Americans remember George Floyd on fifth anniversary of his death

Americans across the country are remembering George Floyd five years after he was killed by police, with special gatherings in the city where he grew up and the one where he died.

The murder of Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin led to nationwide protests against racism and police brutality.

On Sunday, Floyd’s family gathered in their hometown of Houston near Floyd’s gravesite for an event led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, while Minneapolis held several commemorations.

What many hailed as a national “reckoning” with racism after Floyd’s death, though, seems to be fading as President Donald Trump starts to roll back police reforms in Minneapolis and other cities.

In Minneapolis, community members planned a morning church service, a candlelight vigil and an evening gospel concert on Sunday to remember Floyd.

The events were a part of the annual Rise and Remember Festival taking place in George Floyd Square, the intersection where Floyd was murdered and which has since been named to honour him.

“Now is the time for the people to rise up and continue the good work we started,” Angela Harrelson, Floyd’s aunt and co-chair of the Rise and Remember nonprofit, said in a statement about the festival.

In Houston, where Floyd grew up and where he is buried, local organisations planned poetry sessions, musical performances and speeches by local pastors.

Floyd was murdered in 2020 during a police arrest in Minneapolis when Chauvin, a white police officer, stood on his neck for more than nine minutes.

The killing – captured on a bystander’s phone camera – sparked global outrage and a wave of demonstrations against racial injustice and police use of force.

Chauvin has been serving a 22-year prison sentence after he was convicted of murdering the 46-year-old. Other officers were convicted for failing to intervene in the killing.

In a post on X, Rev Sharpton said Floyd’s death had “forced a long overdue reckoning with systemic racism and galvanized millions to take to the streets in protest”.

“The conviction of the officer responsible was a rare step toward justice, but our work is far from over,” he said.

In the wake of Floyd’s death, under former President Joe Biden, the justice department opened civil investigations into several local law enforcement agencies, including Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix and Lexington, Mississippi, where investigators found evidence of systemic police misconduct.

The department reached agreements with both the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments that included oversight measures like enhanced training, accountability, and improved data collection of police activity.

But last Wednesday, the Trump administration said those findings relied on “flawed methodologies and incomplete data”.

Administration officials said the agreement were “handcuffing” local police departments.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, though, said this week that his city would still “comply with every sentence, of every paragraph, of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year”.

Since returning to office, Trump has also taken aim at Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) measures intended to reduce racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. Early in his tenure, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate DEI policies in the federal government, some of which were the result of protests during what is often called “Black Lives Matter Summer”, held after the deaths of Floyd and others,

Critics including Trump say such programmes can themselves be discriminatory. Addressing West Point on Saturday, he said that in ending DEI in the military the administration was “getting rid of the distractions” and “focusing our military on its core mission”.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, removed Black Lives Matter Plaza, a strip of road that was emblazoned with the phrase near the White House. This week, a famous mural of Floyd in Houston was destroyed as part of a building demolition, as well, according to Houston Public Media.

Recent surveys suggest Americans believe there have been few improvements for the lives of black people in the US five years after Floyd’s passing, including a May survey from Pew Research Center in which 72% of participants said there had been no meaningful changes.

The number of Americans expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement has also fallen by 15% since June 2020, the same survey suggests.