on the project’s basketball court.
“Floyd was leveraging his relationships with street guys,” said Christian rapper Reconcile, who was an upcoming performer and Rice student under his real name, Ronnie Lillard. “You can’t just walk into Cuney Homes. … People will say, ‘Where you from?’ and you’ll get banged on.”
Floyd helped him pull out the baptismal pool and cart out chairs for service.
“He was a very spiritual man.” he said. “He’d say things like, ‘God is good.’ ‘Amen, amen.’”
In a video that friends say Floyd posted on social media in 2017, he says into the camera, “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, where you’re at, man, I love you and God love you. Put the gun down, man. That ain’t what it is … we’ve got parents out here trying to bury their kids, man.”
A new beginning
By 2017, Floyd was struggling with addiction. He wanted to get clean and get into training for a steady job so he could get custody of Gianna, Cofield said. That was why he left Houston, she said.
Friends encouraged him to move to Minneapolis. Christopher Harris, who grew up with Floyd and had moved to Minnesota in 2014, told him that it was a good place to live.
“We had some friends that had a fresh start, were getting jobs, getting good-paying jobs and were prospering in life,” Harris said.
He was drawn there by a Houston connection, a church in Third Ward that had sent many people seeking treatment to Turning Point, a live-in, black-owned substance abuse center in north Minneapolis. After he finished the program, he could go to a halfway house and then train for a job.
It was far away, but Floyd was familiar with the program.
Wayne’s mother and others from Third Ward had attended Turning Point in Minnesota. A pastor in Third Ward had sent a number of people there from Cuney Homes.
While he was there, his older daughter had a baby, making him a grandfather. His mom had a stroke and had to start using a wheelchair.
He began training to get a commercial driver’s license for 18wheelers. He manned the front desk at the Salvation Army, did manual labor at a steel yard and served as private security for recording artists. He took on a job at a Latin-themed restaurant that is also a bar and nightclub. But Ray Richardson, who ran the trucker training program, said Floyd was exhausted, and three weeks away from getting to the license test, he stopped coming.
When his mother died about a year after he left for Minnesota, Floyd was devastated, Cofield said. He made it back to Houston for her funeral and then returned to Minneapolis.
On Memorial Day, Floyd was pulled from a parked SUV and handcuffed face-down on the pavement. Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee down on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.
In Floyd’s last minutes, he choked out: “I can’t breathe. …”
And, even though she was gone and couldn’t help him: “Momma … Momma.”
Staff Writers Julian Gill, St. John Barned Smith, Adam Coleman and Andrew Dansby contributed to this report.