Post Reports20 Maj 2022

‘His Name Is George Floyd’

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.

“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.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(1939)

Goodbye from "Post Reports"

Just over seven years ago, we launched this daily news podcast from The Washington Post.Our goal was to bring you inside our newsroom, sharing our reporting with listeners to help make sense of what w...

6 Feb 8min

A surprise Kennedy Center makeover

In his second term, President Donald Trump has gone on a mission to reinvent the Kennedy Center, the beloved performing arts venue in Washington, D.C.Trump promised to overhaul the center’s programmin...

3 Feb 18min

A teddy bear, an ice skate: What remains from last year's deadly D.C. plane crash

In late January of last year, an American Eagle flight and a U.S. Army helicopter collided above the Potomac River, killing everyone aboard both aircraft. It was the deadliest flight disaster in the U...

2 Feb 15min

Jason Rezaian, Iran and the costs of press freedom

Ten years ago this month, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian was freed from Iran’s Evin prison. He and his wife, Yeganeh, had been arrested at their home in Tehran and falsely accused of espiona...

31 Jan 37min

Is Minneapolis a turning point in Trump's presidency?

Since the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minnesota, President Donald Trump and his administration are feeling the pressure — not only from Democrats, but also from members ...

30 Jan 35min

The quest to ‘destructively scan’ all the world’s books

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. It was code-named Project Panama, and internal documents filed in cour...

29 Jan 27min

Why smaller houses can make us happier

Houses in the United States keep getting bigger, but the people in bigger houses aren’t necessarily happier. Bigger homes often come with higher costs and more maintenance and can pull people further ...

28 Jan 20min

How Kristi Noem transformed immigration enforcement

After both Renée Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by Department of Homeland Security officers in Minneapolis this month, the story from the agency’s secretary, Kristi L. Noem, was that these ...

27 Jan 24min