George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis was tragic.
An American citizen died after more than eight minutes with a police officer’s knee over his neck, as he begged for air.
Floyd’s past convictions, some of them for serious crimes, played no part in what the country saw on video.
He was detained after allegedly attempting to pass a counterfeit bill, and he isn’t around to tell his side of the story, which he was entitled to do as a U.S. citizen.
Floyd was apparently denied his right to due process by officer Derek Chauvin — if what we witnessed on video is correct and in the proper context, and it looks like it was.
But is his death more tragic than the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
Does the death of a man killed in the custody of a police officer, while allegedly committing a petty crime, carry more historical significance than the slaying of a civil rights icon?
Joe Biden, the country’s former vice president and the Democratic Party’s current nominee for the White House, sure thinks so.
In his rush to join the Floyd movement, Biden — who supported mass incarceration in his 1994 crime bill — compared Floyd’s death to King’s.
“Even Dr. King’s assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd’s death did,” Biden said last week while speaking at a Philadelphia economic roundtable discussion, Fox News reported.
“It’s just like television changed the Civil Rights movement for the better when they saw Bull Connor and his dogs ripping the clothes off of elderly black women going to church and firehoses ripping the skin off of young kids,” he continued.
“What happened to George Floyd — now you got how many people around the country, millions of cell phones. It’s changed the way everybody’s looking at this,” Biden concluded. “Look at the millions of people marching around the world.”
