#killer cops
Two Years After the George Floyd Uprising: A Changed Generation, An Unchanged System
Two years ago today, only a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for almost 10 minutes. Police officers Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane stood by and helped Chauvin commit this heinous crime. The crowd begged him to stop. Darnella Frazier bravely recorded it on her phone. Floyd cried for his life, he cried for his mother, and Chauvin killed him.
It was only a few months earlier that white supremacists had killed Ahmaud Arbery.
The video, the harrowing, heart-wrenching, deeply enraging video, quickly spread around Minneapolis and around the world. And it sparked a movement, the biggest social movement in U.S. history. It is estimated that 26 million people people took the streets that summer with Black people on the front lines. In places like New York City, there were marches from sun up until late at night, and even tiny towns, which almost never take to the streets, had Black Lives Matter protests. Almost 4,500 cities held protests around the world. Activists in Europe tore down statues of colonizers, and only a few months later, a Nigerian uprising against SARS police violence emerged.
Even amid the movement, the murderous pigs didn’t stop killing Black people. So many other people: Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Daniel Prude, 16-year-old Ma’khia Bryant, and more.
Both Breonna Taylor and Daniel Prude were murdered in March 2020, before George Floyd.
