His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Name: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Author: Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
ISBN: 9780593490624

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

award won

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Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

award won

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#53 of 3,809 books · #28 in Biography & Memoir

Won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (2023). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 4 other awards.

His Name Is George Floyd won the BCALA 2023 Honor Nonfiction Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd's life and legacy—from his family's roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing—telling the story of how one man's tragic experience brought about a global movement for change. The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off a series of protests in the United States and around the world, awakening millions to the dire need for reimagining this country's broken systems of policing. But behind a face that would be graffitied onto countless murals, and a name that has become synonymous with civil rights, there is the reality of one man's stolen life: a life beset by suffocating systemic pressures that ultimately proved inescapable. This biography of George Floyd shows the athletic young boy raised in the projects of Houston's Third Ward who would become a father, a partner, a friend, and a man constantly in search of a better life. In retracing Floyd's story, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa bring to light the determination Floyd carried as he faced the relentless struggle to survive as a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the larger context of America's deeply troubled history of institutional racism, His Name Is George Floyd examines the Floyd family's roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his Houston schools, the overpolicing of his communities, the devastating snares of the prison system, and his attempts to break free from drug dependence—putting today's inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews and extensive original reporting, Samuels and Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd's America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.

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