George Floyd was memorialized at his funeral on Tuesday as “an ordinary brother” transformed by fate into the “cornerstone of a movement.”
“HE IS GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD”
During a four-hour service broadcast live on every major US television network from a church in Floyd’s boyhood home of Houston, family members, clergy and politicians exhorted Americans to turn grief and outrage at his death into a moment of reckoning for the nation.
His brother, Rodney Floyd, told the church packed with mourners: “Everybody is going to remember him around the world. He is going to change the world.”
The funeral followed two weeks of protests ignited by graphic video footage of Floyd, 46, handcuffed and lying face down on a Minneapolis street while an officer kneels into the back of his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Two columns of uniformed Houston police officers saluted the golden casket as it was wheeled from the hearse into the church before the service.
A horse-drawn carriage later bore the coffin on its last mile to the cemetery in Pearland, Texas, where Floyd was buried in a private ceremony.
JOE BIDEN DEMANDS JUSTICE
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate in the Nov. 3 election, addressed the funeral service via a video recording, lamenting that “too many black Americans wake up knowing that they could lose their life in the course of just living their life.”
“We must not turn away. We cannot leave this moment thinking we can once again turn away from racism,” he said.
