Why was George Floyd’s death the breaking point?

Throughout America’s long history of racial violence, certain names have stood out as markers of the struggles of a particular period in time. Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955 drew attention to the brutality of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The beating of Rodney King and acquittal of the officers involved sparked the Los Angeles riots in 1992. The police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014 brought the Black Lives Matter movement into the national consciousness.

They were, of course, not the only black people...