By David Remnick
“Ariot is the language of the unheard.” This is how Martin Luther King, Jr., explained matters to Mike Wallace, of CBS News, in 1966.
That language is now being heard across the United States with an uprising that began in Minneapolis and has spread to dozens of American cities, where there have been hundreds of arrests, curfews declared, National Guard troops summoned. The proximate cause is the video images of yet another black man killed by an officer of the law, the death of George Perry Floyd outside Cup Foods, on Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue South. Floyd joins Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice—a lineage that goes back decades in the American story.
But before he was a horrific video image, an entry in the history of injustice, George Floyd was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and came to Houston with his mother when he was very young. He was raised in the Cuney Homes, a housing project in the Third Ward, a historically black neighborhood. In 1981-82, a woman named Waynel Sexton was Floyd’s second-grade teacher, at Frederick Douglass Elementary School. After hearing of Floyd’s death, Sexton posted on Facebook a facsimile of her pupil’s composition for Black History Month: “When I grow up, I want to be a Supreme Court Judge,” Floyd wrote. “When people say, Your honor, he did rob the bank, I will say, Be seated. And if he doesn’t, I will tell the guard to take him out. Then I will beat my hammer on the desk. Then everybody will be quiet.”