George Floyd (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020) was an African American man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. One of four police officers who arrived on the scene knelt on Floyd's neck and back for almost ten minutes, fatally asphyxiating him. After his murder, a series of protests against police brutality, especially towards African Americans, quickly spread nationally and then globally.