Growing up in North Carolina, George Floyd’s aunt was taught by her parents how to get along in a slowly desegregating America. Her nephew’s death at the hands of police stirs memories of the stinging prejudice her family has endured.
Growing up in a shack surrounded by piney woods and tobacco fields in eastern North Carolina, George Floyd’s aunt Angela Harrelson was taught by her sharecropper parents how to get along in a slowly desegregating America: Sit at the back of the bus, do what white folks tell you, “stay strong and hold on.”
She hopes the four police officers charged in the case, including former officer Derek Chauvin, 44, who is accused of murder, will face justice from a government that has allowed white people to discriminate against African Americans for generations. Her great grandfather, Hillary Thomas Stewart, was a slave. He got his freedom at age 8, and settled near Goldsboro, NC. By age 21, Stewart had accumulated 500 acres of land and married a woman named Larcenia, who would bear him 22 children.
Jones had become pregnant with the first of 14 children at age 13, but taught herself to read, write and play piano. Harrelson was the youngest of her 10 daughters, all of whom graduated from high school. Soon after settling in Eagan, an inner suburb, where racism was often hidden in “Minnesota nice,” Harrelson went to get her hair done at the J.C. Penney salon in a local mall. She saw they had products to wash and condition black hair, but their sole black stylist was off, and the white stylist refused.“I was like Rosa Parks,” she said, laughing. “I said, ‘I’m not getting out of this chair. I’m not trying to make a statement, I just don’t want to drive to North Minneapolis’.
She chafed at prosecutors’ delays, at the release of an autopsy that initially failed to label his death a homicide - until after the family’s lawyer released results of their independent autopsy this week.
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