Delivering the eulogy at a memorial service inside a university chapel in Minneapolis, Sharpton said Floyd’s fate – dying at the hands of police, pinned to the ground under the knee of a white officer – symbolized a universal experience of police brutality for African Americans.
Memorial tributes for Floyd occurred in Minneapolis, where he was killed on May 25, and in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, a major flashpoint for demonstrations stirred by his death.
In the nation’s capital on Thursday, hundreds if not thousands assembled for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, many sitting on the ground listening to speakers and chanting, “Say his name – George Floyd,” before an evening thunderstorm dispersed the crowd.
Floyd’s brother, Terrence Floyd, joined an outdoor memorial on Thursday in a Brooklyn park where many in the crowd knelt in the grass in the afternoon sunshine in a symbol of protest and chanted, “No justice, no peace.”
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio took the stage to pledge that Floyd’s death would lead to substantive changes in police practices in the nation’s largest city, and called for greater interracial empathy.
