Alesha sayed biography of george floyd

Two years after his murder, most people still only know George Floyd for the way he died: Under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis, Minn. Many don't know how he lived — that he habitually told friends that he loved them, often in all-caps text messages; that he was self-conscious about his 6-footinch frame and that he suffered from lifelong claustrophobia; that he and his roommate in Minneapolis moved their mattresses into the living room right next to each other.

They had met each other in rehab, and they wanted to help ensure that they didn't stray," said Robert Samuels, a national political enterprise reporter for The Washington Post. The pair of reporters say the book is a story about how racism affected every part of Floyd's life, starting more than years ago. But during the turn of the century, he lost all of his land to fraudulent tax sales and dubious business deals, and he was unable to transfer any of that to his descendants.

And it impacted his life," Olorunnipa said. Olorunnipa and Samuels spoke with NPR's All Things Considered about Floyd's personality, his awareness of his physical presence, his missteps and how he was on his way to coming back from them.

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Florido: One detail that struck me in your reporting and that comes up over and over throughout the book is he was really aware that his sort of mere presence as a big, Black man often scared people. Why did you dive into this aspect of his personality? Olorunnipa: It's key to understanding those moments that we all saw on the video of Floyd's final moments, his fear of being assaulted by the police.

From his earliest days, he would go into a room and shake everyone by hand just to put them at ease, just to say, you know, "I know I'm a big guy, I know my size may intimidate you, but, you know, look at me eye to eye. I'm OK, I'm not going to hurt you. Samuels: It was also one of the cruelest contradictions about himself. By the time he gets to high school, he is this tall string bean of a guy.

And immediately, people say, what you need to do is focus on playing football. And George Floyd was taught that maybe academics isn't the way to escape poverty, football is.