Visible Men: Black Fathers Talk About Losing Sons to Police Brutality

By Mosi Secret, GQ

We asked the fathers and father figures of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake to reflect on the violence that forever altered their families’ lives—and what it means to raise a Black man in America.

Six months have passed since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Perry Floyd Jr., and already the subsequent storm of fury and hope that spawned so many anti-racist dreams seems to have lost its charge. A recent Pew survey points to a decrease in support for the Black Lives Matter movement among all racial groups except Black people since June, a reflection of the American, and perhaps human, tendency to return to life as normal, even if today’s normal is very weird. One hopes, at least, that a new awareness has been brought to daily life.

For a dedicated few, though, Floyd and the other Black people killed and wounded by police will forever remain front of mind—for those activists and civil rights lawyers and family members with a heroic, if sometimes tragic, resolve. Notable among the steadfast are the men who raised the injured and slain, who tend to be Black and are themselves more likely to have been battered by the forces that undid their kin. It is not possible for them to quit imagining a more just future for the United States.

Yet as the movement lulls, they are an easy group to overlook. One could be forgiven, for example, for thinking that no man helped raise George Floyd. Postmortem profiles in the press took us back to Floyd’s youth in the public-housing projects of Houston’s Third Ward, where his single mother, Larcenia Floyd, did her level best to help raise him and his siblings. Some accounts, searching even deeper for the causes of Floyd’s demise, went further back, to his family’s roots in the sharecropping South, where his mother grew up as one of 14 children in a small house in the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina. There was a way in which Floyd’s story seemed to adhere to a very old myth, hardly questioned now, of the fatherless and thus doomed Black child. That Floyd in his final moments on earth cried out for his mother, already deceased, was a kind of heartbreaking capstone to this tale. The big man that Floyd was—six feet four inches, 223 pounds—without a big man in his life. This was rendered an implicit part of his tragedy…

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