Three Steps Forward, 10 Steps Back: George Floyd's Murder and Aftermath
by John Hawkins
Five years ago George Floyd, an African American, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and called the cops. When the cops arrived they pulled Floyd from his vehicle and during the arrest threw him to the ground, where officer Derek Chauvin put his knee into Floyd's neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds and ignored pleas of "I can't breathe" by the suspect. Floyd couldn't breathe, and he died. The murder was captured on phone cameras by bystanders looking on in horror. Chauvin was not long thereafter charged with murder. Other officers standing around the arrest were also charged.
This incident drew significant global media attention. First in Minneapolis, then in other American cities, then in European and Asian cities, protests erupted, with citizens chanting Floyd's name and/or shouting Black Lives Matter, and carrying signs. The BBC just recently ran a documentary of this incident and its global repercussions. Titled Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd, the documentary lucidly recalls those days of outrage, with the global protests making it clear that being Black is hazardous to your health. The last part of the film moves on to how things have changed for Blacks since George Floyd's murder.
Already fumbling the federal response to the just-beginning Covid-19 spread in America, President Donald Trump inflamed citizens tired of fascistic police actions and the deaths of African Americans that seem to go back decades, by essentially declaring his indifference to the human rights abuses, and urging police to "be strong" against protesters, even praising the pushback by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who, Trump said, "knocked [protesters] out so fast it was like bowling pins." He also took the opportunity to knock left wing movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, which he boasted had been happily snuffed out by police actions.
In Britain, at that time, many Black citizens expressed concern that such depravity could happen there. Backlash does a good job from the beginning of listening to the voices of the community expressing their fears of such a possibility. The Morning Star, a left wing daily, wrote, "that there have already been publicised cases of deaths in custody and police using dangerous restraints such as chokeholds."
Police officials in Britain were interviewed and noted that differences in policing made the situation in America unique because of gun availability and long history of racial violence. But this view was soundly rejected, including by an interviewee named by George the Poet, "There are disturbing parallels between the black British experience and the African American experience. There was a young man that I was in primary school with. His name is Julian Cole. He was accosted by five officers outside of a nightclub, had his neck snapped. Guess how many convictions that that debacle ended in? None. There's been no jail time doled out for police."
A large portion of the film is devoted to the "backlash" in England to Floyd's murder by police. In Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston, 17th Century slave trader was toppled during a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol and dumped in the harbor. And in London, a statue of Winston Churchill, a racist, was given the graffiti treatment. But there was also the backlash of defensive-minded whites who counter-protested leading to violence.
Derek Chauvin , however, was engulfed by public outrage. It had been building for a while after the wrongful deaths of other recent African American deaths by police or security, starting in the Obama administration with Trayon Martin, then Sandra Bland, Tyre Nichols, Breonna Taylor, and Eric Garner, et. al. Black Lives Matter, antifa, and woke activists demanded action against Chauvin. He was tried for murder in 2021 and sentenced to 21 years in a federal prison. In this case, justice seems to have prevailed.
However, progress has stalled. Racism is endemic and requires the same vigilance afforded future holocausts, whose mantra is Never Again. In America, the natural divisiveness of Donald Trump has returned with a vengeance in his re-ascension to the throne, as it were, of American governance. For many it is hard to believe that this twice-impeached
In his first address of his second term to Congress on March 4, 2025, Trump gave a speech in which he said, "We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and our country will be woke no longer."
As an American it is deeply ironic that the first man to fall in the name of the nascent American Revolution was a newly freed Black man named Crispus Attucks, who was shot by 'security' forces in red coats on March 5, 1770. And it is deeply troubling to see how easily the Sons of Liberty have been transmogrified to the Sons of Anarchy, enforcers of tyranny rather than freedom.
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