CONGRESSMAN AL GREEN FIDGETED IN THE FRONT row of George "Perry" Floyd's third and final me-morial service, held here in the city where the slain man had spent much of his life, as he rehearsed in his head the speech he'd spent the night before preparing. Green had been in the living room of his Houston home when he first saw the excruciating cell-phone video on the news: a white police officer in Minneapolis nonchalantly kneeling on the neck of the 46-year-old Floyd for nearly nine minutes. The handcuffed man desperately crying that he can not breathe. The bystanders urging the officer to stop. His cold refusal to acknowledge their pleas. Floyd's body had been flown back to Texas to be buried. But first, there would be a funeral at Fountain of Praise church, one of the largest churches in Green's district, at which the congressman had been asked to say a few words. But now, as the service began, Green was struck by the words of the church's pastor Remus E. Wright, who urged congregants to maintain social distancing, avoid getting too close and keep masks over their mouths and noses. The coronavirus pandemic was lurking. And no life, the pastor stressed, was expendable.
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