Why Is This Happening? ‘His Name is George Floyd’ with Robert Samuels – MSNBC

Its been a little over two years since the tragic murder of George Floyd, and what was arguably the largest civil rights protests in United States history. Since May of 2020, hashtags and icons have been used to commemorate him, but he was so much more than a face on a mural. He was a father, partner, athlete, and friend who constantly strove for a better life, as chronicled in His Name Is George Floyd: One Mans Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. The book builds off of a series in The Washington Post in October 2020 called George Floyd's America. Robert Samuels, a national enterprise reporter at The Washington Post, co-wrote the book with colleague Toluse Olorunnipa, a political enterprise and investigations reporter. Samuels joins WITHpod for a personal look at how systemic racism impacted Floyds life, his familys social mobility, his legacy and more. Samuels also discusses how even despite all of the seemingly endless challenges Floyd faced, he still held on to his vision for a better world.

Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos.

Robert Samuels: A lot of folks who believe that to get by in life you simply need to get by, there's not a lot of ambition, George Floyd wasn't one of those people though.

From early on, he started telling his sister that he didn't want to rule the world, he didn't want to change the world, but he wanted to do something to touch the world.

Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to "Why Is This Happening?" with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

It's been a little over two years since the death of George Floyd, a man in Minneapolis who was buying something at a store, had the police called on him for possibly passing a counterfeit 20. And the police showed up, and as you know, Derek Chauvin ended up kneeling on George Floyd's neck as a crowd of onlookers watched and raised alarms and screamed out for help and recorded on their phones until George Floyd was no longer able to breathe, as he said, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe," and ended up dying.

And in the wake of that, the United States saw the largest civil rights protests, racial justice protests it had seen in over a generation and by some metrics ever if you count participation estimates and the number of people that were on the streets. You had protests in cities large and small that swept across the country. You had this moment to sort of invoke what's become a cliche, a racial reckoning, about the sort of systemic legacy of anti-Black racism in America and its intersection with the legacy of policing.

And then, you had a backlash to that, which in many ways one could say was as equal in its force, even if it didn't mobilize in the streets in the same way, but produced what we have seen in state house after state house with prohibitions on the teaching of certain aspects of the legacies of white supremacy, and chattel slavery, and Jim Crowe, and racial segregation and systematic oppression up to this current day.

And the continuation of this pitch battle about the meaning of the American story as it pertains to race. The aspiration towards of equality with the reality of systematic inequities that persist, and persist, and persist long past the inception points that created them and long past the point that many people would like to admit that they persist.

At the center of that though was a person, a man by the name of George Floyd, with a story, with a family, with a history, with an inner life (ph), with passions, with complications, with all of the human attributes that attach to any person. And a story that put him in that place at a certain time propelled by all of the historical structural forces that produced the system of the racial caste in America.

And that, telling that story is the project of a fascinating new book, which is a biography of George Floyd. It's called, "His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice." It's a biography of George Floyd, but also about the structural factors of history and class in American society that shaped who he is, and what his life was and how he came to be there at that moment. And how he died at the hands of a white police officer. And what happened afterward.

It's co-authored by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, and it builds off a series that was done in "The Washington Post" in October 2020, called "George Floyd's America."

And two years plus after his death, I thought it would be great to sit down with Robert Samuels, a fellow Bronx native and one of those co-authors.

Robert, great to have you on the program.

Robert Samuels: Thanks for having me, Chris. I really appreciate it.

Chris Hayes: This is a really interesting project because it's at the intersection of biography and sort of history and social history. How did you conceive of it?

Robert Samuels: So much of the conversations in the country when we had first endeavored on this project were about systemic racism. And they were good conversations to have, but I thought lost in those conversations was the idea of how it actually played out in someone's life.

And so, in the summer of 2020, a group of reporters at "The Post" asked ourselves, how can we make this real? How can we show the tangible impact of what it does?

And the idea came to try and look at the life of George Floyd, a person who everyone recognized, felt the brunt of racism on May 25, 2020.

But what we wanted readers to understand, Chris, was that the structures of systemic racism were hobbling George Floyd before he ever met Derek Chauvin. And in going through the story of his life we could help the world see who we are as a larger society and what we might be able to do to start unlocking and dismantling systemic racism in America.

Chris Hayes: So, I want to start the story with the first emancipated generation in George Floyd's family history, which I think is a really fascinating story that you trace back. Tell us about many generations back where George Floyd's people came from.

Robert Samuels: So, we understood that if we really wanted the world to understand why George Floyd grew up poor, why he was born poor, you had to go back to the very beginning. Even though people don't like talking about slavery, but it turns out when we went back seven generations George Floyd's great-grandfather was a man named Hillery Thomas Stewart. He was the first person on his mother's line to be emancipated.

And he was an industrious fellow. He actually amassed 500 acres of land in eastern North Carolina, which would have made him one of the wealthiest and most industrious Black landowners of his time.

But before he was able to make one single inter-generational transfer all that property and land was stripped from him through tax fraud, unscrupulous business deals that he could not understand, being forced to sign letters that he could not understand because it was illegal for him to learn how to read.

And so, he ended up dying a popper in a country where if he was able to continue George Floyd would have been born in a different life. That money would have been passed on. It would have grown. Instead, his family was forced into the abusive and expletive nature of sharecropping, where his family worked. They continued to work for generations, hoping that one day they'll be able to rid themselves of these credit burdens that sharecropping had brought about, but they could never do it.

And one thing that I think is really important about this conversation, Chris, is when we talk about the abuses of sharecropping, like when I was growing up in the Bronx I thought this was something that happened long ago. You know, I sort of saw in black or white or sepia tones.

Chris Hayes: Yes, totally.

Robert Samuels: Yes, but the people who we spoke to about it, George Floyd's aunts and uncles, they're living today. They're of working age today. And that shows just how long that history of slavery reached, to people who are still living today.

Chris Hayes: So, the story of Hillery Thomas Stewart I found very affecting and compelling for a number of reasons. One that I think often, the story that you can read about, the expropriation of Black wealth in that period is just sheer theft and violence, right? Like literally marauded off their land.

In this case, it has the same end, but it's a much more pernicious form or perdition, basically in which he is taken advantage of, partly because he is an emancipated slave who was legally barred from being literate, right. So, he is sort of sitting duck for these people to prey upon him.

But also, the notion that in this one family's lineage is the story of tremendous progress and then regress that's the story of Black emancipation right after the Civil War and then in the seven decades after. That this man is emancipated and begins to amass land as a full citizen of the newly liberated South, and that that is just a blink of an eye before it's all taken back and his family, for seven generations, would be thrust back into the sort of neo-feudalism of sharecropping.

Robert Samuels: Right. That's right. And that's how we begin to understand how structural racism works, right. Now, when they were taking away the land from the Stewarts, that's George Floyd's maternal side, again, his mom's side, this was a slow burn. It wasn't like the Klan came in and completely robbed it.

Chris Hayes: Exactly, right.

Robert Samuels: And I think that's what people really need to understand about how racism works. It's easy to think about actors as being nefarious, swift people who will do and inflect immediate punishment on African Americans in this country.

But what our reporting showed that time and time again was it was a feeling of fear and a feeling of resentment of Black progress that seeped into to many of the policies and many of the actions by people who are in with the majority in this country.

Chris Hayes: So, this is back many generations on his mother's side. Tell the story of his parents, were sort of more immediately where they come from, the world they're coming on (ph).

Robert Samuels: Sure. So, Larcenia Stewart, that's George Floyd's mother, that's her maiden name, she meets a musician who she falls in love with. His name is George Perry Floyd, Sr. And he has big dreams. He dreams about being a musician. He plays gigs in New York, and they begin to have a family.

Larcenia, who everyone knew as Sissy, and later Miss Sissy, didn't want that kind of life. She didn't want to be around a traveling rolling stone of a musician. So, she first returns to North Carolina and still faces the burden of racism. Feeling that her family could not get ahead, she makes a move. And she moves with a man named Felonus Hogan (ph) to Houston, Texas. And she hopes that living a bigger city that's rapidly growing, that she might be able to set her family on a stronger path.

Now, again, I really want to emphasize that Miss Sissy was not someone who never believed in hard work or was never industrious. She worked as a domestic worker. She worked at a local hamburger joint, and she was known for her gregarious spirit. She'd take people in. If she saw them drunk, she'd fix them meals. She'd fix meals for the entire community. We have stories about people who had grown up with George Floyd, who lived with the Floyd family for a very long time.

So, she was a matriarch of a very full house, a very loving home. And the person who really had taken to her, who loved kissing on her cheek to the point where she'd say, this side's getting numb kiss me on the other side was George Perry Floyd, Jr., her first son.

Chris Hayes: This is another place where I just found the striking, you know, microcosm of the larger story, which is for generations in America, Black people in the rural South and in small town South and parts of the South have moved to large metropolitan areas seeking more opportunities, seeking to escape the bonds of the inheritance of the structural factors that had produced sharecropping and segregation and Jim Crowe during the Great Northern Migration that happens in the 1900s, 1920s. But even as late as Sissy, George Floyd's mom, that this is part of a much larger story, the sort of striking out from metropolitan areas searching for opportunity.

Robert Samuels: Right. There are so many times where, the Floyd family, they held on to the belief of the American promise. And that's one of the things about the American promise, right, that if you work hard and your find the opportunity something good will happen to you.

I don't know how it got so encoded into everyone's DNA in the country that this is how it works. And so, yes, she follows a very familiar pattern of leaving the South to a city hoping that she'd be able to flee herself and her family from some of the structures that were oppressing her.

But when she got to Houston, right, she and her family run into different ways that the original American sin begins to pour out. She moves into an area called "The Bottoms," the Third Ward of Houston and later into a housing project called Cuney Homes.

Now, that neighborhood was a redline neighborhood. It was segregated because the federal government had chosen that it should be that way. It was by a highway which sliced through a community and separated the wealthy from the not-so-wealthy. And there was not a lot of investment in the school systems that came.

She takes her children, and they are educated in a school system, the Houston Independent School District, that was amongst the last major metropolitan cities to integrate. And when they did begin to integrate, you saw the flight, the white flight of white residents from the Houston School District. Some even tried to make their own school districts and invent their own cities.

And one of the most interesting things that happened is that as George Floyd's going to school and all of this is going on, the courts say you need to swap teachers. You cannot have a segregated educational workforce.

So what happens? Well, the best Black teachers are pulled away from the schools that George Floyd is going to, and the white schools did not respond in kind. They did not send their best teachers.

So you are left with an educational system that did not have the investment originally and it did not have the right educational experience or cultural understanding to actually relate to these children.

Chris Hayes: What year was George Floyd born?

Robert Samuels: George Floyd was born in 1973.

Chris Hayes: OK, so his childhood is in the Houston Third Ward which is a predominantly Black neighborhood, right? I mean and sort of in some ways when you say relined, I mean again the nature of the Third Ward is very recognizable as an instantiation of a form of concentrated Black poverty that is produced in city after city after city after the Great Migration and through this sort of redlining that gets produced in the post-World War II era. The Third Ward's an example of that.

Tell me about what his upbringing's like, his life world in that neighborhood is like.

Robert Samuels: So if you live in a city, you'd recognize a community like Third Ward, and particularly the Cuney Homes Housing Project because it looks so distinct from the neighborhoods that are across the interstate from it.

The people in that community called it the "The Bricks" because the homes, the project housing, they were low-slung brick homes connected to one another. But it also referred to the hard scrabble life that people led there.

And as factory jobs left the United States there was not a lot of investment in work. And so what happens is that neighborhood, the currency of the neighborhood largely becomes drugs. So George Floyd is growing up in a community that is known for dealing drugs, a lot of drug users, a lot of poverty, a lot of people who can't get jobs.

And a lot of folks who believed that to get by in life you simply need to get by. There's not a lot of ambition. George Floyd wasn't one of those people, though. From early on he started telling his sister that he didn't want to rule the world, he didn't want to change the world, but he wanted to do something to touch the world.

And one of the most interesting things that we learned about him came from his second grade teacher Ms. Sexton. And she kept this essay that he wrote in second grade.

Chris Hayes: Yes, this is incredible detail.

Robert Samuels: Yes, this is second grade so it's not a full essay, it's about a paragraph. And it comes after she teaches this segment about African American history. And George Floyd, after learning about Thurgood Marshall, says he wants to be a Supreme Court Justice because he wants to be able to adjudicate and regulate how the law is played out.

Now it's not just the dream that's interesting about this, right, it's how he writes about it. The spelling's right, the grammar is right, the punctuation's right. And George Floyd, at second grade, was reading and writing at grade level, which is incredibly hard if you grow up --

(CROSSTALK)

Chris Hayes: Yes.

Robert Samuels: -- in a community as destitute as his was. And so there was something special about George Floyd. And I think there is something that we, as readers, ask about this and what we as society should be asking about this. Which is how is it that these bright Black boys, who have these big dreams in second grade, what happens that prevents from achieving them?

Chris Hayes: Yes, I found that detail about the second grade essay just really profound and really moving, you know, partly because I do think and I appreciate about the project of this book. Even in the mourning of George Floyd, there's a kind of dehumanization because he becomes an icon rather than a person. And just that like this human detail of this bright little boy, memorable bright little boy with big dreams for the world writing about being a Supreme Court Justice just like completely got me when I came across that in the book.

Robert Samuels: You know Toluse and I, when we first endeavored on this project, one of my biggest worries was that we were simply going to write a Black pain essay that would just make people feel terrible and lament how hard it is to be Black in the United States, which it is.

But the more we learned about George Floyd the less nervous we got because it's true that when a person becomes a hashtag, they're flattened in a way that is unfair and some of it is that people don't want to traffic and negativity about the people who are dead. And so you hear things like, oh, this guy was a gentle giant, he wouldn't hurt a fly.

And I know that, as a person who receives that information, you sometimes say, oh, yes, sure, they're just trying to protect their life. But by all accounts, you know, through all the interviews that we did with his friends and his family, the people who loved him, the people who were on football teams with him, the people he was in rehab with.

They all told these similar stories that George Floyd was not just a generic person who should be reduced to a hashtag. He was a man of flesh and blood. But he was distinct in the way he loved people, in the ways that he hugged people. And he was incredibly distinct in his positivity and optimism that despite everything that was happening to him and had happened to him, he was going to make a difference. Up until the last days of his life, he never lost that.

Chris Hayes: We'll be right back after we take this quick break.

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Chris Hayes: Let's talk a little bit about who he was, what his personality was. Because it does come across like I totally agree with you and like one of the things, you know, you're a reporter and you learn this as a reporter, right. Like A, people are complicated, really complicated. I mean that's true of if you're asked to write a 5,000-word profile of anyone that you love, a family member, right, and you want to write an honest profile like there would be a lot of complexity there.

Also like some people are harrassable. Some people are like kind of jerks. Like and some people that terrible things happen to can be kind of ornery. Or, you know, there's all sorts of complexity. It does come across that this is a particularly like soulful and sensitive individual in terms of who he was, just his personality. That comes across in how he's described by this friends and stuff.

And tell me a little bit about like what kind of a guy he was?

Robert Samuels: Yes. So George Floyd, you know, he was 6'6" and 225 pounds, a big muscular guy. He wasn't always that way. He was pretty lanky when he was growing up. And he used to be mocked because he was so skinny until people saw what he could do with a basketball and a football.

So they told him, you know, Supreme Court that's cool. But the way that people really make it out of this neighborhood is if they're great athletes --

(CROSSTALK)

Chris Hayes: Right.

Robert Samuels: -- and so that's what George Floyd invest in. But when you talk to the people who are with him on the Jackets football team, which was one of the best teams in this state and known for their ruthless aggressive style. They'd make every game a morality play, you know, the coach would say, "This is the rich against the poor."

George Floyd was often mocked because he was not a ruthless player. He did not like to hit, he did not like to be hit. One of the most entertaining anecdotes in the book is, I'm not very good with football. But he's on the field and a person's charging at him who's bigger than he is and wider, who could really do some damage to him and they're at practice. And instead of getting tackled, George Floyd just throws him the ball. And they laugh and he laughs and that's who he was.

The other thing about George Floyd is people would say he had almost the opposite of a Napoleon complex. He was very self-conscious about his size.

Chris Hayes: Yes.

Robert Samuels: So if he was walking into a room with strangers he'd want to go and shake people's hands and to let them know he wasn't there to intimidate them, he wasn't there to scare them. And the three words that he's most associated with now in his death are, "I can't breathe". But when we talked to so many people who knew him, they talk about the last thing he would always say to them is, "I love you".

Now, the first we heard that from one of his girlfriends and then we heard it from his second girlfriend. And we thought well, you know, this guy's just good with girls. But then we learned about it with all his other friends too. That those were the last words that he had ever shared with them. He'd end most phone calls and most text messages with it, "I love you". Because he felt that as being Black and being poor and living in the conditions in which he was living, hearing those words was not something that people in his situation often heard enough.

Chris Hayes: So he develops this incredible frame, and he is a naturally gifted athlete and is a quite elevated level of athletic ability in high school. What happens next?

Robert Samuels: Well, his big dream is to get a football scholarship which would then take him to play pro. But when he gets to college, he realizes that he cannot meet the academic requirements to play. And it's incredibly hard for him. This is the cruel contradiction of this. You know, he was good at these sports, but he really built himself up, his size, developed his body so he could play these games.

And then at the end, he can't do it because he can't meet the academic requirements for post-secondary education. So it's one of those real cruel contradictions. So what's he left with? He's left with returning to a community during a time when the policing within his community has increased, this is the war on drugs era, this is the crime bill era in a place where the only true economics in the community are to deal drugs. And that's what George Floyd begins to do.

Now, when we talked to people about his ability to hustle, those who hustled with him say that his heart was never really in it. He wasn't particularly good at it. It was something he did because he had to do. And ultimately, he got caught.

And in a world where, in Texas at that time, there was no public defender system, there is not a lot of grace for people who looked like he did. He pleaded guilty to a number of drug-related charges both usage and possession because he thought there was no other option, which leaves him with the brand of convicted felon.

And when you get that brand in Texas, like many other states at the time, that meant it was going to be fairly impossible for you to get a job. You could not get a professional license in Texas if you were a former felon, which prohibited you from one in three jobs in Texas. You couldn't become a barber if you wanted to.

So what does that lead to, right? It leads to rolling the dice on that experience, but it also leads to a feeling of depression and escapism that no system in Texas was truly equipped to handle.

At that time, Governor George W. Bush restricted the number of safe beds, those are beds for people who have drug dependency issues and addiction issues. He restricted the number of those in prison. They did not expand Medicaid, which meant George Floyd could not get health insurance.

And so, here he was with this issue and no way to fix it.

Chris Hayes: This is by his mid-20s, right? I mean, at this point he --

Robert Samuels: Yes.

Chris Hayes: -- has developed a substance dependence, right?

Robert Samuels: Yes.

Chris Hayes: What drugs?

Robert Samuels: So, at first, we know about largely opioids.

Chris Hayes: Yes.

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Why Is This Happening? 'His Name is George Floyd' with Robert Samuels - MSNBC