George Floyd’s killing triggered the largest civil rights movement in American history

Evidence

In 2020, something changed. The collective witnessing of what must be described without hyperbole as a modern-day lynching by an agent of the state propelled a global protest that would become the largest movement for civil rights in American history. Even as the nature of George Floyd’s death shocked us—a white law enforcement officer taking part in the extrajudicial killing of a Black person, nonchalantly pressing the life out of him in plain view of more than a dozen onlookers—it also reminded us that we had not banished this barbaric part of our history. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1320

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the recurring theme across the book of Black resistance/backlash cycles — this is the payoff of the backlash sections earlier in the chapter.