George Floyd Deserved A Better Life. A New Book Charts His Trajectory From Poverty To The US Prison-Industrial Complex – And The Impact Of His Death
George Perry Floyd, Jr. was murdered when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sank his knee into Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Video footage went viral within hours, helping to inspire protests against racism and police violence that lasted all the American summer of 2020.
But while the size of the protests was unprecedented, the activism of that summer had deep roots. Journalists across the United States and indeed the world, focused attention on that history of protest, as they had done during the 2014 police killings of Eric Garner, choked to death in New York, and Michael Brown, shot in Ferguson, Missouri.
Review: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice – Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Penguin RandomHouse)
At the...