His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa
The events of that day are now sadly commonplace: on May 25, 2020, white cop Derek Chauvin shot George Floyd outside a Minneapolis convenience store, making him the most recent Black person to die at the hands of the police. The video of his death ignited the biggest protest movement in American history and made millions aware of the pervasiveness of racial injustice. Yet before Floyd’s image appeared on many murals and before his name came to represent civil rights, he was a parent, a partner, a competitor, and a friend who relentlessly pursued a better life.
His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa
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A well-known character from Houston’s housing projects is profiled in His Name Is George Floyd as he deals with the oppressive societal pressures that come with being a Black man in America. This meticulously researched account examines Floyd’s family history of slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the over-policing of his community amid a wave of mass incarceration, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction—putting today’s inequality into uniquely human terms. It also places Floyd’s story within the context of the country’s enduring legacy of institutional racism.
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa of the Washington Post offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who just wanted to breathe ended up touching the world. They did this by conducting hundreds of interviews with Floyd’s closest friends and family, his elementary school teachers and varsity coaches, civil rights icons, and those in the highest positions of political power.
The tragic tale of George Floyd has become legendary and a defining moment in time. The images of his final minutes have been viewed by millions of people in the era of endless videos. The book by Toluse Olorunnipa and Robert Samuels provides a thorough account of Floyd’s life and how he met his tragic demise. “His Name is George Floyd” is the slogan activists chanted during the sizable demonstrations that followed his passing. The work, which has the subtitle “One Man’s Life and The Struggle for Racial Justice,” is much more than just a biography.
The book is thorough and covers the background of ethnic discrimination in both Houston, where Floyd was raised and Minneapolis, where he passed away. The writers examine the ancestry of significant characters, comparing Floyd’s roots with those of Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed him, in particular. The conclusion portrays Chauvin’s progenitors as having “white privilege” as opposed to Floyd’s ancestors who were subjected to oppression. However, the book searches elsewhere for justifications, compiling a list of crimes against Black people since emancipation. Unexpectedly, just before Floyd passes away, a happy tale surface after what seems like an endless stream of bad news, and it centres on Floyd’s enduring conviction that God was looking out for him.
