Richard Wallace had seen it all before, and he wasn’t hopeful. It was, he thought, the same old story: Police kill a Black person, protests erupt, politicians pledge reforms and corporations offer platitudes about supporting needed change.
But Wallace, the 38-year-old founder and executive director of Equity and Transformation, a social and economic justice advocacy group in Chicago, came to realize that this time was different.
This time the victim was George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father of five captured in a sickening citizen video taking his final breaths under a white officer’s knee.
And this time, the victim would become a global symbol for change much broader than criminal justice reform. “George Floyd has taken systemic racism