George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020, in an incident filmed by bystanders and by the officer's own body camera. The video evidence — immediately shared worldwide through social media — was central to the subsequent prosecution of Chauvin, who was convicted of murder in 2021 in one of the most significant American criminal trials of the twenty-first century. Floyd's death and the global protests it triggered profoundly reshaped public debate about police use of body cameras, video evidence, and racial justice.

George Floyd's death generated one of the largest immediate literary responses in American history, including thousands of elegies, protest poems, essays, and documentary works published within weeks of his death. Poets including Claudia Rankine, Jericho Brown, and Nikki Giovanni wrote about Floyd and the broader context of policing and anti-Black violence. The role of video evidence — citizen-gathered, viral, legally definitive — became itself a poetic and philosophical subject: the seen death, the witnessed killing, evidence as elegy.