Houston Bids Goodbye to George Floyd, Whose Killing Galvanized a Movement

The funeral served as both a national reckoning and a moment of personal mourning. The Rev. Al Sharpton demanded more action against police brutality.

George Floyd died at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. A thousand miles to the south, in the Texas city where he was raised, two rows of police officers saluted as his coffin went past.

Hours before Mr. Floyd’s funeral began at a southwest Houston church, uniformed officers stood between the hearse and the front doors. As relatives and friends pushed the gold coffin with blue trimming into the church, the officers raised their hands in a show of respect.

Mourners arriving for a memorial of George Floyd at the Fountain of Praise church in Houston on Monday.Credit...Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times

Mr. Floyd’s funeral and the public viewing that preceded it a day earlier have been a counterpoint to the fury that his death touched off in cities across America. Mr. Floyd, who grew up in a tough public housing complex in Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, was considered a native son, and the tone adopted by protesters, activists, elected officials and police officers has been one of honoring a grieving Houston family.

Inside the Fountain of Praise church, Mr. Floyd, 46, the emblem of an international movement whose name has been chanted by thousands of people since his death, was remembered as the son, brother, uncle and father that he was in life.

The funeral aired live on broadcast and cable television, and as it began at noon, the New York Stock Exchange went silent for eight minutes, 46 seconds — the length of time a Minneapolis police officer held Mr. Floyd’s neck under his knee before he died. It was the longest moment of silence on the stock exchange floor in its 228-year history.On Monday, a public viewing in Houston drew nearly 6,400 people, including Gov. Greg Abbott, nurses fresh from work dressed in scrubs, new fathers holding babies and Mr. Floyd’s high school classmates.

In a video message, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, offered his condolences to the family, saying he understood the weight of grieving in public. Mr. Biden, who has often connected to people through grief after suffering deep losses in his own life, spent time with the Floyd family in private on Monday. “No child should have to ask the question that too many black children have had to ask for generations: ‘Why? Why is Daddy gone?’”

“This was not just a tragedy. It was a crime,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who delivered the eulogy.

No one mentioned President Trump, but Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, said that the next person in the country’s highest office needed to tackle racial inequality. And Brooklyn Williams, a young niece of Mr. Floyd’s, called for an end to hate crimes.

“Someone said, ‘Make America great again,’ but when has America ever been great?” she said. “America, it is time for a change!”

One by one, Mr. Sharpton named the relatives of other black men and women whose killings have invoked concerns over racial injustice and asked them to stand. Other mourners stood, too, until everyone in the sanctuary was up and clapping and the funeral of one man briefly became a funeral for all the other lives lost.

“The mother of Trayvon Martin, will you stand,” he said. “The mother of Eric Garner, will you stand. The sister of Botham Jean, will you stand. The family of Pamela Turner, here in Houston, will you stand. The father of Michael Brown from Ferguson, Mo., will you stand. The father of Ahmaud Arbery, will you stand.

“All of these families came to stand with this family because they know better than anyone else the pain they will suffer from the loss that they have gone through,” Mr. Sharpton said.