For Black people in this country, Floyd’s last words — “I can’t breathe”— served as yet another devastating reminder of the dangers of interacting with the police.
As soon as he arrived in town, Daryl Washington drove to the mural and stared up at George Floyd’s eyes. He could not stop thinking about him — a fellow Black man, a man he had never met, yet one he traveled 250 miles to see laid to rest.
But this trip wasn’t for work. He wasn’t in town collecting evidence or representing Floyd’s family. He arrived here because he felt called to Houston — Floyd’s hometown and a city, like America, grieving over the brutal image of a white officer pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck until his body went limp on the asphalt. Another reminder that the slightest movement, a terse reply, simply living and breathing in your own skin can so quickly end with a bullet or a chokehold.
But it was in the early 1990s, when white Los Angeles police officers beat Rodney King and were acquitted of criminal charges, that Washington decided to dedicate himself to fighting police brutality. After he graduated from law school, he moved to Texas and has spent the last 15 years crisscrossing the state, trying to bring justice to people hurt, and killed, by police.
As he watched the faraway cities on the screen, his mind focused on Texas. He thought about Floyd’s friends in Houston and about the 26-year-old Black protester he’s representing in Dallas who lost his left eye after police fired rubber bullets into the crowd last week. Washington couldn’t stop thinking.Washington was thinking, too, of Jordan Edwards and Botham Jean and of both of their families, whom he’d represented as their civil rights attorney.
“Every time I take a case, I think, this could be my child,” he said. “It’s just a fact of life for Black people in this country.”In recent years, Washington has concentrated on cases involving so-calledinside her Louisville, Ky., home in March. It was 6 p.m. and he still had a two-hour drive from Killeen back to Dallas. His mind, though, was already on his next trip, to see Floyd.On Sunday, Washington arrived in Houston, to mark the moment Floyd had led him to, a time when the faces of strangers shared the same binding expression. He wanted to stop by a makeshift memorial with a mural. It was a short walk from Cuney Homes, the public housing project where Floyd grew up in the Third Ward.
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