Four years ago, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor earlier that year. Shortly after Floyd’s death, the city of Minneapolis—and then cities across the country—erupted in mass protest, igniting the largest protest movement in U.S. history. The uprisings, Elizabeth Hinton writes, were a means “for the oppressed and disenfranchised to express collective solidarity in the face of punitive state forces, exploitative institutions, and calcified ‘democratic’ institutions.”
This week’s reading list gathers pieces from our archive on the 2020 uprisings, the long history of police oppression that ignited them, and visions for change—including an interview with Derecka Purnell on what a police-free world could look like, Melvin Rogers on the “rage and anger” at state violence expressed in the protests, and Alex Reinert on a path to ending qualified immunity.