“They wanted George to really get out of the neighborhood, to do something, be something,” Walker said. The school was a 17-hour drive away, in a small town, but high school administrators and Floyd’s mother urged him to go, Walker said. On the basketball court, Floyd’s height and strength won attention from George Walker, a former assistant coach at the University of Houston hired for the head job at what is now South Florida State College. “He just wasn’t going to ball up and act like he wanted to fight you.” “If you said something to him, his head would drop,” said Maurice McGowan, his football coach. “We used to call him ‘Big Friendly,’” said Cervaanz Williams, a former teammate. “She thought that he would be the one that would bring them out of poverty and struggle,” said Travis Cains, a longtime friend.įloyd was a star tight end for the football team at Jack Yates High School, playing for the losing side in the 1992 state championship game at Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin. Larcenia Floyd invested her hopes in her son, who as a second-grader wrote that he dreamed of being a U.S. They got so many rats and roaches I can play with.” To deflect the teasing, he, Floyd and other boys made up a song about themselves: “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Cuney Homes kid. Yeura Hall, who grew up next door to Floyd, said even in the Third Ward other kids looked down on those who lived in public housing.
But many residents struggle, with incomes about half the city average and unemployment nearly four times higher, even before the recent economic collapse. Texas Southern University, a historically black campus directly across the street from the projects, has long held itself out as a launchpad for those willing to strive. The neighborhood, for decades a cornerstone of Houston’s black community, has gentrified in recent years. They settled in the Cuney Homes, a low-slung warren of more than 500 apartments south of downtown nicknamed “The Bricks.” But his mother, a single parent, moved the family to Houston when he was 2, so she could search for work. “And when he got out of that, I think the Lord greatly impacted his heart.”įloyd was born in North Carolina. “He had made some mistakes that cost him some years of his life,” said Ronnie Lillard, a friend and rapper who performs under the name Reconcile. Intensely proud of his roots in Houston’s Third Ward and admired as a mentor in a public housing project beset by poverty, he decided the only way forward was to leave it behind.
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Once a star athlete with dreams of turning pro and enough talent to win a partial scholarship, Floyd returned home only to bounce between jobs before serving nearly five years in prison. He had nothing remotely like the stature he has gained in death, embraced as a universal symbol of the need to overhaul policing and held up as a heroic everyman.īut the reality of his 46 years on Earth, including sharp edges and setbacks Floyd himself acknowledged, was both much fuller and more complicated. Former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted by a jury on April 20, 2021, of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd.Īt the time, Floyd was respected as a man who spoke from hard, but hardly extraordinary, experience. Put them guns down.”ĮDITOR’S NOTE: The Associated Press initially published this profile of George Floyd on June 10, 2020. “But, man, the shootings that’s going on, I don’t care what ’hood you’re from, where you’re at, man. “I’ve got my shortcomings and my flaws and I ain’t better than nobody else,” he says. “I just want to speak to you all real quick,” Floyd says in one video, addressing the young men in his neighborhood who looked up to him. HOUSTON (AP) - Years before a bystander’s video of George Floyd’s last moments turned his name into a global cry for justice, Floyd trained a camera on himself.
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