Rep John Rutherford talks law enforcement with sheriffs in Jacksonville jacksonville.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jacksonville.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
George Floyd’s death was one of the loudest alarms from a figurative clock that has been ringing in this country since 1619.
Viewing the last nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of his life awakened the minds of many Americans who either simply did not see or deliberately chose to avoid the reality many have faced in America and the world.
In the ongoing fight for racial and social justice and equality, we know there are tangible steps that should be taken to move us collectively in the right direction toward forgiveness and healing our nation.
One great way would be our United States Congress passing the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act”.
Sonya Patrick, leader of the Wilmington arm of the Black Lives Matter movement, said her group had been advocating for those two changes in particular for years. The protests, she said, including the rallies held by BLM/ILM at the 1898 memorial on North Third Street, helped provide the momentum necessary for those changes to occur.
The history of Long Leaf Park it was formerly named after Hugh MacRae, one of the organizers of the Wilmington coup and massacre of 1898, in which dozens of Blacks were killed and others run out of town made many Black residents reluctant to go there. The Confederate monuments still presumably in storage somewhere in Wilmington, their fate as yet unknown are seen by many as an enduring endorsement of white supremacy.
One year ago this week , the Fayetteville-born Floyd, 46
was killed in police custody after spending nine suffocating minutes on his neck.
Floyd s uncle, Selwyn Jones, said he watched the video of his nephew s death that surfaced on the internet knowing exactly how it would end. It was heartbreaking, Jones said Tuesday by phone from his home in South Dakota on the one-year anniversary of Floyd s killing. When you first lay your eyes on that video, it doesn t take you long to realize that the Black guy is going to die at the end of this movie, that he had not one chance of leaving that scene.