Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons
"Say His Name, George Floyd" street art on windows of the Ritz Theater in Northeast Minneapolis, Minnesota.
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice is a healing book about a truly terrible moment.
Written by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, two sharp reporters from The Washington Post, this social biography of George Floyd is a masterwork. Floyd is not rendered as a caricature or perfect martyr; instead, he is flawed, ordinary, and special. He made a lot of mistakes and yet also tried to live a good life. And in the end he was, by his own definition, a success.
"His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice" By Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, Viking, 432 pages, publication date: May 17, 2022
“For as long as he could remember, George Perry Floyd Jr. had wanted the world to know his name,” says a passage early in the book, presaging his emergence as the face of the movement against police violence in the United States. This reminded me of the scene in Richard Wright’s Native Son when Bigger Thomas tells his friends, “Sometimes I feel like something awful is going to happen to me.”
Floyd’s heinous death on May 25, 2020, unleashed a global protest against police violence, even as the world was in the throes of a deadly pandemic. But his story, in this telling, is rooted in the history of chattel slavery in the United States. Floyd’s ancestors were imprisoned in that world and, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has said, “plundered.” They gained their freedom only to lose their sole lifeline to economic freedom after Reconstruction, when their land, like millions of Black Americans, was taken from them.
George Floyd grew up poor and was offered barely a speck of opportunity. He and his family struggled to get by. His mother even moved to Houston to get away from the trappings of the family’s connections to slavery in North Carolina.
Samuels and Olorunnipa also explore the various players in Floyd’s backstory: the enslavers of Floyd’s ancestors, those who stole their land, and Derek Chauvin, the cop who took his life, whose family came to the United States from Europe in the nineteenth century but instantly jumped ahead of Floyd’s people in the U.S. racial caste system.
The chapter on Floyd’s killing is detailed and horrific. As someone who saw the video of his killing early in its circulation online, I found the book version to be even more painful. The inhumanity of the police officers is given a minute-by-minute analysis, revealing their actions—and, in some cases, inactions—to be even more depraved than I had previously thought.
While Floyd begged to live, the writers highlight, “Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd even more, a half-smirk on his face.” Meanwhile, off to the side, “the other officers continued to talk among themselves casually.”
As we know, the case had an atypical twist in that Chauvin was prosecuted and convicted of murder, while the three other cops on the scene were found guilty of federal civil rights violations and still face trial starting in mid-June on state charges. The book describes Ben Crump, the attorney who comes to represent the family; the Reverend Al Sharpton, a fixture in police brutality struggles for decades; and Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, whose legal team brought Chauvin to justice.
But my favorite passages are about some of the ordinary people who played a big role in the case. People like Darnella Frazier, the young Black woman who somehow filmed the killing and then posted it online, exposing a cover-up in motion by the police. And Donald Williams II, another witness, who, because of his martial arts training, knew what he saw that evening was murder.
“Get off of his fucking neck, bro! Get off of his neck!” Williams cried out desperately as Floyd was being killed.
Sadly, we know that Williams’s demands were ignored. And sadly, we also know the killing of unarmed Black people by police has continued unabated.