As is now widely known, on May 25, 2020, Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old high school student happened to be at the Minneapolis corner of 38th and Chicago Avenue and observed Minneapolis policemen restrain a Black man on the street pavement by a police car. She had the presence of mind and courage to get out her cell phone and make a video recording of what turned out to be the last minutes of George Floyd’s life.[1]
For these actions in 2020 she received the PEN/Benenson Courage Award from PEN America. [2]
On May 25, 2021, the first anniversary of the death of Mr. Floyd, she penned a beautiful tribute to him on FACEBOOK that subsequently was movingly read on MSNBC by Caroline Randall Williams, an award-winning poet, young adult novelist, cookbook author and the Writer-in-Residence of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University.[3]
On June 11, 2021, she received another award for her judgment and courage. This was a special Pulitzer Prize that recognized her for “courageously reporting the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality, around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.” In announcing this award, Mindy Marques Gonzalez, the co-chair of the Pulitzer Board, said this video was “transformative” and “jolted viewers and spurred protests against police brutality around the world.” [4]
This Pulitzer award was applauded by Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute and a five-time Pulitzer winner himself. He said, “”There she was, at 17, sort of witnessing an injustice and she stood there in the face of threats and captured that video. It would be hard to select, even from the work of professional journalists over recent years or decades, a 10-minute video that had as profound an impact as this young woman’s video did.”
On June 24, 2021, Ms.Frazier will receive the Human Rights Defender Award from the Minneapolis-based Advocates for Human Rights. The initial announcement of this award stated she “bravely documented the murder of George Floyd. Her quick thinking sparked a worldwide reckoning with systemic racism and police violence.”[5]
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[1] Witnessing, dwkcommentaries.com (April 26, 2021).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Darnella Frazier’s Continued Witnessing, dwkcommentaries.com (May 26, 2021).
[4] Columbia University, 2021 Pulitzer Prize Winners (June 11, 2021); Forliti (AP),Teen who recorded Floyd’s arrest, death, wins Pulitzer nod, Wash. Post (June 11, 2021); Hill (AP), Pulitzers honor coronavirus pandemic, US protest coverage, Wash. Post (June 11, 2021); Izadi, Darnella Frazier, the teen who filmed George Floyd’s murder, awarded a citation, Wash. Post (June 11, 2021).
[5] Advocates for Human Rights, 2021 Virtual Human Rights Awards Dinner.
