HOUSTON — Most did not know him. But they knew the city that shaped him, and that was enough.
They were black and white, young and old. They were people of prominence like the governor, and they were the diverse, multiethnic workers who had built the country’s fourth-largest city, lacking title but not honor. They waited in the Houston sun for hours to spend the briefest of moments in a hymn-filled sanctuary, to grieve and pray by the body of George Floyd.
They came by the hundreds. And then hundreds more.
“Numbers speak volumes,” said Angie Pickens, 43, a chemical-company worker who stood in line holding a bouquet of flowers to honor the 46-year-old man who has become the latest symbol of police violence in America. “I’m a mother of three sons, so we’re all in this fight together, and that’s why I’m here.”
Mr. Floyd was born in North Carolina and died in Minneapolis, but he spent most of his life in Houston, in the hard but proud streets of the city’s Third Ward. On Monday, Houston mourned for Mr. Floyd at a public viewing that stretched for more than six hours and became not so much a rally or a protest but an open-air memorial for a city’s fallen son.
Some wore crimson and gold — the school colors of the Third Ward’s Jack Yates High School, where Mr. Floyd was a member of the class of 1993. Others wore masks out of concern for the coronavirus that were emblazoned with Mr. Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe.”
The majority were African-American, but there was a diversity in the crowd — one young white man held a bouquet of flowers as he stood in line. People held umbrellas, waved fans and sat in a cooling tent as the heat and humidity soaked faces and shirts.
“I’m going to wait in line all day if it’s necessary,” said Charles Edward Jackson, 70, a retired bus driver.
Mr. Jackson went to Wheatley High, the longtime rival of Yates High. That connection to Mr. Floyd’s life, and anger over Mr. Floyd’s death, brought Mr. Jackson to the church on Monday.
“I wanted to physically be here to show respect for George Floyd and his family,” Mr. Jackson said. “His needless killing by the police, it has to stop. It has to stop or this world is headed to destruction.”
Unlike an earlier memorial service in Minneapolis last week and the funeral that was scheduled for Tuesday in Houston, the viewing on Monday at The Fountain of Praise church was the only time the public could grieve for Mr. Floyd in the presence of his body. Other services in recent days were for relatives and invited guests only; at the church on Monday, no tickets or invitations were required.
Those attending parked nearby and then boarded buses that dropped them off at The Fountain of Praise. American flags lined the street outside. More than an hour before the viewing began at noon, there were already more than 100 people in line. Hundreds of others continued to line up outside the church’s glass doors; the line went around a water fountain, down a walkway to the street and then back up the driveway of the parking lot.
From noon to the end of the service shortly after 6 p.m., nearly 6,400 people had walked past Mr. Floyd’s coffin, said a spokeswoman for Fort Bend Memorial Planning Center, the funeral home handling the arrangements.
Mr. Floyd died on Memorial Day in Minneapolis, as a police officer pinned him to the ground with his knee as Mr. Floyd cried out for his mother and pleaded with the officers for help. His death has ignited a protest movement around the country, and his name has become a global chant, a hashtag, a cause.
But he was one of Houston’s own.
Some of those who attended said they were heartbroken by the video and wanted to do something to honor a man who had experienced what so many black men had at the hands of the police, and paid for it with his life. Standing in line to view his body and pay their respects, they said, was the least they could do.
Others felt that Mr. Floyd was shaping a change in America, and this was their way of being part of history.
“This is a transformative moment in the country,” said Sheldon DeBraine, 49, who works in work-force development and whose words were muffled by his mask as he stood in line. “I wanted to make sure I supported the moment and I did my part, because this was a great injustice.”
Police officers had a presence in the area, but the mood was somber. The low-key viewing highlighted the ways in which the killing of Mr. Floyd has played out differently in Houston than in other cities.
The demonstrations in Houston over Mr. Floyd’s death have been largely peaceful and have for the most part not been disrupted by the looting and clashes with the police that have occurred in some other cities. Police cars were vandalized and officers made a number of arrests, but protests in Houston were generally civil.
At least one of the reasons has something to do with the police chief in Houston, Art Acevedo, who marched with protesters, changed his department’s Twitter profile picture to an image of Mr. Floyd and made a sermon-style speech in which he said he did not “fear walking up to people who are angry, because we join them in their anger.”
Chief Acevedo’s officers escorted Mr. Floyd’s body to the funeral home after his remains arrived in Houston on Saturday night.
Chief Acevedo’s department has been no stranger to controversy, particularly after a deadly botched drug raid in 2019 and a string of shootings involving officers. But on Monday, the chief stood for several minutes next to the line of mourners.
“This community knows that we’re not perfect, but they know that we care,” he said. “You cannot build relationships via memo from headquarters. You cannot change culture via memo from behind your desk.”
Gov. Greg Abbott was among the first to pay his respects to Mr. Floyd at the church on Monday. He met later with the Floyd family privately, as did Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
“George Floyd is going to change the arc of the future of the United States,” said Mr. Abbott, a Republican, who wore a striped crimson-and-gold tie in tribute to Mr. Floyd. “I’m here to tell you today that I’m committed to working with the family of George Floyd to ensure we never have anything like this ever occur in the state of Texas.”
Carol Wright, 48, wiped tears from her eyes as she left the church.
“I wasn’t expecting the casket to be open, so that kind of caught me,” said Ms. Wright, an information technology consultant from the Houston suburb of Katy. “I was thinking about him calling for his mother and thinking about so many black men I know that age.”
After the viewing, she stood quietly in a line waiting to board a bus back to her car. The top of her mask was getting wet from her tears. Her 11-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old son stood next to her, trying to comfort her. They said very little — just being there for one another in silence seemed to be enough.
All three wore matching white T-shirts. On the front, in bold letters, was a line from a Langston Hughes poem: “I, too, am America.”
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