Yuen: How George Floyd’s aunt healed her heart and lent her voice for justice

On May 25, 2020, Angela Harrelson ended her nursing shift at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. It was not an especially hectic day, as it sometimes could be for Harrelson, helping people through their mental health crises. Outside the hospital, gentle skies teased the start of a Minnesota summer. And yet as she left work, Harrelson felt an inexplicable sense of finality.

“I’m glad this day is over,” she thought.

Later that night she tucked herself into bed in her Eagan home. And that was the last normal day Harrelson would have in a very long time.

The next day she received a call from a local news reporter asking for her to comment on the news that her nephew, George Floyd, died the previous evening while in the custody of Minneapolis police. The conversation was a blur. Harrelson did have a nephew in the Twin Cities whom she knew by his middle name, Perry. The call from the reporter did not compute.

Only later when Harrelson checked her phone to find a torrent of text messages and missed calls from family did she get the message: The police killed Perry.

After the murder, Harrelson — Floyd’s closest family member in Minnesota — steered her life toward a new purpose. She’s written a book, helped organize annual “Rise and Remember” events for Floyd, shared her family’s story with strangers and taken on the mantle of activist.

“God made me realize there’s a difference between anointed and appointed,” she said. “Some people sign up for this stuff, to be a civil rights activist or to protest. But then there’s certain people where God says, ‘You can do this. I will give you all the tools you need.’”

Appointed with those tools, Harrelson now stops by the memorial at 38th and Chicago several days a week. It’s at this intersection where five years ago Derek Chauvin pinned her nephew’s neck to the ground for about 9½ minutes despite Floyd’s desperate pleas to let him breathe. The corner, now teeming with flowers and tributes, draws travelers from around the world. Harrelson has smiled with them. Cried with them, sometimes profusely.

On a recent morning, she welcomed a group of gray-haired visitors from Wisconsin who were delighted to learn that the vivacious 63-year-old woman with the long blonde highlights greeting them was Floyd’s aunt.

“Over the years, I’ve grown with them,” she says of the community at George Floyd Square. “I’ve learned to take that strength and come out here as much I can. Over time it became part of my healing.”

Five years later, how have Minnesotans come to peace with the fact that we are the state that killed George Floyd? Some have twisted the narrative, even after grueling, highly publicized trials that found Chauvin and three other officers guilty in his murder. Right-wing activists would have you believe that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose rather than Chauvin refusing to unpin Floyd. While trying to grieve, she’s had to deal with death threats and hoaxes, including one chilling phone call from a man who purported to be Chauvin himself.

You don‘t need to tell a registered nurse who worked in chemical dependency for years about Floyd’s personal struggles. She saw the signs that he was in a bad place before his encounter with police; Harrelson had not heard from him in months. Her profession also taught her how the disease of addiction is shaded more sympathetically toward whites (“He’s having challenges with his sobriety,” we might say) than Black people (“He’s a junkie.”).

Through the years, the family never claimed Floyd was sober or had a clean criminal record, Harrelson said. “We never said he was perfect,” she said. “But no one deserved to die the way he did.”

Harrelson could only stomach to watch the video that Darnella Frazier bravely recorded one time. Here’s what Harrelson, a military veteran born into a family of 14 children during the Jim Crow-era South, observed: Her nephew was not belligerent. He treated Chauvin with respect, repeatedly calling him, “Mr. Officer.” His voice was weak. He called out for his mama, Harrelson‘s late older sister Larcenia.

“Here’s the thing: Perry had enough strength to say, ‘I can‘t breathe,’” Harrelson said, tearing up at the memory. “According to the records, he said it 27 times. But the only reason he’s asking that … he’s really asking for help. Nobody asks a monster for help. So that tells me he saw enough humanity in him to say, ‘Is there enough humanity in you to let go and help me?’ The problem was that Mr. Chauvin didn‘t see the humanity in him.”

The courageous interveners who tried to help, those ordinary bystanders that one prosecutor described as a “bouquet of humanity,” should know they did the right thing, Harrelson said. “I thank them. They were our heroes, and I don‘t want them to ever think that they didn‘t do enough.”

About our collective grief: Harrelson saw it firsthand when she went back to work a day after the killing. She entered the nurse‘s station, noticing that her colleagues’ eyes were glued to the computer screens. Some were crying. One nurse was literally shaking as she said: “They killed that poor man.” Harrelson found herself comforting that nurse.

The protesters who poured into the streets around the world — Harrelson thanks them, too. Through grief and a pandemic, they marched and chanted Floyd’s name so that we would never forget.

That she continues to tell her story, as painful as it is, shows what Harrelson stands for, said independent photographer KingDemetrius Pendleton. He operates the Listen2Us studio in George Floyd Square, a collection of powerful images taken from the streets after Floyd’s murder.

“She has embraced people, hugged them. She don‘t care where they’re from, what color they are, if they’re intoxicated or what,” Pendleton said. “She represents a piece of calmness, a piece of dignity, a piece of unity.”

Harrelson said it can feel that as a nation that we are rolling back progress. Concepts like diversity and inclusion are in the crosshairs of the current president. But she reminds us that we are in a movement, not a moment. Can we muster the outrage and despair we felt five years ago to call out that Black lives still matter? To speak the truth when the very facts about how her nephew died are under attack?

“The gift he left us is the voice, to lift our voice and to fight,” she said. “We don‘t have to be silent.”

The “Rise and Remember” festival commemorating the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd will be held May 23-25. The event includes a black-tie “night of honor” at Quincy Hall at 1325 Quincy St. NE., Minneapolis, as well as vendors, kids’ events, music and performances, a self-care fair and candlelight vigil at George Floyd Square, 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. Visit riseandremember.org for more details.