workingclasshistory:

On this day, 25 May 2020, George Floyd, 46, a Black security guard and father of two, was murdered by Minneapolis police, as an officer knelt on his neck for over eight minutes. The killer, who had eighteen previous complaints filed against him, ignored Floyd’s desperate calls that he could not breathe, and that the officer would kill him. He kept kneeling on Floyd’s neck after he lost consciousness, and even after paramedics arrived he kept kneeling on his neck for a further minute and twenty seconds. Meanwhile, three of his colleagues stood by and protected him while onlookers filmed and called for help. Combined with a spate of other killings of unarmed Black people by police and vigilantes, including Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks, the Black Lives Matter movement re-emerged and swept the US and internationally. Within the next two months, over 4,700 protests took place in some 2,500 towns and cities around the US with between seven and 26 million participants, which would make it the largest protest movement in US history. This has been despite violent attacks on demonstrators by police, National Guard, and armed white supremacists.
The full scope of the movement cannot be known at present, but so far it has resulted in criminal convictions for the killers of Floyd and Arbery, and has sparked growing calls for the defunding or even abolition of police forces. In Minneapolis itself this resulted in the city council initially pledging to dismantle its police department, although after protests died down, authorities backtracked on the plan.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9773/george-floyd-murdered https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=632513372255215&set=a.602588028581083&type=3