This article was first published in BU Today on May 24, 2022. Video by Pam DeBaross, Koeun Neak, and Devin Hahn | Photos by Cydney Scott & Jackie Riccardi | Text by BU Today staff
Excerpt
For 9 minutes and 29 seconds, Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man handcuffed and pinned on the ground. And thanks to a bystander’s cell phone video, when a nation watched in horror, a racial reckoning was at hand. Now, two years after Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, Chauvin has been convicted and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison, and Floyd’s family has reached a historic $27 million settlement with the city of Minneapolis.
But has anything really changed? Have we as a country, as a society, learned from the tragedy, moved forward, or is Floyd’s murder just another reminder of how far we still have to go? On the second anniversary of Floyd’s death, BU Today took these questions to several members of the Boston University community. Listen, and read, what they have to say.