The emotions ran the gamut when news broke Tuesday that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts in the murder last May of George Floyd.
Relief. Joy. Fatigue. Determination.
But perhaps most of all, people of color across the United States felt that, for a moment, they mattered.
“This means everything, this is long, long overdue,” said Selena McKnight, 46, of Minneapolis, who after hearing the verdict threw her arms around her 18-year-old daughter as a crowd cheered. “But this doesn’t stop here. We have to keep going.”
In New York’s Times Square, Floyd’s brother Terrence told the USA TODAY Network that “given the history of these kinds of cases, I was surprised” by the verdict, which could find Chauvin in prison for up to 40 years for having knelt on Floyd’s neck until he died. “I know there’s still more work to be done.”
In Washington, D.C., Cheria Askew, 43, arrived in Black Lives Matter Plaza feeling “overjoyed and overwhelmed” by the news.
“I’d experienced racism as a child, but it’s very different when you get older,” she said. “It’s saddening, it can be depressing. You see growth, but then sometimes it doesn’t seem like it’s enough. So it’s bittersweet. But this is more on the sweet side, than anything.”
Cheers and tears in George Floyd Square: ‘Light will defeat dark’
At a Columbus, Ohio, barbershop, Emoni Hudson, 24, took a photograph of the TV after the guilty verdict was…
