Police violence against Black lives has shaped American history for generations, and today marks six years since that history became impossible to ignore. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd drew his last breath on a Minneapolis street while the world watched through a cellphone screen. The fight for justice his death ignited has never been more urgent than it is right now. Six years of marches, legislation, grief, and renewed demands have not yet produced the federal reform that Floyd’s murder seemed to make inevitable. The streets that filled with millions in the summer of 2020 are quieter today. The battle, however, has moved into congressional hearing rooms, into state legislatures, and into the hearts of every Black family in America that has ever rehearsed the talk with a son or daughter before they leave the house.
Today, on this sixth anniversary, Maryland’s own Rep. Glenn Ivey and the Congressional Black Caucus are renewing the push to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act on Capitol Hill. May 25 marks the sixth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man whose dying breaths under the knee of a white police officer ignited a global reckoning on racial injustice and police accountability. The legislation bearing his name is still waiting. The names on the wall are still growing. For the African diaspora community in the DMV, which has buried its own in this country’s streets for decades, this history is not abstract. It is personal, ongoing, and deeply connected to the community’s daily reality.
This is not just a story about one man in Minneapolis. It stretches from a Bronx apartment building in 1999 to a Baltimore police van in 2015. Guinean immigrants, Nigerian students, and American-born Black men and women have all encountered law enforcement in this country and did not survive the encounter. Every name deserves to be spoken today.
What Happened on May 25, 2020
A Counterfeit Twenty Dollar Bill and Nine Minutes
George Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes at a convenience store in Minneapolis. That is the complete list of reasons the police were called. What followed redefined American history.
Floyd died after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes. Images caught on cellphone video circulated around the world, moving millions to protest, demonstrate, and march in the months following his death. His words, “I can’t breathe,” echoed across every continent. His daughter Gianna, then seven years old, stood outside the White House the following year and told reporters her father was going to change the world.
Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck, faced conviction on all charges. Three other officers, Thomas Lane, J. Kueng, and Tou Thao, faced conviction in both federal and state courts for aiding and abetting. Days before former President Biden left the White House in January 2025, the city of Minneapolis and the Justice Department signed a proposed consent decree that would enact substantial changes to the police department, including banning chokeholds and neck restraints.
The Consent Decree Under Threat
That consent decree now faces an uncertain future. Just days before this sixth anniversary, President Trump’s Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the Minneapolis consent decree and a similar lawsuit in Louisville, Kentucky, that had been opened after the police shooting of Breonna Taylor. The message from Washington is unmistakable, and the African diaspora community in Maryland is watching it closely. OPB
The Reform That Still Has Not Passed
Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland’s 4th Congressional District, alongside members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Floyd’s family, is leading a renewed push to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a comprehensive federal reform bill that previously stalled in the face of partisan gridlock.
Ivey’s congressional district covers most of Prince George’s County and a portion of Montgomery County. These two counties are home to the largest concentration of African diaspora residents in the entire country. The legislation would lower the standard for prosecuting officer misconduct from “willfulness” to “recklessness,” reform qualified immunity, expand the Justice Department’s ability to investigate systemic misconduct, and mandate body-worn cameras for federal officers.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed a Democratic-controlled House in both 2020 and 2021, though mostly along party lines. The Senate has never passed it. Ivey told the AFRO that despite previous setbacks, “If not this congressional session, then the next. It’s been too long as it is, delayed but not denied.”
Amadou Diallo: When America Killed an African Dream
Forty-One Shots on a Bronx Doorstep
Long before George Floyd, long before smartphones made video evidence impossible to dismiss, there was Amadou Diallo. His story is one the African diaspora community in the DMV carries in its bones. West African mothers in the Bronx still tell it to their sons before they leave the apartment. Every school where African immigrant children sit should teach it.
Plainclothes officers of the New York Police Department’s Street Crime Unit fired 41 shots at unarmed Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, killing him on the steps of his apartment building shortly after midnight on February 4, 1999.
Diallo was born in 1976 in Liberia to his Guinean parents. His family’s business of exporting gemstones between Africa and Asia gave him the opportunity to study in several countries, including Thailand. The 23-year-old came to New York hoping to earn a computer science degree, but that dream ended in a burst of police gunfire just after midnight.
A Wallet Mistaken for a Gun
The object the police mistook for a weapon was a simple wallet. This event, both brutal and banal in its unfolding, quickly became one of the most striking cases in the contemporary history of police violence against Black lives in the United States.
The four officers claimed to have confused Diallo for a serial rapist. They shouted at him to show his hands. Diallo reached into his pocket instead, pulling out his wallet as he attempted to run for the safety of his building. One officer shouted “gun.” A witness later testified that no warning came before the officers fired 41 times, and that many shots were fired after Diallo had already fallen to the ground.
All four white New York City police officers were found not guilty on every charge. New York City eventually paid the family three million dollars in a wrongful death settlement. His mother, Kadiatou Diallo, used part of those funds to establish the Amadou Diallo Foundation, whose slogan comes from the last words her son spoke to her on the phone: “Mom, I’m going to college.”
A Warning That Has Never Expired
The Diallo case established a devastating precedent. An African immigrant could be shot 41 times outside his own front door, no officer would face criminal consequence, and the system designed to protect him would simply move on. More than 25 years later, West African mothers in the Bronx still caution their children to take their hands out of their pockets when they pass police officers. That is not a relic of 1999. That is the present tense for the African diaspora in America.
Maryland’s Own Wound: Freddie Gray in Baltimore
A Young Man Who Ran
The DMV African diaspora community does not need to look only to Minneapolis or New York to understand the weight of police violence against Black lives. Maryland has its own chapter of this history, written in Baltimore in April 2015.
On the morning of April 12, 2015, a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Carlos Gray Jr. allegedly made eye contact with a police officer at the corner of North and Mount in Baltimore, and started running. Making eye contact and running. Those were the circumstances that began everything.
Police arrested Gray for possession of a knife. While in custody, he sustained fatal injuries and was transported to the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. His death on April 19, 2015, resulted from injuries to his cervical spinal cord. Officers had failed to secure him inside the police van, contrary to a department policy that had taken effect just six days earlier.
Six Officers, Zero Convictions
The medical examiner ruled Gray’s death a homicide. The Baltimore State’s Attorney charged six officers with crimes ranging from reckless endangerment to second-degree depraved heart murder. Ultimately, four of the six officers took their cases to trial, and in each instance, the prosecution failed to secure a conviction. Charges against the remaining two were dropped. The city settled with Gray’s family for $6.4 million before the family even filed a lawsuit. Every officer returned to their life. The community did not.
The protests that followed were as much a reaction to Gray’s death as they were a reaction to four hundred years of slavery and systemic racism perpetrated against people of color in Baltimore and Maryland. The uprising brought the National Guard into Baltimore’s streets and a citywide curfew. Ten years later, the question of what actually changed remains difficult to answer honestly.
A Wall of Names: The Pattern Across America
From Staten Island to Louisville
The names accumulate over years and decades. Together, they form a pattern that no honest reading of the data allows anyone to dismiss as coincidence.
Eric Garner died in Staten Island in July 2014 after a police officer held him in a prolonged chokehold on a sidewalk. He said “I can’t breathe” eleven times. His words became a rallying cry six years before George Floyd spoke them. The officer was never charged.
Philando Castile, 32, was shot and killed during a Minnesota traffic stop in July 2016. Castile told the officer he had a registered gun in the car. Reaching for his driver’s license, he was shot five times at point-blank range. A jury acquitted the officer of all charges, and the city settled with the family for $3.8 million.
Tamir Rice was 12 years old when police arrived at a Cleveland recreation center in November 2014, where he was playing with a replica toy Airsoft gun. Within two seconds of arriving, an officer opened fire twice, hitting the boy once in the torso. He died a day later in a hospital. No officers faced charges.
Breonna Taylor was asleep in her Louisville apartment in March 2020 when officers forced their way in on a no-knock warrant. Police shot Taylor eight times, killing her. She was never considered a suspect in the drug investigation the officers were conducting. The man they were looking for had already been detained elsewhere. One officer eventually faced federal civil rights conviction. Nobody faced conviction for killing Breonna Taylor.
Everyday Moments That Became Final Moments
Tamir Rice was playing in a park. Natasha McKenna was having a mental health episode in Fairfax, Virginia. Walter Scott was going to an auto-parts store. Botham Jean was eating ice cream in his living room in Dallas. Atatiana Jefferson was babysitting her nephew at home in Fort Worth. Dominique Clayton was sleeping in her bed. Breonna Taylor was also asleep in her bed. None of them posed a threat. None of them survived.
What the Data Says About Police Violence and Black Lives
The statistics behind these individual names are staggering and deserve to be stated plainly.
In 2024, law enforcement killed 1,365 people across the United States, making it the deadliest year on record since tracking began in 2013. Despite a national decrease in violent crime, police killings continued to rise. Black people were 2.9 times more likely than white people to die at the hands of police.
According to the Washington Post’s database tracking every fatal police shooting between January 2015 and December 2024, Black Americans account for roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population yet die at the hands of police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. The Washington Post
The NAACP reports that Black people make up 13.4 percent of the population but account for 22 percent of fatal police shootings. That figure excludes non-lethal police violence entirely. NAACP
The 2024 Police Violence Report found that 64 percent of police killings occurred during traffic stops, responses to mental health crises, and situations where the victim was not threatening anyone with harm. Most people killed by police in 2024 posed no lethal threat when they died. Police Brutality Center
What This Means for the African Diaspora Today
The Immigrant Experience of Police Violence
Police violence against Black lives in America is not only a story about American-born Black men. African immigrants arrive in this country carrying ambition, qualifications, and the work ethic that the American narrative says it rewards. What they discover is that the color of their skin activates institutional assumptions that do not change regardless of where they were born, what language they speak, or what degree they hold.
Amadou Diallo arrived from Guinea. He wanted a computer science degree. He died in 1999 outside his own front door. That story functions as a 25-year warning inside the African diaspora community of the DMV. It is the reason African immigrant parents in PG County and Montgomery County still rehearse police encounter protocols with their children before they leave for school or work. It is part of the reason the 287(g) ban that Governor Wes Moore signed in February 2026 carries such profound emotional weight for this community. The fear of law enforcement, for an African immigrant in America, is not irrational. History made it rational.
The Legislative Road Ahead
Rep. Glenn Ivey connected the current moment directly to the African diaspora, telling the AFRO that “what’s happening with ICE is a powerful reminder of the need to have these kinds of legal protections in place.” That connection is not incidental. The same legal infrastructure enabling police to kill Black men without meaningful accountability also enables immigration enforcement to operate in African diaspora communities without transparency or consequence.
A Tennessee trial jury recently acquitted three former Memphis police officers of murder and other charges in the 2023 beating death of Tyre Nichols, which struck many observers as confirmation that the police reform moment has stalled. Furthermore, the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the Minneapolis consent decree signals a federal posture moving in the opposite direction of accountability.
Ivey continues pressing forward regardless. The Floyd family expressed gratitude to Ivey and his colleagues for reintroducing the legislation and continuing to fight. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act proposes banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, establishing a national registry tracking officers with excessive force histories, reforming qualified immunity, and mandating body-worn cameras. None of those provisions are radical. All of them are long overdue.
Six Years Later, the Work Continues
George Floyd’s daughter Gianna said her father was going to change the world. She was right, even if the change has come more slowly and with more resistance than 2020 seemed to promise. The consent decree in Minneapolis exists, even if the Trump administration is attempting to kill it. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act exists in Congress, even as the Senate has never voted on it. Body camera requirements, chokehold bans, and use-of-force reforms now exist in Maryland and dozens of other states, even though their enforcement remains uneven.
Meanwhile, the data on police violence and Black lives keeps showing that Black Americans die in police encounters at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The African diaspora community in the DMV navigates the same institutional landscape that took Amadou Diallo on a Bronx doorstep in 1999 and Freddie Gray in a Baltimore police van in 2015.
Six years after George Floyd died calling for his mother, Rep. Glenn Ivey is standing in the halls of Congress and telling the AFRO: “We’re going to keep fighting until we get it.”
That is the right posture. The African diaspora community in the DMV should be standing behind him with exactly that same resolve.
Say their names. Every single one.