32 NEWSWEEK.COM JULY 03, 2020
national reckoning with race and justice unlike any seen in the
United States since the Los Angeles Police Department beating
of Rodney King, which was also captured on bystander video, in
the early 1990s. Yet Floyd is just the latest to join a roster of Black
people killed by police in recent years: Laquan McDonald, Eric
Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray,
Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Korryn Gaines,
Botham Jean, Breonna Taylor.
For years, Black activists and organizers have demanded a com-
plete upheaval of the criminal justice system, yet their demands
have been met with skepticism from the public and promises,
often unfulfilled, of piecemeal reform from the police. But this
time, after Floyd’s death, could be different. Polling shows that a
majority of white Americans now agree that there is something
systematically unjust about U.S. policing.
“I’ve actually been really emotional,”
Amber Goodwin, a longtime activist in
Houston, who has worked on issues of
gun and police violence, told me, adding
that the conversation about changing
American policing has seemingly evolved
overnight. “I’ve always believed that an-
other world was possible.”
Rather than contemplating body
cameras and bias training, the public is
now debating what it could look like toTHEAFTERMATH
(Above) Democratic
Congressman Al Green
of Texas speaking in
Houston at the last of
three services for George
Floyd on June 9. (Right,
top to bottom) Pallbearers
carry Floyd’s cofɿn into
church at the Houston
funeral; Senator Tim
Scott of South Carolina
announces a Republican
police reform bill.ongressman al green fidgeted in the front
row of George “Perry” Floyd’s third and final me-
morial service, held here in the city where the slain
man had spent much of his life, as he rehearsed in
his head the speech he’d spent the night before preparing.
Green had been in the living room of his Houston home
when he first saw the excruciating cell-phone video on the news:
a white police officer in Minneapolis nonchalantly kneeling on
the neck of the 46-year-old Floyd for nearly nine minutes. The
handcuffed man desperately crying that he can not breathe. The
bystanders urging the officer to stop. His cold refusal to acknowl-
edge their pleas.
Floyd’s body had been flown back to Texas to be buried. But
first, there would be a funeral at Fountain of Praise church, one
of the largest churches in Green’s district, at which the congress-
man had been asked to say a few words.
But now, as the service began, Green was struck by the words
of the church’s pastor Remus E. Wright, who urged congregants
to maintain social distancing, avoid getting too close and keep
masks over their mouths and noses. The coronavirus pandemic
was lurking. And no life, the pastor stressed, was expendable.
Green couldn’t shake that concept—that we can’t afford to lose
one more life. That now is the moment for drastic, desperate ac-
tion. By the time he was summoned to the stage, the congressman
had torn up his prepared speech.
The death of George Floyd has prompted a generational