2023-06-08 22:42:31
The images that were disseminated three years ago through the networks of the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police in the city of Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, unleashed a wave of outrage that spread beyond the borders of USA.
George Floyd’s uncle, Selwyn Jones, was stunned as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demonstrate and demand racial justice and an end to police brutality. He had never imagined that so many protesters from around the world would chant the name of his nephew and show solidarity with the family.
Three years have passed since the murder of Floyd and Jones, 57, has found different ways to cope with the pain, in large part through the Hope929 Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on advocacy for racial justice, mistaken for educator Liz Darden
On May 26, 2020, Jones was in South Dakota watching television. The channel began showing images of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, who was killed in February of that same year by white men while jogging through a Georgia neighborhood. The channel also showed footage of another brutal attack on a black man, in this case by a police officer. In the video, the man kept repeating that he “couldn’t breathe” before suffocating to death.
“I saw those images and I thought: ‘My God. Can someone help him?'” Jones tells The Guardian.
“And then my sister called me and said: ‘Have you seen what the police did to him? [a George]? I sat down and something reached into my heart and pulled it out because it was my older sister’s son. And my nephew couldn’t do anything to defend himself, just wait for his death,” he explains, adding: “Nothing has ever been the same again.”
Jones, who traveled to Minneapolis last month to commemorate the third anniversary of his nephew’s death, has made what he calls “a turning point” in the past two years. “We want to send the message that ordinary people can react to a tragedy and generate changes in the world, you don’t have to remain impassive and think that you can’t do anything. Tragedies are an incentive to change things,” he says. he.
In June 2022, Jones co-founded Hope929 with Liz Darden, an educator from Harrison, Arkansas, whom he had met at various local and community events. Jones and Darden believe that the purpose of this organization goes beyond the fight against police brutality. “We focus on injustices,” the woman tells The Guardian. “Historically, marginalized groups have been disenfranchised, so we created a nonprofit organization to serve the needs of those people and build stronger, more equitable futures for communities around the world,” she says.
The foundation has a wide variety of proposals and resources to promote change. In addition to organizing youth seminars and workshops on public speaking and public safety, he is developing aid packages to send to people experiencing certain traumas, such as the loss of loved ones due to police violence. “We want to … put into perspective that equity is a personal journey,” Darden says. She explains that the organization is developing programs that will offer transitional resources for people coming out of jail and is also exploring new partnerships with groups to make Hope929 a clearinghouse for the homeless.
Darden says the decision to partner with Jones to help him jump-start Hope929 stems from deeply personal reasons. An educator and mother of biracial children, she lives in Harrison, Arkansas, a city of 13,000 known online as “the most racist city in America.”
Home to the historic Ku Klux Klan group, Harrison drew nationwide attention after a video of a filmmaker holding a Black Lives Matter sign in the city went viral on YouTube in July 2020. The video, titled ‘Holding a Black Lives Matter Sign in America’s Most Racist Town,’ has garnered more than 12 million views and shows numerous white bystanders yelling. racist slurs at the filmmaker while holding that banner.
“I’m part of a community that deals with the prejudice of being the most racist city in the country. It’s a false label, and I speak about it to show that we are not,” says Darden. In her opinion, Hope929 is “an opportunity to strike up awkward conversations and make others…hear what needs to be heard.”
Despite the strong global support for the racial justice advocacy movements that arose from the murder of George Floyd, Jones believes that not enough progress has been made. “We’ll only have done enough when the killing stops,” says George’s uncle, citing the names of other black people killed by police, including Breonna Taylor, Tire Nichols and Eric Garner.
Following the murder of his nephew, Democratic lawmakers introduced the George Floyd Police Justice Act, a federal bill intended to address police brutality by prohibiting the use of chokehold by federal law enforcement officers, cracking down on unannounced arrest warrants and simplifying the judicial process against officers accused of violence.
Although the bill passed the House twice, first in June 2020 and then in March 2021, the failure of bipartisan talks with Republican senators stalled its passage, largely as lawmakers found themselves deadlocked. around the elimination of qualified immunity for agents.
In February, the bill made headlines again in the national media after RowVaughn Wells, the mother of 29-year-old Tire Nichols, killed by Memphis police officers in January, made an emotional petition at his funeral. of your child for approval.
For Jones, the removal of qualified immunity is not a realistic goal. “They would have to strip this measure of its content, literally, so that it was not really applicable, so that it was not relevant in practice, because if they had wanted to approve it, they would have already approved it,” he says.
Meanwhile, Jones has focused his efforts on passing a federal Medical Civil Rights bill that would give people the legal right to receive medical help in the event of a run-in with the police.
“All we are doing is taking advantage of… the last minutes of my nephew’s life… We are not talking about the life he lived. We are talking about the last 15 minutes of his life, in which he was tortured beyond belief. imaginable. Only 2% of his lung capacity entered his lungs. He had stones on his shoulder and chin and he tried to get up because he did not want to die. Death caught him off guard,” says George Floyd’s uncle.
Darden expresses similar sentiments about the bill: “It would save countless lives. It’s unbelievable that this bill hasn’t already passed in the US.” In addition to Hope929 and her efforts to get the Medical Civil Rights law passed, Jones has been working in various elected positions on another project to preserve her nephew’s legacy: designating May 25 as George Floyd Day forever.
His uncle explains that he wants “that day to be a second 4th of July, America’s Independence Day.” He details that, after thinking about what happened, he wants people to say: “With his death, Floyd laid the foundation for others to make this a better place, with fairer laws and a completely different approach to racism and police brutality. “.
Translation by Emma Reverser.
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