George’s Floyd’s death was a reminder that racial violence isn’t new

Clarence Cross Jr. changed his route after police pepper-sprayed an Army lieutenant on the same highway he often traveled.

Teia Brown feared for her daughters after Sandra Bland was pulled from her car by police and days later ended up dead in a jail cell.

Donya Collins worried about her safety after Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighborhood watchman on his way back from the store.

USA TODAY talked to Black Americans across the country about moments of violence that resonated with them and had a lasting impact. For some, the death of George Floyd at the hands of police one year ago on May 25, 2020, was one of those moments. There were many others.

The moments reminded them, they said, how vulnerable people of color are and how justice hasn't always been served. These high-profile attacks left them fearful of police, suspicious of others and worried for their lives and the safety of their loved ones.

“What binds all this together is the false promise of civil rights in this country for Black Americans,’’ said Jason Williams, assistant professor of justice studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “The reason why police can pull us over, discriminate against us and kneel on our beings is because they understand that this country still doesn't take our citizenship, our rights, our positionality in this country seriously.” 

Racial violence in the United States isn’t new.

The country has a long history of violence against Black people, from the torture of enslaved Africans to lynchings during the Jim Crow era to the brutal beatings and killings of protesters during the civil rights movement. Some veterans of the civil rights movement say it was Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy murdered in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 after being accused of flirting with a white woman, that spurred them into action.

Watching the death of Floyd and other Black men and women exacerbates existing fears about encounters with police, Williams said. And with social media offering unfiltered views, more people can witness ‘’state-sanctioned’’ deaths right before their eyes, he said.

“The smokescreens are now annihilated,’’ Williams said. “For Black Americans, it's like, ‘Well, this is what we've been living our entire 400-and-plus years here.”

After Bland’s death, Brown worried more about driving alone or through a white neighborhood where she said you can “feel the eyes on you.’’

Bland, a Black woman, was found dead in a Texas cell in 2015 three days after a traffic stop by a white state trooper.

At the time, Brown sat on the edge of her bed and watched the newscast. It made her nervous, fearful and sad. She prayed Bland’s family would find peace. She prayed white police officers would stop killing Black people.

“How could she have been thought of as a threat?’’ Brown, now 59, wondered. “Why are they pulling her out of the car? What is she doing? She's a woman. Stop! That could be my daughter. It could be me.”

Years later, Brown, a retired information assistant in Camp Springs, Maryland, doesn’t watch the videos posted on social media of unarmed Black men and women being shot or killed by police. She worries her husband, Rob, could be next.

She still gets angry remembering clerks who followed her in stores. “I’m like dude, ‘I have a pocket full of cash ... Why are you doing this to me?’”

The mother of two daughters called it “absolutely frightening” that one day her children will no longer live in her house and may encounter danger.

“How do I protect them or keep them from being victims?’’ she said. 

She doesn’t understand why some people feel threatened by her brown skin and why they don’t understand Black people are trying to “strive and thrive just like everybody else.”

“When will they get it?’’ she said. “What is it about my blackness or our blackness that scares you so much?” 

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Cross takes a different route now when he drives from his home in Washington, D.C., to visit family in North Carolina. And as a Black man, he said he won’t dare take another trip alone across the country.

“It would be too risky,’’ said Cross, 73, a retired VA hospital chaplain. “I’m fearful of what could happen.”

Cross overhauled his road trip habits after he watched the video of Army Lt. Caron Nazario being pulled over by local police in December, pepper-sprayed, then ordered to lie on the ground at a gas station in Virginia.

It made Cross relive his own experience when he was also stopped along the U.S. Route 460 by a local officer about three years ago while he was traveling home after visiting family in North Carolina.

Cross remembered the officer approached his car and immediately unsnapped his holster. Cross said he was so upset by that move he angrily questioned the officer.

“I thought that was over the top,’’ recalled Cross, who said he didn’t realize the speed limit in the small town had changed from 55 mph to 35 mph.  “I said, ‘Why are you doing that? I'm not a threat to you.'’’

He said his friends later scolded him, calling him crazy for challenging the police officer and warning he could have been shot. Cross said he was issued a ticket for reckless driving. His lawyer challenged the ticket, which he said was reduced to a lesser offense.

Watching Nazario’s encounter earlier this year stirred up that anger again. “You realize it could have been you,’’ he said.

Cross, who served two years as a policeman in the Army, said he knows in his “heart of hearts’’ that not all policemen are bad. But he was trained to tell people why they were being stopped. That didn’t appear to happen with Nazario.

“I know that we are treated differently and the potential is always there to get harassed or whatever, unnecessarily,’’ he said.

More: Police killings of Black men in the U.S. and what happened to the officers

Anastassia Doctor was planning an outing with girlfriends when a news alert popped up on her cellphone that Philando Castile had been killed by a police officer in Minnesota. The day before on July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling had been fatally shot by a policeman in Louisiana. 

“It was like I had just woken up from the Matrix,” recalled Doctor, who at the time was stationed at an Army base in Hawaii. “It was like, Where have I been?' ”

She texted her friends. Many of them had Black sons. “You know they killed another Black man, right?”

Doctor, 46, was bothered that her friends weren’t more upset. She never spoke to them again. 

“I was like, ‘Wow, they could just hunt us down and kill us and nobody's going to say anything?’’’ she said.

Doctor joined chapters of Black Lives Matter and the NAACP when she moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, two years later.

While Doctor recounted police shootings of other Black people, she said the deaths of Castile and Sterling are “burned’’ into her memory in part because they were caught on video.

Sterling, who was selling CDs outside a store in Baton Rouge, was shot by a policeman six times, including three times in the back. Police said Sterling was found with a gun. One of the officers was fired in 2018 after an excessive force investigation.

Castile’s girlfriend captured part of the encounter on Facebook when an officer shot him in a car in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Her daughter was in the back seat. 

“It was more traumatizing,’’ recalled Doctor, who now lives in Springfield, Virginia.

She said Floyd’s death also made her angry. A video showed Derek Chauvin, a former police officer, kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. 

“All of us felt powerless,’’ she said.

The trauma, said Doctor, is made worse when focus shifts to the history of the person killed. 

“There's never a perfect victim when you're talking about Black people,’’ she said. “They're going to find something, some reason why you deserve to die.”

Nicholas Gibbs was in the middle of a piano lesson in Los Angeles when his mother abruptly sent his teacher home. News broke that the white police officers who beat Rodney King had been acquitted and the city was burning.

Gibbs sheltered at home for days. He remembers the fire, the anger.

Gibbs was about 11 years old when he watched the video of King being beaten. Even at that age, he knew it was wrong.

“It was about him being Black,” he said. “It was on camera and it was obviously unnecessary.” 

Soon after, Gibbs learned that a Black girl in Los Angeles not much older than him, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, had been killed by a Korean store owner, Soon Ja Du. 

Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but instead of jail time she was placed on five years' probation with 400 hours of community service, a $500 restitution and funeral expenses.

“The feeling at the time was that our lives didn’t matter,” recalled Gibbs, 40. “Things could happen to us and nothing would happen to the perpetrators.”

After the acquittals in King’s case, his mom, an immigrant from Belize, explained what he needed to do so that what happened to King wouldn’t happen to him: Be calm, follow the officer’s directions, don’t do anything that could give police a way to assassinate your character. 

“She did make me feel like because you’re Black you have to be better,” Gibbs said. 

The lessons sunk in when he started driving as a teenager. They are lessons Gibbs, a teacher in Texas, still uses to ensure he makes it home to his family each night.

“You just hope your game plan works,” he said.

The day before her eighth birthday, Kadiatou Tubman saw her name on the television for the first time. A woman also named Kadiatou was on the news because her son, Amadou Diallo, had been shot to death by police. Diallo had immigrated to New York City from Guinea, just like Tubman’s mother.

Four white officers said they feared for their lives because Diallo drew an object that looked like a gun. It was a wallet. All four were charged with second-degree murder amid protests and later acquitted in the Feb. 4, 1999, shooting.

Tubman, 30, said it wasn’t until she had her first encounter with police a few years later that the pain Diallo’s death caused her community became personal.

On a warm, almost-summer day, Tubman’s mother rushed her and her siblings home from school in a panic. When they arrived at their fifth-floor Brooklyn apartment, their landlord was standing at the door with a police officer. They were being evicted.

The eviction and the five years her family spent in the shelter system inspired Tubman to become a housing advocate. Tubman, who works at a Black history and culture research library, teaches students about less talked about ways policing affects  them, including eviction.

“Seeing what I saw on the news with police brutality and then coming home to have police officers remove us from our home, it just awakened something in me,” said Tubman, who still lives in Brooklyn. “I was like: ‘OK, I am Black. This is what it’s like to be Black in America.’”

In 2013, K.W. Tulloss helped organize a rally in Los Angeles after a jury thousands of miles away in Florida acquitted George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon.

“That was even more of a slap in the face,’’ Tulloss recalled.

Tulloss, who then headed the western region of the National Action Network, a social justice group, had tracked the 2012 case since he saw news reports that Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida, had shot and killed Trayvon, who was 17 and Black.

Trayvon had gone to the store for Skittles and was walking home when he was confronted by Zimmerman. During an altercation, Zimmerman shot Trayvon, who was unarmed.

“This was literally the moment that really opened up my eyes to the ugliness of hatred in our country,’’ said Tulloss, 43, pastor of Weller Street Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. “Racism was still alive and well. It was just in a new form. … People weren’t afraid to shoot no more. They were hiding behind the law of justice, justifying profiling.’’

Zimmerman was acquitted of charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter the next year.

Tulloss said like many he had been hopeful race relations had improved, particularly after the country elected Barack Obama its first Black president. But Zimmerman’s acquittal showed otherwise, he said.

“Many of us were optimistic that this was a post-race society,’’ Tulloss said. “Well, it seemed like, no, this was the coming-out party for racism.’’

“And it's coming back out,” he said.

Tulloss said Floyd’s death and the protests that followed came as many people were already in a “moment of righteous indignation” about the police shootings of other unarmed Black people.

“Enough is enough,’’ he said. “We have to turn our anger into passion. We have to really change laws.”

More: ‘More work to be done’: Derek Chauvin murder conviction brings relief, resolve to keep fighting for justice in George Floyd's name

Collins stormed out of the house, sat in the yard and cried. A jury had just acquitted Zimmerman of all charges, and it felt as if a stone had been dropped onto her stomach.

Her mother held her to her chest. “How am I going to go to school and live my life?” she asked her mother.

“You’re going to pray before you go out every day that you’ll be able to come home,” her mother told her.

Collins saw herself in Trayvon.

“It set in that they could really kill me and get away with it,” said Collins, a 20-year-old Black woman from Indianapolis. “I realized I’m not safe anymore. I realized that the people I love aren’t safe. ... I will remember that moment until the day I die.”

Eight years later, Collins’ worst fears came true when she saw her childhood friend staring back at her on the news.

In May 2020, an Indianapolis police officer shot and killed 21-year-old Dreasjon Reed during a pursuit captured on Facebook Live.

Collins’ mom used to work with Reed’s. She has known him since she was 7 years old. He bought her fries when she forgot her lunch money. When they were older, they babysat their younger siblings and played video games.

“It hurts in a way I never knew I could hurt,” she said. “Your heart cracks, and it breaks you. I watched my friend die.”

Collins prayed for Black people not to be killed. She prayed for God to take the world out of people’s hands and fix it. She prayed for “a miracle that I know will never come.”

She lives with the trauma of that moment.

“Every day I live in some sort of fear,’’ she said. “Every time I see a cop car, I get a pit of anxiety in my stomach.”