B8 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022
To his family and close friends,
George Floyd was known as Perry —
his middle name.
Although he died on a street cor-
ner in South Minneapolis, his real
home was the Third Ward, a Black neighbor-
hood of Houston. Long before police officer
Derek Chauvin cut off 85 percent of the air
flow to his body by putting a knee on his neck
for nine minutes and 29 seconds, Floyd suf-
fered from severe claustrophobia — so much
so that he would sometimes panic when he
found himself behind closed bathroom doors.
When Floyd cried “Mama!” seven times in a
row toward the end, he was referring to the
beloved mother he knew as “Miss Cissy,” who
had passed away almost exactly two years
earlier. But his nickname for his White Minne-
sota girlfriend, Courteney Ross, was “Moma,”
so Ross thought he might have also been
calling out to her and her two sons by another
man when Floyd uttered his last words:
“Please. Mama, I love you. Reese, I love you.
Te ll my kids I love them. I can’t breathe for
nothing, man. This is coldblooded. I’m dead.”
In the months after cellphone video of
Floyd’s horrifying death sparked protests
around the world in the summer of 2020, a
team of journalists from The Washington Post
conducted more than 150 interviews for an
award-winning, six-part series titled “George
Floyd’s America,” examining, as the paper put
it, “how systemic racism shaped Floyd’s life
and hobbled his ambition.” Now, two of the
lead reporters on that project, Robert Samuels
and To luse Olorunnipa, have produced a
book-length version of the story, “His Name Is
George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle
for Racial Justice,” based on more than 400
interviews, that is even more detailed, vivid
and moving.
Like millions of Black Americans descend-
ed from enslaved ancestors, George Floyd was
born with disadvantages accumulated over
generations. After the Civil War, his great-
great-grandfather, Hillery Thomas Stewart,
born enslaved in North Carolina, managed to
make enough money as a sharecropper to
acquire 500 acres of his own farmland, only to
have it cheated from him by unscrupulous
White creditors. A half-century later, Stewart’s
granddaughter, Laura Ann, and her husband,
H.B. Jones, were rental farmers on a North
Carolina tobacco farm when the White owner
burned down the storage barn to collect the
insurance money, n egating months of labor by
the entire family, then forced the Joneses to
repay him for the lost crops.
One of the Joneses’ 14 children, Larcenia,
known as “Cissy,” tried to escape that hard-
scrabble existence by moving to New York City,
where she met another North Carolina native
and aspiring musician named George Floyd.
But after giving birth to three of the four
children she would have by George Sr. —
including George Jr. in 1973 — Cissy despaired
of her husband’s roving ways and moved as a
single parent to Houston’s Third Ward, which
by then was suffering from a perfect storm of
ills familiar to Black urban neighborhoods
across America in the decades after World War
II.
The public-housing project where the
Floyds found an apartment, the Cuney Homes,
had become a run-down brick fortress after
decades of government neglect. White flight
had left once-officially-segregated Houston
schools still all-Black and starved of resources
well after they were supposed to be integrated
under the Brown v. Board of Education r uling.
A new mania for standardized testing — soon
to be embraced by Te xas Gov. George W. Bush
— placed disproportionate pressure on poor
Black students without access to tutoring,Book Worldtion: prison stints, limited job oppor-
tunities on the outside and constant
paranoia about being sent back be-
hind bars.
In the page-turner second half of
the book, the authors largely put
aside efforts to link Floyd to broader
racial trends and statistics as they
follow him to Minneapolis, where he
moved in 2017 in hopes of starting
over. He enrolled in a tough-love
rehab program called Turning Point
and got a job as a security guard at
the Salvation Army and at a Latin
nightclub called Conga. But he spi-
raled back into addiction after he
started dating Ross, a single mother
with her own substance abuse is-
sues; began rooming with a new
friend from rehab who relapsed and
overdosed; and fell in with another
ex-con from Houston who had come
to Minneapolis promising to get
clean but who never stopped using
and dealing pills.
On Memorial Day in 2020, when Floyd
walked into a grocery-and-electronics store
called Cup Foods and bought a pack of men-
thol cigarettes with a $20 bill, the cashier
suspected that the bill was counterfeit, and thebooks and supplies in a state that
ranked 40th in per-student spending.
Like so many young Black men
from such circumstances, Floyd
dreamed of transcending them
through sports. Well over six feet tall
in high school, he was a star basket-
ball player and played tight end on a
football team that made it to a state
championship game. But his aca-
demic struggles limited his prospects
as a college recruit, and by his mid-20s
he was again living in the Cuney
Homes and starting to deal crack
cocaine, explaining sheepishly to po-
tential buyers that he was “just a
ballplayer trying to make some mon-
ey.”
Perhaps for legal reasons, Samuels
and Olorunnipa are uncharacteristi-
cally vague about other figures in-
volved in leading Floyd to this fateful
step, as well as in later getting him to
appear in an amateur porn video.
Once Floyd was arrested for dealing in 1997, he
took a six-month plea deal that branded him
forever as a felon. From there, he was on a path
that led to an aggravated-robbery arrest and a
life depressingly common for so many inner-
city Black men in the era of mass incarcera-A moving portraitof George Floyd,h is strugglesand his legacyHIS NAME IS
GEORGE FLOYD
One Man’s Life
and the
Struggle for
Racial Justice
By Robert
Samuels and
Toluse
Olorunnipa
Viking.
414 pp. $30BIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY MARK WHITAKERJOSHUA LOTT/THE WASHINGTON POSTLightning strikes near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and 38th Street in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police, on April 6, 2021, as the trial of former officer Derek Chauvin was underway.
manager asked for police to be called. When a
team of rookie cops showed up, Floyd ap-
peared high and confused, but he was also
visibly frightened and apologetic. It’s heart-
breaking to relive, moment by moment, what
came next, as the handling of the suspect was
taken over by Chauvin, a cocky veteran officer
with a long record of civilian complaints about
callous behavior and eight previous episodes
of resorting to neck restraints, a tactic that
Minneapolis police officers were trained to
use, as the authors explain, “only if the suspect
was resisting — and never with deadly pres-
sure.”
The ups and downs of the last part of the
book, which chronicles the aftermath of
Floyd’s murder, also make for poignant read-
ing. Floyd’s siblings from Houston struggled
with mixed feelings of grief, vindication and
guilt as they became the focus of media
attention and recipients of a $27 million civil
settlement from the city of Minneapolis. While
civil rights lawyer Ben Crump orchestrated a
public-relations campaign, a “dream team” of
trial lawyers assembled by Minnesota Attor-
ney General Keith Ellison constructed a crimi-
nal case that led to Chauvin’s conviction on
three separate murder counts.
Although the whole world had seen the
cellphone video of Floyd’s murder shot by
teenage bystander Darnella Frazier, the pros-
ecution team left nothing to chance. They
staged secret mock trials in Des Moines and
persuaded fellow officers to break the “blue
wall of silence” and testify against Chauvin.
They also found a compelling expert medical
witness, a pulmonologist from Chicago named
Martin To bin, who used graphics and hand
gestures to dramatize Floyd’s death by “as-
phyxia” and to pinpoint the exact “moment
that life goes out of his body,” a s To bin put it on
the stand.
Floyd left behind a then-6-year-old daugh-
ter, Gianna, whose mother was a former
girlfriend from Houston named Roxie Dan-
ielle Washington. Throughout the book, Sam-
uels and Olorunnipa return to Floyd’s dream
of getting his act together enough to gain
custody of his child. So it’s touching to hear
that when President Biden met Gianna in the
heady days after her father’s death, she told
him proudly: “My daddy changed the world.”
Sadly, of course, that was not to be. Soon
opponents of police reform shifted the terms
of the debate by focusing on extreme calls to
“defund the police.” Efforts to examine institu-
tional racism and White privilege were at-
tacked in a broad-brush backlash against
critical race theory. Bipartisan support for the
George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which
would have provided more funding for train-
ing and for identifying bad apples, fell apart
amid squabbling over where to set the bar for
prosecuting cops and how much money they
could be sued for. Recalling the cries of “Black
lives matter” that rang out in streets across
America and the world in the months after
Floyd’s death, the authors conclude that “the
fascination with the phrase appeared to be a
ceremonial, summertime fling.”
Instead of changing the world, the tragic life
and death of George Perry Floyd serves to
illustrate a harder and more complicated story
of race in America. That reality was captured
in advice that the veteran activist Al Sharpton
gave to Floyd’s younger brother, Philonise. “I
call it the Newton Law of Civil Rights,” Sharp-
ton said. “For every action, there’s g oing to be a
reaction. So, brace yourself. But keep going.”Mark Whitaker is the author of “Smoketown: The
Untold Story of the Other Great Black
Renaissance.” Previously, he was managing editor
of CNN and editor of Newsweek.LYNN GALLIEN
Floyd as a student at Jack Yates High School in Houston, where he was a star athlete in the
early 1990s. His life later took a turn toward drug dealing, addiction and arrests.