WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
CONGRESSMAN AL GREEN FIDGETED IN THE FRONT row of George “Perry” Floyd’s third and final memorial 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 acknowledge 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 congressman 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 action. 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 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 complete 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 another world was possible.”
Rather than contemplating body cameras and bias training, the public is now debating what it could look like to shift some responsibilities away from police forces altogether. The nation is asking: Where do we go from here? And it seems, Americans are at least momentarily willing to consider a radical answer in response.
“To see a person with a knee on the neck, that’s more
