This is just a sidebar to both the George Floyd and Daunte Wright travesties/tragedies.
I came across it while reading this excellent and moving WaPo piece, posted yesterday by Robert Samuels. It’s well worth the read, an in-depth look at Ms Ross’ part in both George Floyd’s life and in Derek Chauvin’s trial for Floyd’s murder. But it’s much more than that — it’s a story that explores her relationship with George, but also weaves all the disparate, destructive elements of Minnesota’s fraught relationship with its police forces, along with some amazing photojournalism by Joshua Lott. It’s well worth the price of one month’s subscription just to read this one item.
But what most blew me away in the article (and there’s a lot of very powerful narrative and anecdote there), was the strong connection that was made at Floyd’s funeral where, by happenstance, she sat next to Toshira Garraway, the fiance of another black man who died under very suspicious circumstances involving the next-door St Paul police, Justin Teigen. The two ladies forged a friendship based on shared grief, but also based on the need to change the toxic police culture that led to their lovers’ deaths.
After the trial had concluded and the jury was deliberating, Garraway was holding an annual memorial for her fiance, and she’d asked Ross to speak at it, where Ross made a powerful statement (that became the story’s title) despite her stage fright.
As soon as the relatives began to gather, it was clear why [Garraway] had asked to keep the speeches short. There were so many families. There was the mother of Demetrius Hill, who said her son died in a botched police raid in 1997. There was the best friend of Travis Jordan, who was killed in 2018 when police came to his house after his girlfriend reported he was suicidal — police said he threatened them with a knife. There was Jamar Clark’s family, and Hardel Sherrell’s family, and more.
“We’re going to have the girlfriend of George Floyd, Courteney Ross, who is here speak,” Garraway told the crowd. “She doesn’t really come out too much …”
Cellphones went up. A man FaceTimed a friend and started whispering, “She’s here, she’s here.”
Ross grabbed the microphone, but struggled to say anything.
“We got your back, Courteney,” someone yelled, and the crowd began to cheer her on.
“Floyd was my man,” she said. “But George Floyd is a movement. And his name speaks for everyone who has been affected by police violence!”
The first part of that statement became the title of Samuels’ WaPo story. “Floyd,” btw, was her term of affection for him.
After the rally, she was approached by the parents of an autistic child who was killed by police during a beyond-ironic “wellness check;” the parents invited Ross to share time with them at their home, then this happened:
As they talked, Garcia checked his phone.
“They’ve killed another one,” he said. “In Brooklyn Center — that’s where we used to live.”
“It’s too much,” Ross said.
She learned when she got home that the 20-year-old man who died was one of her former students.
Daunte Wright was “a silly boy," a goofy student who required extra attention because he “needed a lot of love,” she said.
“It’s too much,” Ross repeated.