Five years after the murder of George Floyd, the global movement his murder sparked a reckoning over police misconduct and racism that today is itself under attack.
The moves by the Justice Department to roll back police accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville and close investigations into other local police departments, including Phoenix, Memphis, and Oklahoma City, reveal their new priorities.
The proof that those agencies had violated the Constitution has now been officially denied, with the decision by Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, retracting those conclusions.
Dhillon has said her priority is to reshape the definition of civil rights, discarding a focus on racial discrimination and instead focusing on alleged antisemitism on liberal college campuses, while looking for more ways to shred diversity initiatives and other programs opposed by the Trump Administration.
And now, some in Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are asking Donald Trump to pardon Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
Today, on this fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death, people are asking if the brutality of the nine minutes and 29 seconds that Derek Chauvin’s knee was on George Floyd’s neck has changed anything. NOW members know that the work of unlearning racism and fixing a broken system won’t happen overnight. That’s why today we keep fighting to stop the backlash against D.E.I. initiatives that themselves are part of the legacy of George Floyd.
Here’s what Marc Morial, President and CEO of National Urban League, says about whether George Floyd’s murder was a moment or a movement. As he says,
“History will judge us – not by how we responded in the days after George Floyd’s death, but by what we are building five, ten, and twenty years later. The fight for justice, safety, and dignity is far from over—and the stakes for our democracy could not be higher.”
NOW members will always be there to answer this call of history and justice.