Victim of police brutality. George Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man who was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and raised in Houston, Texas. He attended Yates High School, where he played on the basketball and football teams. Floyd was a star tight end for Yates, helping them to the 1992 state championship final game. He played basketball at South Florida Community College from 1993 to 1995. Floyd returned to Houston where he joined the hip hop group Screwed Up Click and rapped under the stage name "Big Floyd." In 2014, Floyd moved to Minnesota. He lived in St. Louis Park and worked in nearby Minneapolis as a restaurant security guard for five years. At the time of his death, Floyd had recently lost his job due to Minnesota's stay-at-home order during the COVID-19 pandemic. Floyd was the father of two daughters and a son. He was described as a "gentle giant" by friends and family. During the course of being arrested after a store clerk alleged he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill, Floyd died when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds while officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Kiernan Lane held down his legs. Officer Tou Thao stood nearby and failed to intervene.

Floyd's death sparked mass protests against police brutality toward Black Americans in over 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries, making it the largest protest in US history at that time. Floyd's last words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and other protestors. Several statues of historical figures associated with slavery and the Confederacy were removed or vandalized in May 2020. On April 20, 2021, Derek Chauvin was found guilty of deprivation of rights under color of law, unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, and was sentenced to twenty-one years in federal prison and twenty-two and half years in state prison. It was the first conviction of a white police officer in Minnesota for the murder of a Black person. The next year, on February 24, officers J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Kiernan Lane, and Tou Thao were found guilty of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter and deprivation of rights under color of law, resulting in death. Kueng and Thai were also found guilty of willfully failing to intervene to stop the use of unreasonable force. Kueng was sentenced to three years in federal prison and three and a half years in state prison. Lane was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison and three years in state prison, and Thao was sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison and four and three-quarter years in state prison. In honor of George Floyd, the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives proposed the BREATHE Act in July 2020 to divest taxpayer dollars from policing and invest in alternate, community-based approaches to public safety. On September 18, 2020, the Minneapolis City Council approved designating the section of Chicago Avenue between 37th and 39th Streets as George Perry Floyd Jr. Place, with a marker at the intersection with 38th Street where the incident took place. In that same year, US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee proposed the George Floyd Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act to reduce police brutality and establish national policing standards and accreditations. While the bill died in committee, it was reintroduced in 2021. In May 2022, Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa published a biography of Floyd titled His Name Is George Floyd.