The funeral of George Floyd, an African American whose death in US police custody spawned global outrage, has heard impassioned pleas for racial justice.
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Floyd died in Minneapolis last month as a white police officer held a knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes, his final moments filmed on phones.
The service was held at the Fountain of Praise church, attended by some 500 guests including politicians and celebrities.
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His coffin was taken from the church driven in a motorcade to the Houston Memorial Gardens where he was buried beside his mother.
Speakers in the church in Houston, Texas, lined up to remember a man whose “crime was that he was born black”.
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One of Floyd’s nieces, Brooke Williams, called for a change in laws which, she argued, were designed to disadvantage black people.
“Why must this system be corrupt and broken?” she asked. “Laws were already put in place for the African-American system to fail. And these laws need to be changed. No more hate crimes, please! Someone said ‘Make America Great Again’, but when has America ever been great?”
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President Donald Trump’s Democratic Party opponent in the November presidential election, Joe Biden, addressed the service in a video message, saying: “When there is justice for George Floyd, we will truly be on our way to racial justice in America.”
“George Floyd was not expendable – this is why we’re here,” said Al Green, the local Democratic congressman. “His crime was that he was born black.”
Veteran civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton told the service: “All over the world I see grandchildren of slave masters tearing down slave masters’ statues.”
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Talking about Floyd’s difficult life, he said: “God took the rejected stone and made him the cornerstone of a movement that’s gonna change the whole wide world.”
In Minnesota, the state where Floyd was killed, Governor Tim Walz called on people to honour the funeral by observing silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the time the deceased was pinned to the ground before he died.
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Floyd’s coffin was taken to a cemetery in Pearland, south of Houston, for a private burial ceremony.
For the last mile of the procession, it was conveyed in a horse-drawn carriage.
BBC
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