Remembering George Floyd

If not for another Roosevelt High School graduate from another Roosevelt High School, this one in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the story of George Floyd’s murder might have read as just another police killing where justifiable force was used.

Instead, the video shot by then teenage Darnella Frazier exposed police brutality in its most horrific form by showing the world the brutal, senseless, and tragic killing of a handcuffed man who pleaded for his life.

That man would become a household name in the United States and known around the world as George Floyd. To the many of his friends and family that knew him as a caring and jovial presence despite his troubles he was known as Perry or  Big Floyd.

George Perry Floyd Jr. was born on October 3, 1973, in Fayetteville, North Carolina to George Perry Floyd and Larcenia “Cissy” Jones Floyd.  His great, great grandfather, Hillery Thomas Stewart, born into slavery in 1867, became a successful farmer who at one time owned 500 acres of land that he had hoped to pass on to his children.

After a  series of complex financial instruments offered by unscrupulous Carolina businessmen and local officials that Stewart was reported to have signed, his land was auctioned off for failing to make a tax payment, becoming  part of the 90% of farmland lost by Black farmers between 1910 and 1997. Hillery Stewart lived the rest of his life in poverty and died in 1937, leaving none of the generational wealth he had hoped to pass on.

George’s parents split up when George was two years old. Cissy Floyd took her children to Houston, Texas, obtaining a one-room apartment in Houston’s segregated Third Ward. George had a middling academic record entering underfunded, predominately Black Yates High School. He played both basketball and football at Yates where he had grown to 6’6” tall. An affable teammate and friend to many at Yates, George took on the name Big Floyd.

Yates made it to the state championship George’s senior year, losing a close game to Temple High School. It was the apex of George’s school experience. Soon after obstacles and problems arose that George would battle the rest of his life.

The first  obstacle was the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills  exam (TAAS). Passing the three-part proficiency test was required for graduation at all Texas high schools. It weighed heavily on George. He had failed the math section three times and feared a fourth would sabotage his scholarship dreams and professional sports aspirations.

The odds were stacked against him, as they were for many Black and Hispanic students who failed at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. TAAS did not account for the troubles that Floyd and thousands of Texans like him dealt with daily: overcrowded living conditions, a lack of healthy food, almost nightly blasts of gunfire, and the trauma of a crack epidemic. They took a toll on George.

Aware of such hardships, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund brought suit, claiming that requiring minority students to pass a test that their underfunded school could not adequately prepare them for further entrenched disparities. US District Judge Edward C. Prado agreed that the tests had adverse effects on minorities but dismissed the case citing the state of Texas’ right to set its own education policy.

George failed the TAAS and was inconsolable. Feeling like an outcast, he kept to himself. Some of his friends stated that Floyd’s life began to go awry when he was denied a diploma. “I think the fight really kind of got out of him when he didn’t get that diploma,” said a former roommate who went by PoBoy. “When he ain’t got that diploma, it just crushed him.”

Floyd passed the test in the fall and moved to Avon Park, Florida after being recruited to play at a community college. He put up good enough numbers to get the attention of Texas A&M Kingsville. Academic restrictions once again sidelined him and in 1997 he moved back to Houston without a degree and without prospects.

Back in the Third Ward, George would struggle to make it in a world destitute of resources, and devoid of job training, healthcare, and prospective connections. And rife with the crack epidemic.

It was a world in which one small misstep could put a Black male in prison or in the morgue.

In adulthood George struggled with mental health. He suffered from anxieties and claustrophobia. Depression deepened as his large, athletic body was a daily reminder that he failed to make it as a pro. Compounding matters, his extraordinary size made him a target of the police.

The War on Drugs unleashed in the mid-1980’s by the Reagan administration and similar tough on crime initiatives launched by state governments led to a racially disproportionate rise in the country’s prison population. Democratic politicians co-opted the crime issue in the 90’s. Between 1986 and 1999, young whites’ imprisonment for drug offenses declined by 9%. The number of young Blacks imprisoned rose by 360%. Though drug use was the same among Blacks and whites, far more police would patrol the Third Ward than the fraternities at the University of Houston.

George Floyd knew the dangers that police posed to Black males. Yet with few prospects and little money he engaged in a number of petty crimes. A large target, George often ended up handcuffed and put into a police car which exacerbated his claustrophobia. He was arrested and charged on eight different occasions.

During George’s time mired in the Texas criminal justice system he never faced a jury.

He was never assigned a public defender.

Felony court judges would appoint private attorneys to represent low-income clients. Researchers found that judges were more likely to hand cases to lawyers who donated to their campaigns. A Democratic state senator from the Third Ward convinced the legislature to fund a public defender program. The legislation was vetoed by Governor George W. Bush. The Texas prison system that was a source of revenue to the state was sustained.

What advice George did get was to accept shorter prison terms than the much longer terms he was sure to be sentenced to at trial. Plea deals were his sole defense, and he did multiple prison stays.

His longest was for a five-year sentence, part of a plea bargain for a dubious arrest for armed robbery that any competent lawyer would have had tossed. He honed his body with exercise and was a model prisoner, but his fear and hatred of confinement grew.

George was determined to turn his life around and stay out of prison. He became active in a Houston church program. He mentored youth and delivered meals to seniors. Yet prospects remained few and he seemed a marked man in Houston.

So, he moved. Many Third Ward residents escaped the Texas prison system and poverty by relocating in Minneapolis where the city and county offered more support. George Floyd followed.

He found relative success up north. He completed a 90-day rehabilitation program and was able to find work as a security guard. He became active in the community and was admired for having survived poverty and oppression. There were other endeavors. He trained to be a truck driver but quit his program to earn money. He worked various jobs while going through periods of drug use and sobriety. In 2019 he landed a security job at El Nuevo Rodeo, a nightclub where an off-duty Minneapolis police officer worked part time.

The officer’s name was Derek Chauvin.

During his law enforcement career in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin had been involved in multiple episodes in which he used violence against unarmed citizens suspected of a crime. He had 18 formal complaints against him, resulting in two reprimands. After 2014 the MPD  began tracking encounters where neck restraint was used. There were at least 295 such incidents.

Chauvin had accounted for nine of them, some of the episodes leaving the suspect unconscious. He accounted for 3% of the department’s reported use of neck restraint. Eight of his subjects survived.

The ninth, George Floyd, didn’t.

The arrest and killing seen around the world occurred over what an employee at CUP Foods suspected was a counterfeit $20 bill that was used by George Floyd.

Police were called, and two inexperienced rookie cops responded. They tried to get George into their car. His claustrophobia flared up and then fear met fear.

Reinforcements were called.

When Derek Chauvin showed up he grabbed George by the neck and pulled him out of the car and onto the pavement. At first George was grateful to escape the confines of the car, but soon Chauvin’s knee was on his neck and he couldn’t breathe.

Darnella Frazier, attracted to the red and blue lights flashing outside her bedroom window, filmed the entirety of the nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds that Derek Chauvin’s knee choked the life out of George Floyd.

Had she not done so, the initial Minneapolis Police Department statement regarding George’s death might have stood.

It read in part: “Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his forties, in his car. He was ordered to step out from is car. After he got out, he physically resisted the officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.”

Nowhere in the report was Chauvin or his actions mentioned. Nor were the desperate, even polite pleas from the man being choked to death. “Please, sir. Please… I’m claustrophobic. My stomach hurts. My neck  hurts. Everything hurts….I can’t breathe.”

Darnella Frazier’s action wouldn’t let that statement stand.

She planned on posting her video in the morning but was too disturbed to sleep. Fifteen minutes later she typed out a message: “They killed him right in front of cup foods over south on 38th and Chicago. No type of sympathy. #POLICE BRUTALITY!”

George Floyd was well liked in Houston and his adopted Minneapolis. When he attended his 20th high school reunion he ran into his former teammate, Jonathan Veal who asked what George had been up to. “I just got out,” George responded. Veal was shocked that George, the gentle giant and jokester of the football team, had been in prison.

George Floyd was a good, decent man. Despite his anxieties and addictions, he was liked and respected in his communities. He never lost his dream of doing something great to change the world in his life, which was viciously cut short.

In his death, he did.