Racism has long burdened the family of George Floyd

EAGAN, Minn. — Growing up in a shack surrounded by piney woods and tobacco fields in eastern North Carolina, George Floyd’s aunt Angela Harrelson was taught by her sharecropper parents how to get along in a slowly desegregating America:

Sit at the back of the bus, do what white folks tell you, “stay strong and hold on.”

That’s what she did when she boarded the local school bus in the 1970s and white students blocked the seats with their feet, making her stand in the aisle.

The bus driver, also white, would swerve and threaten to slap black students if they fell. Some days, he wouldn’t pick her up at all.

“But we held on,” Harrelson said as she sat at her kitchen table this week in a Minneapolis suburb.

The abuse only stopped, she said, when a white girl boarded the bus one day and declared, “My Mama said this is wrong. Stop picking on them.”

“She was brave because she stood up against her own,” recalled Harrelson, 58. “It takes one person to make a change, speaking up.”

That’s what she sees happening now across the nation and the world as protests spread in the wake of her nephew’s death at the hands of police. The tragedy stirred memories for Harrelson of the legacy of segregation, slights and stinging prejudice her family has endured.

She hopes the four police officers charged in the case, including former officer Derek Chauvin, 44, who is accused of murder, will face justice from a government that has allowed white people to discriminate against African Americans for generations.

Floyd — who the family called by his middle name, Perry — moved to Minneapolis three years ago to be closer to Harrelson and to build a new life. An unmarried father of three, Floyd, 46, wanted to escape the low-income Houston neighborhood where he grew up.

Harrelson promised his mother that she would look after him.

“They lived in a tough environment, so he said he was coming to make a fresh start and she was happy,” Harrelson recalled. He took a job as a bouncer and a retail clerk; he got engaged and, although he was 6 feet, 7 inches tall, he still had maturing to do.

A year after he arrived, Floyd’s mother died, and Harrelson felt even more responsible for him. They met a couple times and Facetimed often. As her parents had done with her, she warned her nephew about dealing with the white establishment, specifically police. She drew her advice from experience.

Harrelson’s great-grandfather, Hillary Thomas

Stewart, was a slave. He got his freedom at age 8, and settled near Goldsboro, N.C. By age 21, Stewart had accumulated 500 acres of land and married a woman named Larcenia, who would bear him 22 children.

In black and white family photos, Stewart poses with his wife in front of a china cabinet full of crockery, wearing a dress shirt and suspenders.

“He did the best he could to build a legacy for us,” Harrelson said.

But the couple couldn’t read or write. White farmers settled their land; they were powerless to fight back.

“It was stolen from them,” Harrelson said.

Her grandmother Sophell

Suggs cleaned white families’ homes during segregation. She told Harrelson stories about how she had to enter through the back door; how the women wouldn’t give her gloves even to wash their soiled menstrual rags.

One of Harrelson’s earliest memories is passing a water fountain labeled “Whites Only.”

Her mother, Laura Stewart Jones, worked the tobacco fields for $2.50 a day. Sometimes the white farmers refused to pay. Her father, who served in the U.S. Army in Korea and worked at a barbecue on the side, would get upset at being cheated, and they would have to move to another shack without indoor plumbing.