CBH Talk | Five Years After George Floyd: The Fight Today
On May 25, 2020, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin stunned the nation and ignited a global uprising.
As we mark the fifth anniversary of that tragic day, CBH brings together three leading voices to examine the protests, their impact, the fierce backlash, and how the fight continues today.
Join Yale professor Elizabeth Hinton, New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé, and civil rights historian Jeanne Theoharis as they explore the history and ongoing crisis of racist policing. Hinton brings her deep scholarship on the systemic roots of anti-Black law enforcement, the long history of protest, and the 2020 reckoning sparked by Floyd’s murder. Ossé offers a unique perspective as a leading Black Lives Matter organizer who, at 23, turned protest into political power by winning elected office as the youngest New York City council member. Theoharis situates today’s movement within the long struggle for Black freedom, exposing the persistent tensions between law enforcement and racial justice.
At a time when the White House scrubs phrases like “systemic racism” and “white supremacy,” as DEI programs are dismantled, and as a new executive order claims to "restore truth and sanity to American history" — we reflect on the legacy of the 2020 racial reckoning and the urgent, concrete steps toward justice that remain before us.
Pictured above: Double George Floyd signs, Barclays Center, Brooklyn, June 6, 2020. Still Image by Bob Gore. GORE_0097. Bob Gore photograph collection, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History
Participants
Elizabeth Hinton is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University and Yale Law School. She is the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America and America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Both books received numerous awards and recognition, including being named New York Times notable books. In addition to top scholarly journals such as Science, Nature, and the American Historical Review, Hinton’s articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Nation, and TIME. Her research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation. A member of the American Philosophical Society, Hinton serves as Founding Co-Director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at Harvard University.
Chi Ossé is the Council Member for New York City’s 36th District, representing Bedford-Stuyvesant and North Crown Heights. He entered politics as an organizer and prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement. At 23 years old, Ossé was elected in 2021 as the youngest member of this Council and its only member hailing from Gen-Z. Ossé is the co-Chair of the Brooklyn Delegation. His work is focused on implementing innovative and human-centered public safety solutions and investing in solving New York’s housing crisis. More broadly, he recognizes the immense power of municipal spending and is an outspoken advocate for budget justice. Last year, he passed Intro 360, the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) Act. Currently, tenants are often forced to pay broker fees when moving into a new home, even if they found the unit themselves and never hired a broker. This law ends that exploitative system, and requires that whoever hires a broker, whether landlord or tenant, pays the broker fee.
Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York and the author or co-author of thirteen books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the United States. Her new book King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Her New York Times-bestselling biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. It has been adapted into a documentary of the same name, directed by Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen and executive produced by Soledad O’Brien for NBC-Peacock, where she served as a consulting producer. The film won a Peabody Award, a Television Academy Honor Award, a Gracie Award for Historical Documentary, and the Eric Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, TIME Magazine, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Salon, the Intercept, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
