
Three years after George Floyd was choked into silence lying on a Minneapolis street, his voice still resounds. Floyd’s murder by a policeman who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes as Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe set off Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the country, with some local changes in policing policy and demands for broader change at all levels.
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, both of The Washington Post, won a Pulitzer Prize last year for their book His Name Is George Floyd, putting the episode in perspective of Floyd’s life, American policing patterns, and the centuries-long crunch of racism on Black existence. At the Portland Book Festival Nov. 2, Samuels will talk about the book in a 3 p.m. panel, “NBF Presents: Awards & Activism” in The Old Church. Unusually in his promotional appearances, he noted, he is on a panel with a poet (m.s. RedCherries).
“In all, we conducted more than four hundred interviews to craft this portrait of Floyd’s distinctive American existence,” wrote Samuels and Olorunnipa, going deep into Floyd’s family and friends and the atmospheres he lived in, both in Houston and Minneapolis. Throughout his life — and going back centuries in the history of his family — “Floyd repeatedly found his dreams diminished, deferred and delayed — in no small part because of the color of his skin.”
Floyd clearly led an erratic life, dropping in and out of drug use, criminal activity, employment, and relationships. He moved from Houston to Minneapolis in pursuit of better drug treatment and a new start. The book puts his life in the context of being Black in America, particularly in the time of a war on drugs: “Between 1986 and 1999, the number of young White Texans imprisoned for drug offenses declined by 9 percent, while the number of Black youths locked up on drug charges increased by 360 percent, according to the Justice Policy Institute.”
The stress of being Black contributes to higher levels of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, and untreated mental difficulties. “Being Black in America,” the reporters explain, “is its own pre-existing condition.”
The reporters also traced the other side of the story, conducting more than 120 phone interviews following the background of the policeman Derek Chauvin, trying to understand what led him to his nine minutes on Floyd’s neck, ignoring both Floyd’s pleas and the cries of bystanders.
“We spent a lot of time trying to get into his thinking,” recalled Samuels recently in a phone interview. “We found at least seven other incidents of using neck restraints, in a precinct known to use heavy force without reprimands. There was a good chance that no matter what he did, he thought he could get away with it.”

The book notes that in an 800-officer police department, Chauvin alone was responsible for 3 percent of neck restraints. “Eight of his subjects survived. The ninth was George Floyd.”
Diving down into the Minneapolis atmosphere, the reporters found a culture with a national reputation for tolerant liberalism that looked very different to its minority residents. It’s a situation that might have resonances to Samuels’ Portland listeners.
“Minneapolis is known as a prosperous city,” reports the book, “but one in every four Black households lives in poverty – five times the poverty rate for White households.… Of the nation’s hundred largest metropolitan areas, only Milwaukee in neighboring Wisconsin had a larger gap between Black and White earnings.”
The situation was intensified by COVID, which exploded the local Black unemployment rate to 50 percent.
The book began as a Post reporting project, and Samuels was initially dubious that it was likely to go any further. “I was a little bit skeptical,” he recalled. “I thought that the interest would just go away, that it was a few weeks’ story.”
Instead, the event and the moment came together.
“It was a mix of two things,” Samuels calculates. “With the pandemic, there was so little going on, people had the opportunity to really fixate on this.”
And, “On social media first, it really fell right into the metaphor. There was a Black man appealing to be seen, and an agent of the state nonchalantly killing him.”
All of it captured on a bystander’s cellphone video, replayed millions of times to unbelieving eyes.
The immediate official response tried to control the situation. The first statement from the Minneapolis police dishonestly described both the circumstances and the location of Floyd’s death. This was not unusual, the reporters found: “[A] 2021 study from the University of Washington … contended medical examiners had mischaracterized or covered up nearly seventeen thousand deaths that had involved police between 1980 and 2018.”
But the reality was beyond managing.
“Floyd’s death consumed the country,” write Samuels and Olorunnipa. “A study from the Brookings Institution stated that 13 percent of all posts and 15 percent of all engagements on Twitter included the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the first week of protest… The protests were shaping up to be the largest in a generation.”
Demonstrations and more violent responses burst across the country. In Portland, they consumed downtown for a summer, leaving marks still raw.
In Minneapolis, furious street demonstrations – including some demanding the defunding of the city’s police department – ran alongside the grinding of the legal machinery. The city agreed to a $27 million payout to Floyd’s family, the largest ever in a case of police misconduct. The criminal prosecution of Chauvin, and three other police on the scene, was removed from the local prosecutor and turned over to the Black state attorney general, Keith Ellison.
Floyd’s family came up from Houston to Minneapolis for the trial. They felt they needed to do it, although it meant they had to repeatedly watch video of him dying, in real time and from many different angles. But they were there to hear Chauvin convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 22½ years in prison.
Policy changes were less dramatic. The Minnesota legislature banned choke holds and no-knock warrants – an element in another dramatic police-involved shooting at the time, Breonna Taylor in Louisville – but couldn’t move deeper policing changes. It was a frustration to the state’s governor, the then little-known Tim Walz. “This is a great state if you’re White,” Walz later recalled thinking. “Not so much if you’re not.”
Over conversations for the book, Walz made a considerable impression on Samuels.
“Governor Walz was one of the most forthright and sincere politicians I’ve ever met,” Samuels says today. “He was kind of disquieted the state didn’t go further.
“When I heard that he was in the running for vice president, there was no doubt in my mind that [Kamala] Harris would pick him.”
Samuels has some experience of politicians. Talking on the phone, two weeks before the election, he was just about to leave for Wisconsin for the Post.
Major changes at the federal level were equally elusive. A drive for a major policing reform act named after George Floyd stalled in the Senate, despite active encouragement from President Joe Biden, who tried to make some changes with executive orders.
For the two authors, the time spent working on Floyd was grueling. “[N]othing I’ve worked on has left me feeling so human, so raw,” Samuels muses in an Afterword. “… Racism is a pervasive, insidious force threatening to corrupt the spirit of every American if it is not acknowledged and confronted. I realized why so many of the families felt they had little choice but to fight racial injustice. You could not simply run away.”
Still, after all the stress of following the painful story and the people it scarred, and the legislative disappointments, Samuels refuses to feel discouraged. Over a short period, Floyd’s story had a sweeping effect on the national consciousness, with corporations taking stands for inclusion and reconsidering old symbols, such as Aunt Jemima on the pancake box.
“I don’t think that’s nothing,” Samuels said. Perhaps more important, “Juries began to find police officers guilty.”
Even with the specter of a backlash, “It’s not like we didn’t get anything. Undoing bias is hard. These kinds of reforms take years and years and years.”
Interviewing Jesse Jackson while the trial was going on, Samuels asked him how he kept hope alive. With an experience running back to segregation and the early civil rights movement, Jackson reminded the two authors that there was a time when two Black reporters wouldn’t have been writing a book on this subject.
“We’re winning,” Jackson told them. “No matter what, remember: We’re still winning.”
Great interview. Thank you.