George Floyd death: Funeral to take place of the unarmed black man who 'sacrificed for the world'
Thousands of people queued in Houston to pay their respects at the final public memorial.
Tuesday 9 June 2020 16:38, UK
When George Floyd left Houston it was in search of a fresh start in life.
He returned to Texas in death, his name now the focus of a nationwide, a worldwide, call to action.
George Floyd's funeral at The Fountain of Praise Church will be attended, alongside his family and friends, by political, religious and civil rights leaders.
His death on a Minneapolis street two weeks ago, so public and so brutal, has sparked protests, marches and rallies. Millions are demanding America finally and properly address the age-old problem of inequality in the treatment of the African-American community.
On Monday, thousands queued in the heat and humidity of Houston to pay their respects at the final public memorial. In groups of 500, they filed past his open gold-coloured coffin.
"Change has come," said Jesse Holmes. What Martin Luther King had long sought, he said, George Floyd had delivered. "The world will never be the same. We're thankful. He sacrificed for the world."
At the same time, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was meeting George Floyd's family. His compassion, the family's lawyer said, "meant the world to them".
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The former vice-president has recorded a video message to be played at today's funeral service.
The reckoning in America following George Floyd's death has forced the issue on to the agenda of the nation's politicians. Mr Biden has described Donald Trump's response as "despicable", Mr Trump has retreated to a message of "law and order".
In Washington DC, Democrats on Capitol Hill knelt for 8 minutes and 46 seconds - the length of time Mr Floyd spent with a police officer's knee on his neck - to honour him and the campaign his death has reignited. The party also unveiled proposals to overhaul police procedures.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called for "transformative structural change".
But across America there is a real determination to keep the pressure on those politicians, many of whom have been in office for decades, to demonstrate that serious change will take place this time.
Anger and outrage at deaths in the past has too often faded with little material change.
In Houston, as in his birthplace in North Carolina at the weekend, the memorials for George Floyd represent a sense of personal loss.
A highly-talented basketball and football player, known to friends and family by his middle name Perry, he was also a familiar figure on the city's hip hop scene. He moved to Minneapolis six years ago but two of his children still live in Texas.
There is a new mural in his memory near his old home in Houston's Third Ward.
"It is a watershed moment for the American people," said Houston's police chief Art Acevedo.
Following his funeral service, George Floyd will be laid to rest at a cemetery in the suburb of Pearland.
He will be buried next to his mother, the end of a life story that could reverberate for generations, in a legacy of real and lasting change.