‘The country felt a knee on its neck:’ Sacramento pastor reacts to Chauvin verdict
Relief. It was Sacramento pastor Tecoy Porter’s first reaction Tuesday; for his hometown half a country away in the Twin Cities; for the grieving family of George Floyd — the family he has come to know this long and bitter year — and for the people carrying the scars of the 9½ minutes that unfolded on a Minneapolis street corner nearly a year ago.
“I am so relieved. I was holding my breath that the right verdict would come down — and it did,” said Porter, senior pastor of Sacramento’s Genesis Church and son of the Twin Cities who helped preside over Floyd’s Minneapolis memorial and attended Floyd’s Houston funeral service.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty Tuesday of all three charges he faced in Floyd’s killing last May — second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
Floyd’s killing triggered worldwide outrage, a national reckoning on race and renewed calls to combat systemic racism in policing. The trial transfixed a tense nation buffeted again by the fatal shootings of another Black man, Daunte Wright, in a suburb 10 miles from downtown Minneapolis, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago at the hands of police.
Porter, California state chairman of the civil rights organization National Action Network, returned to Minneapolis on the eve of the Chauvin trial last month, joining network founder and civil rights leader The Rev. Al Sharpton and the Floyd family for a prayer vigil and rally.
“I’ve gotten the chance to know them personally. I went to Houston, saw their pain. You just hope and pray this family gets justice,” Porter said Tuesday. “They’ve carried such a heavy burden. I’m relieved for them, for my hometown, to finally see some justice. The country has felt the knee on its neck. People were hoping for this day to come, for some headway.”
Porter, a candidate for California State Senate, said that headway must come in “bold, blanketed reform,” including the proposed federal police reform bill that bears George Floyd’s name, calling the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act now before the Senate “as important as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were in that era.”
“(Derek) Chauvin — he was a bad apple, but we can’t stop there. We have to fix the tree in order to fix the fruit,” Porter said. “There’s so much more that needs to be done countrywide.”
Porter will return to the pulpit Sunday just as he did the Sunday after George Floyd’s life ebbed underneath Chauvin’s knee. He was asked Tuesday what he might tell his congregants.
“We’ve come a long way, but we’ve still got work to do,” the Genesis pastor said. “We feel relief that we can believe our eyes. We saw a murder. Now, we see justice.”
This story was originally published April 21, 2021 at 2:37 PM.
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