Showing posts with label His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Show all posts

Sunday, May 22, 2022

New biography: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice

His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice is a new book by authors Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa.

The book is a landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd's life and legacy—from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing—telling the story of how one man’s tragic experience brought about a global movement for change.

His Name Is George Floyd tells the story of a beloved figure from Houston's housing projects as he faced the stifling systemic pressures that come with being a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the context of the country's enduring legacy of institutional racism, this deeply reported account examines Floyd's family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the overpolicing of his community amid a wave of mass incarceration, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction—putting today's inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with Floyd's closest friends and family, his elementary school teachers and varsity coaches, civil rights icons, and those in the highest seats of political power, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.

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