Rev. Al Sharpton to Deliver Eulogy at Memorial Service for George Floyd

Rev. Al Sharpton is scheduled to deliver the eulogy for George Floyd at a family memorial service in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this week.

“According to organizers, the service will be held Thursday afternoon at North Central University in downtown Minneapolis,” WCCO reported.

Sharpton tweeted the official announcement on Monday.

The Minneapolis family memorial service for #GeorgeFloyd will be this Thursday, June 4. pic.twitter.com/0t6G4kyWQX

— Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) June 1, 2020

The mayor of Houston, Texas, said on Saturday that Floyd’s body would later be returned to the city where he grew up, according to the Associated Press (AP).

“Floyd was a Houston native before moving to Minnesota. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a news conference that Floyd’s body would be coming back to Houston but provided no additional details. His family has not announced funeral plans,” the report noted.

Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sharpton reacted to the nationwide protests and riots over Floyd, who died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.

“[W]e must distinguish between those that are angry and protesting peacefully and that are out there saying things that are trying to gear toward the neglect of dealing with these issues, and those that are taking advantage of it and those that are inciting others,” he said.

Sharpton also urged people not to use Floyd “for anything other than justice for George Floyd and the Eric Garners and the others that’s been neglected.”

“That’s why we brought Eric Garner’s mother down there because we wanted to show there is a connected battle against systemic neglect of criminal justice. This is not episodal, this is systematic,” he continued.

During an interview Sunday on MSNBC, the reverend accused President Trump’s administration of “aggressively” reversing policies that held police accountable in cases of alleged abuse, according to Breitbart News.

He stated:

So it was some progress beginning after Eric Garner and after Ferguson based on law, not in the cases particularly, but in terms of law and policy that has been rescinded. So that is why when you have President Trump now talking about this like he’s objective, his administration reversed the moving trend, and it certainly wasn’t as much as we needed, but it began moving that way, and he reversed that. He is not a silent onlooker here.

“They aggressively reversed where we were going in this country to hold police accountable when we found that there were bad police,” he concluded.