Breath after death: Remembering George Floyd

Boston Globe

26-05-2025

Like Emmett Till and the Tulsa Race Massacre. Like Fred Hampton. Like Amadou Diallo. Like Breonna Taylor.
George Floyd died, and we cried and raged. Momentarily, we changed until the memories faded.
Promises were made, but they were just band-aids to cover our pain and shame, to carry us over as we slid back into the reigns of what it means to make America great again. There was no racial reckoning, it was a beckoning, a calling to inch closer to progress. Five years later, what do we see: regress.
Five years ago, I stood at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis where Floyd was murdered, where former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. His call for his mother — both a meditation and prayer — were his dying words and an incantation to heal.
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Instead of healing, we're reeling. We live in an American chapter that seeks to destroy truth and uphold supremacy. Anything that mentions race, gender, or orientation is being targeted. To acknowledge racism, in our government's eyes, is to be anti-American.
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'When you look at the movement after George Floyd's murder and the movement to re-elect Donald Trump, what does it say about us that we have not answered the charge to wipe out racism,' says Michael Curry, NAACP board member and CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. 'We have let the movement for justice and equality get co-opted and called reverse discrimination.'
To remember police brutality was always woven into the fiber of American practices is to also recall backlash comes with every uprising.
Reconstruction. Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement. Reverse redlining and racist lending. Racism, the remix.
'People don't want to see the truth anymore, because it's traumatizing,' Curry said. 'It's more comfortable when we don't have to reconcile with the fact that someone would have that much hatred in their heart.'
Police
The Justice Department dropped consent decrees in Minneapolis and in Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor was killed in her home. Will Worcester and it's
Hodan Hashi was 13-years-old when
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Now, she, like me, like so many, is weary. We live in the back-and-forth of hope and heartbreak when we take account of the pain we carry and pass on, even as we fight to change things.
'At the federal level, we are in more danger than we were five years ago,' she says. 'I was told if I do well in school, get a degree, get a career, and check all of the boxes, I was told we would be fine. Now, I am 26. I did that. I have a career, I'm stable. But I'm also constantly in a state of survival. How do you feel safe when it feels like your very existence is under attack at all times?'
Five years ago, at Floyd's funeral, tears welled as the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke about our suffering.
'The reason we could never be who we wanted to be and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck,' Sharpton said of America.
In a country where our Justice Department's civil rights division is focusing less on racism and equity and more on destroying diversity, fighting against brutality and injustice requires a masterclass in navigating gaslighting and violence. We have a president who falsely claims DEI efforts hurt white people, disappears immigrants and citizens, and is defunding education, the arts, and humanities in order to reshape culture in his image.
Safety doesn't live here.
Ron Harris was chief resilience officer of Minneapolis when I met him the day of Floyd's funeral. Since then, he ran for Congress and led the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign in Minnesota. When Donald Trump won, he needed to rest.
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'People are exhausted. We need to train up the next generation of leaders. A choir can carry a single note for an hour because there are enough people to compensate for those who need to catch their breath.'
Now, he's a strategic consultant. Organizers pushed for accountability and did the work, he says. But we have to build movements that are sustainable outside of federal dollars,
'We need resources that can't be taken away with the stroke of a pen and the change of an agenda,' he says. 'What gives me hope is often times when the pendulum swings this far the other way, it is evidence of a reaction to progress. In these moments, leaders are born.'
For Hashi, hope is found in community.
'I feel like I have people I can talk to and go to for support. That's what I try to hold on to, the people that keep me going.'
The people
. We must remember one another in our shared humanity and in the need to protect our personhood.
'Mama, I'm through,' Floyd called. He reached for the memory of her love and support. He wasn't just through, he was a through line connecting us to past, present, and promises to still be kept.
Hope lies in memory of the folks we fight to remember, the people we work to be remembered by, and and for everyone, we pray, to never become an American goodbye.
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Jeneé Osterheldt can be reached at