Robert Samuels presents His Name is George Floyd

The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, awakening millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his face was painted onto countless murals and his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend who constantly strove for a better life.

His Name Is George Floyd tells the story of a beloved figure from Houston’s housing projects as he faced the stifling systemic pressures that come with being a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the context of the country’s enduring legacy of institutional racism, this deeply reported account examines Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the overpolicing of his community amid a wave of mass incarceration, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction—putting today’s inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with Floyd’s closest friends and family, his elementary school teachers and varsity coaches, civil rights icons, and those in the highest seats of political power, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.

Robert Samuels is an award-winning author and a national enterprise reporter for the Washington Post, focusing on politics, policy, and the changing American identity. He is also the Post’s chief analyst for figure skating.
Samuels is co-author of “His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” which was the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, the 2023 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and J. Anthony Lukas Book Award, among other honors. The work, based on more than 400 interviews, explores the life of George Floyd, his time in Minneapolis and the aftermath that changed the world.Robert also has been a finalist for the Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, and has won Polk, Peabody, and N.A.B.J. awards. He has a previously worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the Miami Herald. Samuels graduated with special recognition from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where he was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. He resides in Washington, D.C.

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