Angela Harrelson, the aunt of George Floyd (known as Perry to his family), shares an exclusive excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Lift Your Voice: How My Nephew George Floyd's Murder Changed the World. Listen to the excerpt, as read by the author, by clicking the audio play button.
Some people ask, “Why did it take Perry’s death to get folks angry enough to protest in the streets all over the country?” By the time Perry was killed, we had lost dozens of our people to police violence just in the past 10 years. Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. The list goes on and on. Why did patience run out with Perry?
I think a lot of it has to do with the coronavirus pandemic, which had most Americans under stay-at-home orders in May 2020. Millions of people sat in front of their TV for more hours than they were used to. They were in a position to see a video of something most of them had never seen before: a modern-day lynching. They saw a Black man who, for the time he was conscious, was preaching his own funeral, saying, “I can’t breathe,” and crying out for his mother. He knew he was going to die.
In the video, they could see the pain in his face, the blood running out of his nose. It brought people to tears. And they could see that the pain Perry was in was caused by a man with his knee on his neck, looking totally unconcerned, with his hands on his hips, not letting anyone come up to help Perry. The officer wasn’t a big man, but he was strong; he knew how to apply pressure. During the trial, it came out that he shifted his weight so he could press harder on Perry’s neck. And he mocked Perry. At one point, when Perry said, “I can’t breathe,” the officer said something like, “You must be able to breathe if you’re talking.”
Perry’s hands were cuffed behind his back. He wasn’t kicking the officer. He wasn’t fighting him. He wasn’t trying to run away—he wasn’t even calling him names. Imagine how Perry must have felt: immobilized, in pain, scared to pieces, knowing in his heart that he was going to die. And his killer was mocking him. I think when people saw that video, again and again, the humanity factor kicked in.
All kinds of people, including white people, said, “Wait a minute—this is wrong, this is not just. He’s a human being; you don’t do somebody that way.” Something about the inhumane way Perry was treated just resonated with most of the people who saw the video. That’s what moved the world: a nation of people watching that video, minute after minute, thinking, “Get off him. Stop. Leave him alone.”
It was so excruciating, so painful to watch—for everybody, not just family and not just Black folks. People from everywhere couldn’t get the image of that officer’s knee on Perry’s neck out of their heads. The video, and the number of people who saw it, changed everything because it wasn’t about just race anymore: it was about humanity. That video lit the fuse.
A lot of people who started out by yelling at their TVs, hollering, “Stop it! Get off him!” spilled out into the streets because they wanted people to understand how wrong it was that Perry was killed the way he was killed.
A mural of George Floyd outside Cup Foods, where he died. Photo by Rachel Austin. Lift Your Voice by Angela Harrelson and Michel Levin releases February 8, 2022 on Audible.
