Six on History: Police Brutality
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"I sat there trying to remember how to breathe.
I suspect I had that in common with people — particularly African-American people — all over the country. Didn’t we all hold our breath as we awaited the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin?
Then that verdict was read. The former Minneapolis police officer was found guilty on all three counts in the death of George Floyd and was promptly handcuffed and led off to jail. On television, people shouted and prayed, cranking their fists toward heaven. I just sat there, trying to remember how lungs are supposed to work.
And thinking that justice — real justice — shouldn’t be this difficult. In a nation that was not broken along seams of race, a nation where you could trust the police to actually protect and serve no matter the color of your skin, Chauvin’s conviction would have been a foregone conclusion. But in this nation, it was anything but. That’s why I forgot to breathe. And why, after the verdict, what I felt was less exultation than simply relief.
An American court did right by an African-American man. For a change.
You might, if you are innocent or ignorant of American history, wonder what the fuss is about. After all, the evidence of Chauvin’s crime was compelling and overwhelming, cell phone video that showed him kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed and unresisting man for nine and a half minutes while Floyd pleaded and cried. Bystanders begged Chauvin to stop and he faced them with an expression of malevolent nonchalance as if to convey that he was in charge here — his badge gave him that authority — and he would do with this black body what he damn well pleased. As indeed, he did.
So you may, in innocence or ignorance, wonder how there could have been any doubt of this outcome. But see, they also had pictures in 1930 when Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were killed in Marion, Indiana. They had pictures of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale in 1935. They had confessions of kidnapping when Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, had video when Rodney King was beaten to pieces in 1991. More video when Tamir Rice was shot in 2014. And Philando Castile in 2016. And Terence Crutcher, also in 2016. And no one was ever held accountable for any of those killings — or for literally thousands just like them.
Point being, there is nothing new about compelling, overwhelming evidence. But such evidence has seldom been a match for America’s refusal to know or its stubborn disregard of Black lives.
So what was different this time?
Maybe it’s that this video was particularly excruciating. Maybe it was recognition that the eyes of the world were upon us. Whatever it was, it led to a verdict for which we can only be grateful.
But did it lead to change? Did something heavy just shift in the psyche of a nation? Will African Americans henceforth know a new form of justice, one that is not spotty or hit-and-miss, but that, in the words of the prophet Amos, rolls down like waters?
If would be nice to believe that. But if one is not innocent or ignorant of America, one cannot help but recall all the times belief has gone begging, all the times promise has lied. One is tempered by memory of Trayvon, Breonna and so many others who never knew justice.
Maybe that sounds cynical to you. But these last years have been traumatizing and besides, I am a Black man in America.
So I’m also sitting here trying to remember how to hope."
"Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose office led the prosecution against Chauvin, said he would not call the verdict "justice," because the word indicates full restoration. Instead, he called it accountability, a step towards justice.
He said Floyd "sparked a worldwide movement," and he praised the man's family, who he said was forced to re-live the death of their loved one over and over again during the trial.
"They have shown the world what grace and class and courage really look like," Ellison said. "A verdict cannot end their pain, but I hope it's another step on the long journey towards healing for them."
Ellison also praised the bystanders who stopped and tried to intervene in Floyd's killing, whom he called a "bouquet of humanity" — old and young, men and women, Black and White.
"They stopped and raised their voices and challenged authority because they saw [Floyd's] humanity….because they knew what they were seeing was wrong," Ellison said.
He also praised Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and other members of the department who took the stand and "said enough is enough" by condemning Chauvin's actions."
"Three feminists — Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza — sparked the movement with three simple words on Facebook the day in July 2013 when a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder. Mr. Zimmerman said he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in self-defense.
A year later, a white police officer’s killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and ensuing protests, shot BLM to new prominence.
Six years later, the May 25 death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody has mobilized BLM into a truly national movement. The liberal media and the Democratic Party offer little, if any, criticism of the weeks of violent protests that followed. Four Minneapolis police officers face criminal charges in Floyd’s death.
BLM says it uses “direct action” protests, not violence.
Conservatives, some on the streets with video equipment, say BLM supporters have taken part in looting, arson and rampant destruction of property in cities across America. A special tactic is to block roads, harass drivers and damage cars forced to stop, videos show.
A BLM chant at some protests — “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” — has been interpreted by some police and conservative activists as a call for violence against officers.
BLM’s economic message is clear: the end of capitalism. What would replace it under BLM policy is unclear. There is an embrace of 19th century communism founder Karl Marx and his anti-capitalist views.
“Black lives can’t matter under capitalism,” Ms. Garza told SF Weekly in 2015. “They’re like oil and water.”
Her Black Lives Matter profile states that “as a queer Black woman, Garza’s leadership and work challenge the misconception that only cisgender [gender at birth] Black men encounter police and state violence.”
Our new Teaching Idea, Accountability, Justice, and Healing After Derek Chauvin's Trial is designed to help educators guide an initial class discussion on the verdict. The activities prompt students to process the news of the verdict and then explore the complicated concepts of justice, accountability, and healing.
Facing History and Ourselves also invites you to a timely conversation Wednesday evening between Roger Brooks, President and CEO of Facing History, and Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr., the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Princeton University. This, our final event in the Facing History Now: Conversations on Equity and Justice series, will be an exploration of the crucial work of becoming a multiracial democracy. I look forward to hearing these two scholars engage in a dialogue at this pivotal moment in our nation's history. I hope you will join us.
Abby R. Weiss
Smith Family Senior Vice President and Chief Officer, Program and Thought Leadership
"It shouldn’t have been an open question whether a police officer could kneel on a man’s neck for more than nine minutes, snuffing out his life, with complete or even partial impunity. We shouldn’t have had to hold our collective breath from the moment it was announced there was a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial to the moment that verdict was read. This shouldn’t feel so much like a victory.
But it does. The jurors in Chauvin’s trial trusted their eyes and ears. They saw the video of George Floyd pinned to the hard pavement, they heard him plead again and again that he couldn’t breathe, and they held Chauvin fully accountable.
They saw George Perry Floyd Jr. — fully — as a human being.
The jurors did not temporize or attempt to split hairs. They found Chauvin guilty of all three charges, including second-degree unintentional murder, for which the former officer could spend up to 40 years in prison. After reading the verdicts and polling the jury, Judge Peter A. Cahill ordered Chauvin taken immediately into custody. To see him led away in handcuffs was a tableau of righteous symmetry.
Perhaps the most important societal milestone marked in this trial is that the jury apparently gave no credence to the attempt by Chauvin’s defense to justify how he treated Floyd because of Floyd’s race. Defense attorney Eric Nelson didn’t mention race explicitly, of course. He used coded language that he hoped the jurors would understand. Floyd’s arrest took place in a “high crime” area, he said. The horrified onlookers who watched as Floyd died were a raucous “crowd” that needed to be controlled. The fact that the muscular Floyd was intoxicated gave him “superhuman” strength.
That is how Black men have been stigmatized for 400 years, as powerful and angry and criminal — and needing to be brought to heel, to be dominated if necessary.
After Floyd’s killing, millions of Americans of all races and ethnicities marched in demonstrations across the country to insist that Black lives do matter. Watching the magnitude of the protests, I had a sense that something fundamental might be changing — that a generalized reckoning with systemic racism might actually begin.
This trial might only be the first step in that process. As Floyd’s brother, Philonise, put it at a news conference after the verdict was read, as long as Black Americans such as Daunte Wright are still being killed by the police, “We have to march. We will have to do this for life.”
Speaking for myself, I thought it was a slam-dunk win for the state of Minnesota. But it says a lot about this nation’s troubled history that I couldn’t believe my own analysis of the trial, couldn’t believe my own eyes and ears, couldn’t have had the same faith Philonise Floyd said he had that Chauvin would be convicted, until the instant the verdicts were read.
Almost as important as the guilty verdicts is the fact that so many Minneapolis police officers — including Police Chief Medaria Arradondo — testified for the prosecution against Chauvin. “Thin blue line” solidarity probably isn’t gone forever. But at least we know it has limits. That’s a start, and hopefully, a precedent.
“Days like this don’t happen,” said a joyous Chris Stewart, an attorney for the Floyd family. He pointed out the obvious: It shouldn’t be so hard to win justice for a citizen brutally killed by a police officer. We should be under no illusions that justice will be easily won in the next case involving unjustified police violence against an African American. And Black Americans deserve more from law enforcement than not to be killed by police: As Stewart put it, “All too often, African Americans only get the spear or the sword. We need more of the shield.”
