‘His name is George Floyd’
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Samuels delivers a riveting talk at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis
LOUISVILLE — Robert Samuels, a national enterprise reporter with the Washington Post and the winner, along with co-author Toluse Olorunnipa, of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, drew a large and appreciative crowd to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis Tuesday to talk about “His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” Samuels’ talk was part of the Westminster Town Hall Forum’s Arc Toward Justice series.
Samuels was introduced by R.T. Rybak, a former Minneapolis mayor and now the president and CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation. Watch Samuels’ compelling talk and the questions that followed here. Rybak introduces Samuels at the 42:20 mark.
Samuels described “a big curiosity” about how Floyd ended up at a convenience store called Cup Foods on the day former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, a white man, murdered him almost exactly five years ago by kneeling on his neck for nearly 10 minutes. Samuels said he begged a friend from college to take him to the apartment building where one of the woman who was with Floyd that day lived. She asked Samuels, “You’re really writing about Floyd?” “I said, ‘I want to make sure we do it the right way,’” Samuels told the woman. She responded, “I want to do my part to make sure it’s right.”
Between October 2020 and early 2022, “we learned all we could” about Floyd by spending lots of time in Minneapolis and elsewhere. The authors met all six of Floyd’s siblings, went to church with them and shared meals with them. “I got haircuts from George Floyd’s barber and sat in on rehab sessions where he tried to get clean,” Samuels said. They met two women who each said they were “the only woman George Floyd ever loved.” They read old poems and raps Floyd wrote. “We asked people to act out stories about him, as if he were living in real time,” Samuels said. “We got a sense of George Floyd’s hopes and dreams, his life’s outlook and his soul.”
The authors went back seven generations into the record of Floyd’s ancestry. They spoke with numerous public officials, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and with faith leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The last interview, just 30 minutes before their deadline, was with then-President Joe Biden.
Samuels described Floyd as godly and comical, “a big football player who didn’t like getting hit.” He had a life goal of becoming a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, patterning his vision after the pioneering work of Justice Thurgood Marshall. But people saw Floyd’s size and speed and told him, “you should play football.”
He started dealing and then using drugs and found himself “trapped in a penal system” where he couldn’t get the help he needed. In Texas, a friend told Floyd that if he could get to Minneapolis, “you can get clean and your life will change.”
In Samuels’ mind, George Floyd’s impact crystallized when, during Chauvin’s trial, a rally was held in St. Paul memorializing the life of a woman’s fiancé. One of the speakers reminded Samuels of his mother. “I was moved and overwhelmed,” he recalled.
Then someone saw in their news feed that Daunte Wright had just been killed by a police officer in nearby Brooklyn Center. “Here were these mothers who had lost so much,” Samuels said, “and at that moment they decided they needed to go to the scene and give comfort to another mother. At that moment, I began to realize racism is not just a dark stain, but moves as a force. It lives and breathes, and if we don’t acknowledge that dark force, it’ll never go away.”
“I often say my time as a reporter reifies my faith in humanity far more than it depletes it.”
On one of his last days, Floyd wrote in a poem that “things are hard for me. I am stuck with no money, and I am dealing with addiction. Life really [stinks], but life never [stinks].”
On the day they received their Pulitzer Prize, Samuels and Olorunnipa learned a school district in Memphis had banned their book for its high school students. “It was heartbreaking, frustrating, and it felt deeply personal,” Samuels said. “At the core, it’s important to remember how frequently opportunities are being foreclosed on children looking to see themselves [in books].”
At that moment, Samuels flashed on a poem he’d learned years before, Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel.” A century ago, here’s how Cullen ended his poem:
“Inscrutable [God’s] ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet Black, and bid him sing!”
“We were inspired to keep going by people who kept going,” Samuels said. “It is hope often carried by people who should have little hope. … It’s the reason why we can get up and say, ‘Life [stinks],’ but life never [stinks]. It’s the reason to keep doing your part.”
During a question-and-answer session emceed by Rybak, Samuels marveled at “the truly remarkable persistence that happens when people are down and out and make the choice to move 1,000 miles away,” leaving family and friends “to see if I can make it better,” as Floyd did.
Through their research, the authors discovered that Floyd’s ancestors became large landowners following the Civil War. His great-great grandfather “was a genius of a farmer,” and his 22 children worked the land. At the time, he was among the top 2% of landowners in North Carolina. But the illiterate farmer was duped out of his land holdings through false taxes, and by the end of his life, “he ends up with nothing,” Samuels said. His family was forced into sharecropping “for a person who promises to make them whole and never does. George Floyd came from a family going back generations of people who worked incredibly hard.”
Growing up, Floyd was taught to respect the police and “don’t try to be too wealthy,” because “if you get wealth, they’ll just take it from you,” Samuels said.
Rybak, a former journalist, noted that Samuels’ job “was to be objective. You are a human being who went to the Chauvin trial. What was it like for you as a journalist?”
“I believe in the power of storytelling. When truth is revealed to people who want to hear it, things happen. The majority of my career, that has been true,” Samuels said. “I mean it when I say I felt no greater obligation to tell this story because I couldn’t think of anything more worthwhile than to help people understand the true nature of systemic racism.”
The authors “were allowed to be with people during the most tender moments of their lives,” he said. After publishing the book, “it was hard to report on other things, which is what I get paid to do. It took a year and a half before I started feeling like myself again.”
“The true honor goes to the hundreds of people who decided they would join this mission,” Samuels said. “That illustrates the wonderfulness of the American spirit.”
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