With verdict, the moral arc slowly bends

By the end of what would be George Floyd’s last day on Earth, the number of people watching the video of the last 10 minutes of his life as Derek Chauvin’s knee pressed against his neck was growing. It would rise into the hundreds of millions, maybe even a billion, who saw a man die on the street.

Only one other time in history has the murder of a man on an American street — on any nation’s street — been watched by so many and so stopped the world: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Within a week, George Floyd had become one of the most famous names in the world. His death, like Kennedy’s, one of the most infamous and consequential.

Tuesday, when it was announced that the jury had reached a verdict in Chauvin’s trial, millions gathered around televisions and radios, in public and private. Upon the announcement that the former Minneapolis police officer had been found guilty on all three counts, including the most serious charge of second-degree murder, people cheered, cried and hugged in joy. I felt nothing.

I’m emotional. It doesn’t take much movement on the sadness-to-joy scale, in either direction, for me to choke up and shed a track of tears. On the night of

May 25, I watched Floyd die, and it unplugged new tears from old wells of memory and history. I’ve taken the transcript of that fatal encounter, removed the words of Chauvin and the other officers, and cried as I read the painfully poetic soliloquy of a man who knew he was dying.

But I listened to the verdict and felt neither happiness nor sadness. When the jury began deliberations Monday, we collectively tensed because we weren’t certain a jury would see a truth, a crime, that was self-evident. We knew that were it not for a cellphone recording, the verdict in 2021 would have been the same as it would have been in 1921.

All that I felt was relief that this nation didn’t break.

The United States has been bent and fractured by race, world wars, depressions and recessions, terrorist attacks from abroad and, more frequently, terrorist attacks from within. The Civil War was the one time we broke, and we’re still fighting that battle, including white nationalist terrorist attacks dating back to Reconstruction.

Had the jury not confirmed the murder we saw, had it not concluded that a Black life mattered even when taken by a police officer, the country could have broken irreparably.

Broken not only in what would have been the immediate visceral response to a different verdict but broken in destroying the belief that a historically inequitable justice system could be changed and was worth working for, and broken in widening distrust.

I have faith in this nation, in its ideals and aspirations, its capacity to correct itself and to change and grow for the better — albeit at a maddening slow pace. I have faith we can grow into the best example of a multiracial democracy that appreciates each of its parts while denigrating none.

But my faith isn’t as strong as those who had no doubt the jury would arrive at a just verdict. I know history well enough to know that too many times people have waited at the station for that just verdict only to never see it arrive.

The case of Floyd, his murder and this verdict, has a different feel. It continues to be a moment that is evolving into a historic inflection point. Never has the death of a single individual stirred the nation into mobilizing into so large of a nonviolent, multiracial and multigenerational movement. Not JFK. Not Martin Luther King Jr. Nobody.

In her brilliant and metaphor-rich book “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” Isabel Wilkerson compared America and its unaddressed systemic racism to an old house.

“The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away,” Wilkerson writes. “Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequence of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”

George Floyd is the neighbor we saw get killed in the front yard of our old house. We couldn’t call the police because a policeman killed him.

His murder struck a chord and helped many find the courage to look, for the first time, in the basements and attics of their old house, to learn histories they didn’t know and talk to neighbors they’d not spoken to before.

It’s the only way to understand someone else’s struggles, affirm their humanity and fix the things that must be repaired.

Last week’s verdict strengthened the railing of hope upon which we lean to keep from falling.

Morry Gash / Associated Press People celebrate after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty for the murder of George Floyd. And yet the nation had tensed, not sure a jury would see the truth.