MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: I'm Michel Martin in Minneapolis this week. I am here in a city that was five years ago on the verge of history-making events - the death of a Black man under the knee of a white police officer and the fury, turmoil and soul searching that followed.
ROBERT SAMUELS: People weren't taking to the streets because they thought a saint was killed. They took to the streets and they demanded change because a man was killed.
MARTIN: Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa won the Pulitzer Prize for their book that tells the story of that man.
TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA: We can draw a straight line from George Floyd's great-great-great-grandfather, who was born enslaved in 1820, to George Floyd dying in 2020, 200 years later, under the knee of a police officer, and see how the very real impacts of slavery continue to reverberate, even in modern-day America.
MARTIN: So who was George Floyd?
SAMUELS: George Floyd was a gregarious man. He had a lot of friends. He had a faith that was very strong to him. He was comical, and he was complicated. He had grown up in Houston with dreams first of being a Supreme Court judge, then dreams of being a football player, and at last, dreams of being a truck driver. And he had come to Minneapolis to heal himself. He had - was struggling with drug dependency and was looking to start a new life here.
MARTIN: Toluse, what comes to mind?
OLORUNNIPA: Well, he was a different kind of character. He was a large man. He'd go into a room and shake everyone's hand because he wanted to put people at ease because he knew that his size made people intimidated by him. He was someone who, you know, wrote poetry and wrote in his diary.
MARTIN: So kind of a gentle giant.
SAMUELS: Yeah, even more than that. We interviewed more than 400 people, and a lot of people - they all kind of did an impression of him where, you know, they'd purse their lips and sort of have this, like, guttural sound, and they repeat themselves. And no matter, you know, if you were talking to someone who knew him in Houston or someone who knew him in Minneapolis, they do the same thing.
MARTIN: So, you mean, like, even people who were in different cities who knew him from different stages of his life would all wound up doing impressions of him? That's really funny.
SAMUELS: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Even when the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, saw the picture of George Floyd, he realized he had known him. He realized he had seen him on the street, and he was a familiar person to him.
MARTIN: On May 25, 2020, George Floyd went to a convenience store in South Minneapolis with a friend. He paid for cigarettes with a $20 bill that the clerk suspected was counterfeit. The clerk called the police.
SAMUELS: Two rookie cops knock on the vehicle that George Floyd is driving. He was claustrophobic, and he was also really fearful of going back to jail. And he had been haunted by the image of Philando Castile and would tell people, I just feel the police are waiting to kill another big guy like me. So when he sees the police at the door, he begins to freak out, and that commences the series of events that everyone got to see on tape.
MARTIN: How many police encounters had he had up to that point?
OLORUNNIPA: George Floyd was unique in part for the number of times he had been stopped by police, often for petty issues like trespassing or small-time drug possession. We documented more than 20 times that he had been arrested or had an encounter with a police officer, often leading to George Floyd riding in the back of a police car, going to jail, eventually going through the criminal justice system, taking a plea deal, having a short term jail stay and then getting out and finding himself struggling to find employment. In some cases, he was doing the wrong thing, but reviews have shown that some of those police officers themselves were corrupt, and some of them have since been charged with police corruption.
MARTIN: The book makes the argument, you know, that his life and death were shaped by, I guess, what some people would call systemic racism, maybe you might call it institutional racism. I'd like to hear from each of you on that. Why do you say that?
OLORUNNIPA: Well, we looked at George Floyd's life as an American story. He came into the world bitterly poor in 1973, and then starts to cycle through a number of different institutions that are also tinged with systemic racism despite, you know, the passage of the civil rights laws and all the things that were supposed to bar that kind of racial injustice that he ended up facing. And his experience as an American, even before he met his ultimate demise under the knee of a police officer, was a case study in how racial injustice operates in the modern era. Not to say that he didn't make his own choices, not to say that he didn't struggle with his own demons, but we found that every time he made a mistake, the consequences were that much harsher because of the color of his skin.
MARTIN: Can you give an example?
OLORUNNIPA: One of the easiest to understand is his experience with drug dependency. Arrested more than 20 times, often for petty drug possession, and each time he was met with criminalization and punishment, and rather than getting treatment, he was thrown in jail and told that he was faking his illnesses.
MARTIN: You know, there were demonstrations all over the world. It seemed to sort of spark something. When you think about what's changed as a result of what happened to George Floyd, what comes to mind, and do you think those changes persist?
OLORUNNIPA: Yeah, I think there have been significant changes to policing laws at the local level to ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants. Companies and cultural institutions changed certain things that exemplified systemic racism. But five years later, we are seeing this backlash, this erosion of some of that progress, the push against diversity, equity and inclusion. And so George Floyd's legacy is very much wrapped up in that battle between progress and retrogression, and we are sort of in the middle of that and seeing it play out in real time.
MARTIN: Toluse Olorunnipa is a national reporter for the Washington Post. Robert Samuels is a national enterprise reporter for the Washington Post. They are both the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of "His Name Is George Floyd." Thank you both so much for speaking with us.
SAMUELS: Thank you for having us. We appreciate it.
OLORUNNIPA: Thank you.
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