This week marks the second anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd. Nine minutes and 29 seconds, that’s how long Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck on Memorial Day 2020. Floyd was handcuffed face-down on the pavement, not resisting, as he gasped for air, begging for his life. A teenager named Darnella Frazier recorded cellphone video of their actions and helped spark global protests demanding justice.
Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22-and-a-half years in prison for murdering George Floyd. Three other former Minneapolis police officers were found guilty of violating Floyd’s civil rights as they ignored his repeated pleas of “I can’t breathe.”
And if this was a normal story, George Floyd would have been the heir to that fortune. He would have been — he would have come into the world quite wealthy as a result of the generational wealth that passed down. That’s how wealth is built in this country. That’s how many people came into the world wealthy, because of their hard-working ancestors. But, unfortunately, George Floyd’s great-great-grandfather had all of his land taken from him through fraudulent tax schemes and unscrupulous business deals by white farmers and white landowners who wanted to take advantage of him and didn’t like the fact that there was a wealthy Black man going around their community. This was a time of racial terror in the country at the turn of the century, around the time of the Tulsa race riots and a number of different things happening, and George Floyd’s great-great-grandfather lost all of his land, and he was unable to pass any of that land down. And what did that do to the rest of George Floyd’s ancestry? It meant the next couple of generations, before George Floyd came to scene, were made up of sharecroppers who lived in poverty despite working hard for years and years and years. And George Floyd was not able to inherit any of the benefits of the hard work of his ancestors the way many people have been able to benefit from the hard work that’s built up over generations.
— source democracynow.org | May 23, 2022