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FEATURING MELINA ABDULLAH - Five years ago on May 25, 2020, just months into a global shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the videotaped brutal murder of a Minneapolis Black man named George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer sparked a historic movement. The streets of US cities erupted into one of the most massive movements for social justice in history. Black Lives Matter, a rallying cry coined years earlier, now emerged from the lips of politicians and pundits as a broad consensus was reached that police had gone too far. 

This latest chapter in the movement for racial justice didn’t come from nowhere. It was simmering for years, even decades, and leaders demanded an abolition of police and prisons, or at the very least, a defunding of police and a re-funding public safety institutions. Where is that movement today?

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