‘His Name Is George Floyd’
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2022
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the murder of George Floyd, reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa spent months learning everything they could about Floyd’s life. The story they reveal in a new book shows how systemic racism shaped and shortened it.
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“He's everywhere — but he's not here. He's on somebody's wall. He's on somebody's billboard. … He's in a newspaper, but he's not here. He's here in spirit. But he's not here.”
In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, he became a symbol and a rallying cry. But what was missing in our understanding was the man himself — a figure who was complicated, full of ambition, shaped by his family and his community and centuries of systemic racism.
The Washington Post set out to better understand who Floyd really was and reported a series of stories about George Floyd’s America. We made a podcast based on this reporting, “The Life of George Floyd,” which we’re playing today for you in full. But two of the reporters on that project still had questions.
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa have now written a book that delves deeper into Floyd’s life — what he was like as a father, a boyfriend, a classmate, an athlete, how ambitious he was. And how those ambitions were hobbled by systemic racism. They learned about things that happened to Floyd’s family, hundreds of years before he was born, that shaped everything that would happen to him later.
If you’d like to read an excerpt of Robert and Tolu’s book, you can find that here: How George Floyd Spent His Final Hours.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Shortly after George Floyd was murdered in the summer of 2020, the Washington Post got |
| 0:07.3 | together and said, we wanted to do an investigation of Floyd's life and look at how systemic racism |
| 0:13.6 | impacted his life from various different aspects, whether you're looking at housing, |
| 0:18.5 | looking at education, looking at healthcare. |
| 0:21.2 | Tell LeMand I, we knew there was a lot more work to be done if we were truly to understand |
| 0:28.6 | the soul of George Floyd and also to get the pulse speed of the movement that followed |
| 0:34.0 | after his death. |
| 0:36.7 | That's Robert Samuels and Tollou Olu-Rinipa. |
| 0:39.9 | If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you might remember that they were |
| 0:43.3 | two of the reporters who narrated our episode, The Life of George Floyd. |
| 0:48.4 | That episode tied together reporting from a whole team of journalists at the post, who |
| 0:52.5 | spent months after George Floyd's murder just trying to learn as much as they could about |
| 0:57.6 | who this person was. |
| 0:59.6 | But he was like as a father, a boyfriends, a classmate, an athlete, a nephew, how ambitious |
| 1:06.8 | he was and how those ambitions were hobbled by the same systemic racism that shortened his |
| 1:12.1 | life. |
| 1:13.2 | The things that happened to George Floyd's family, hundreds of years before he was even |
| 1:17.1 | born, that shaped everything that would happen to him hundreds of years later. |
| 1:25.0 | Tollou and Robert published their stories in the Washington Post and they helped us make |
| 1:28.8 | the podcast episode based around their incredible reporting. |
| 1:32.8 | But they couldn't stop thinking about George Floyd and they still had so many questions about |
| 1:37.7 | his life. |
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