George Floyd’s death may be the most consequential police killing to have occurred since smartphones gave us the ability to document the realities of police violence. The details, captured on recordings by passersby, are by now familiar. On May 25, 2020, Floyd, a forty-six-year-old former bouncer, was accused of passing off a fake twenty-dollar bill at a convenience store in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Two police officers, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, arrived at the scene, and Lane quickly drew his weapon. Floyd was a large man: six feet six, two hundred and twenty-three pounds. Perhaps hoping to seem less threatening, he told the cops that he had been shot before and asked them not to shoot him. The officers cuffed him and tried to put him in their cruiser. He said that he was claustrophobic and resisted getting in the cramped car. To restrain him, the cops held him to the ground. Kueng placed his knees on Floyd’s torso, and Lane placed his knees on Floyd’s legs. Derek Chauvin, another officer who had arrived on the scene, dug his knee into Floyd’s neck.
At this point, Floyd began foretelling his own death. “Y’all, I’m going to die in here,” he said. “I’m going to die, man.” He cried out that he couldn’t breathe. “Please, the knee in my neck . . . I’ll probably die this way.” As Floyd continued to plead for his life, Chauvin announced that he was under arrest. “All right, all right. Oh, my God,” Floyd said. Then, eerily, as if the deed had already been done, he said, “Tell my kids I love them. I’m dead.” He soon fell unconscious and was hustled into an ambulance and sent to the hospital. He died of cardiac arrest an hour later.
In 2008, while working on a book about Martin Luther King, Jr., I was struck by what I came to call King’s “automortology”—the manner in which he seemed to prophesy his own death, at times even narrating it as if it had already happened. This rhetorical form dates back at least to the life of Jesus, who resisted Roman oppression, and knew that the state was mustering its forces against him. In Mark, the earliest Gospel, he begins predicting that his death is imminent, telling his followers that he will be “killed and after three days rise again.” He describes the particulars of his death, saying that he will be “mocked and flogged and crucified.” This prophetic mode gives him the rhetorical leverage to shape how his death should be understood: it will not, he insists, be a victory for the Romans and the end to his movement. Instead, it will form part of God’s larger plan, which will lead to the salvation of humankind and the spread of Christianity around the world.
Like Jesus, King did his work under the spectre of violence. Several of his colleagues were murdered for their agitation on behalf of Black emancipation: Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963, and Malcolm X in 1965. When King was in his late twenties, his home in Montgomery, Alabama, was bombed by a white supremacist. In 1958, at a book signing in Harlem, a woman stabbed him with a letter opener. He soon began to speak as if his death were inevitable. In 1965, on a brief trek to the grave site of the martyred church deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson, with a board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King said, “This may be my last walk.” When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, in Dallas, King insisted to his wife, Coretta, “This is what is going to happen to me also.” Coretta later said, “I had no word to comfort my husband. I could not say, ‘It won’t happen to you.’ I felt he was right.” When a plane that King was on was targeted with a bomb threat, in 1964, King said to Coretta and his aide Dorothy Cotton, “I’ve told you all that I don’t expect to survive this revolution.” Early on, King made clear that his death would not be a defeat for the project of civil rights. “If I am stopped, our work will not stop,” King said in 1956. He told the journalist Alex Haley, in 1965, that his martyrdom would propel the movement, saying, “If I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.”
In 1968, he travelled to Memphis to speak on behalf of striking sanitation workers. “Like anybody, I’d like to live a long life,” he said. “But I’m not concerned about that now. . . . I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” The next evening, he was assassinated on his balcony at the Lorraine Motel. By this point, he had become a pariah within the country’s political landscape: unpopular with white moderates because he criticized the Vietnam War, and upstaged within Black activist circles by younger Black Power advocates. But, in death, he became a martyr, the primary symbol of the fight for racial justice in America. As Jon Meacham and Vern E. Smith wrote, in Newsweek, while King “lay dying, the popular beatification was already underway.”
In hip-hop’s golden era, the rapper Tupac Shakur became similarly obsessed with his own death. Tupac was born in 1971 to parents who were Black Panthers. Violence followed him. In 1991, two Oakland policemen slammed him to the ground in a chokehold and arrested him for jaywalking. In 1994, Tupac was shot five times during a robbery at Manhattan’s Quad Studios. He came to believe that he wouldn’t be around long. The director Vondie Curtis Hall, who directed Tupac in the film “Gridlock’d,” said that the rapper “knew he was never going to hit thirty,” and that this belief “allows you to live with a certain level of abandonment” and to “accept destiny without fear.” Maxine Waters, a Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles, who knew Tupac when he lived in her city, told me in 2001, for a book I was working on at the time, that Tupac was “wild and unpredictable, and even troubled,” but that he “stared danger in the eye and didn’t flinch one bit.”
If King channeled the moral energy of Black resistance in the argot of the Black bourgeoisie, Tupac spoke for the masses of Black folk hustling in the underground economy and contending with the everyday realities of police violence. In “Point the Finga,” Tupac describes himself getting lynched by cops, who face no consequences and stay on the state’s payroll. On “Hellrazor,” Tupac speaks of police officers who seek him for investigation, because, he says, “I’m marked for death.” On “Only Fear of Death,” Tupac confesses that “I see visions of me dead.” On “How Long Will They Mourn Me?” he says that “I know soon one day I’ll be in the dirt,” and that all his people will “be mournin’.” He framed his death as one on behalf of poor, inner-city Black people around the country. “Let me die in the line of duty, the duty of the ’hood,” he told the reporter Veronica Chambers, in 1992. On his song “Black Jesuz,” one of Tupac’s comrades prays for “a Saint that we pray to in the ghetto.” In 1996, Tupac was murdered in a drive-by shooting, in Las Vegas. “He was a martyr before it even happened,” Robin Kelley, a historian at U.C.L.A., told me, for the same book. “So much of his music was about the inevitability of his demise, and at the same time he also had this almost Jesus-like voice, where he would preach and, in his own body and experience, would articulate all this pain and hope.”
Most Black folks are neither Nobel laureates nor internationally acclaimed hip-hop artists, but they still live under the threat of violence. Black people in America have a shorter lifespan than white people; in areas like Baltimore, the life-expectancy gap is twenty years. This is largely the result of the forces of systemic racism, which affects the economic circumstances, medical and behavioral forces, and geographic and environmental conditions that determine one’s health. Black Americans are also six times more likely to be murdered than white Americans, and they are up to six times more likely than whites to be killed during a police encounter. In a further injustice, when Black people are killed by the police, they are often posthumously smeared, in an attempt to justify the killing. After Mike Brown was killed by a cop on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, a security video was released that appeared to show Brown stealing cigarillos from a convenience store moments before he was killed; a subsequent video of an earlier encounter suggests that, in fact, he may instead have been giving a small bag of marijuana to store employees and receiving the cigarillos in return. After Breonna Taylor was killed by police officers, in Louisville, Kentucky, she was falsely rumored to have been living with a drug dealer.
Automortology is Black obituary on the sly. It allows a person, living under a threat of violence, to acknowledge this sense of impending doom. And it allows the person, who has little control over the circumstances of the death, to exercise some control over the narrative that will attend her death. Floyd was an imposing Black man with a history of arrests for drug use, and his death might ordinarily have been cast as the necessary killing of a threatening suspect. But, because there was video footage of Floyd being docile and solicitous, asking the officers not to kill him, and repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe,” it was clear that his death was unnecessary and unjust. And the fact that he could tell that his death was coming, almost from the moment the officers arrived on the scene, and that he repeatedly predicted its occurrence, underscored the inevitability of violence in encounters between police officers and Black suspects. It preëmptively framed Floyd’s death as a police killing of an innocent Black man—one in a sordid series. Floyd became a global icon for social justice. Today, there are murals of Floyd’s face on walls across the globe, and quilts bearing his image. More than sixty Confederate statues have been taken down in his name. His killing sparked the largest protests for racial justice in the history of the country. The same nation that couldn’t keep him alive has been inspired by his death to confront our racial demons.
