‘We’re going backwards’: Black Lives Matter’s Nekima Levy Armstrong on Trump’s US and the murder of George Floyd

Nekima Levy Armstrong … ‘It’s not that people can’t do the right thing – they lack the will’ Photograph: Handout

As momentous as the murder of George Floyd was, Nekima Levy Armstrong was not particularly shocked when she first heard the news. “Was it a surprise that the Minneapolis police department killed yet another unarmed Black man? No,” she says. “There had been a series of circumstances in which they had used deadly force unjustifiably.” As a civil rights lawyer, past president of the Minneapolis National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a spokesperson for the local Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter, Armstrong was all too familiar with such incidents. Owing to her standing in the city, she was also one of the first to learn of Floyd’s death. She was in for a long night.

Armstrong was at home with her family that evening. It was Memorial Day, 25 May 2020. She saw that an activist friend had tagged her in a Facebook post. “Someone had told her that MPD [the Minneapolis police department] had killed someone by choking them or crushing their throat,” she recalls.