ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — The name George Floyd will forever be linked to the issues of police brutality and social justice.
However, there is another less-well known George Floyd. He once lived in St. Augustine, and he too was killed by police.
At the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center in St. Augustine, Executive Director Regina Gayle Phillips and others were working on a national project to honor the memory of people were lynched or murdered by vigilantes.
It's called the Community Remembrance Project.
"We want to remember, lest we forget, so we don’t repeat," Phillips said.
Researchers thought they had found the only recorded lynching victim in St. Johns County, hanged in 1897. His name was Isaac Barrett.
But during their research in the last couple of years, they found another lynching victim with a familiar name: George Floyd. It's the same name as the man murdered by police in Minnesota in 2020.
"That’s what shocked us," Phillips said. "It happened in our jail in 1945."
St. Augustine in the 1940’s was a quiet and fully segregated southern town.
A Black man in his 50’s named George Floyd was a laborer. He had been arrested.
"I’m not sure what the charge was," Phillips said.
Floyd was taken to the St. Johns County Jail.
According to research by Dr. Melissa Nobles of MIT and published by the Boston Globe, the death certificate for George Floyd of St. Augustine reads: “Immediate cause of death: resisting officer of the law.”
The next few handwritten words are hard to make out, but they look like: "Due to: being hit with black jack,” which is a weighted weapon.
"He was actually beaten with a Billy club in jail by a police officer," Phillips said. "So those are the records we’ve been able to uncover."
The death certificate was filled out, indicating the death was and “accident”.
Floyd had a wife named Rosa.
This discovery would have been sobering enough for Phillips, but it became eerie because of the similarities with the George Floyd of 2020.
"That you have a man killed in the custody of police in 1945 inside a jail and then in 2020, you have a man killed in a street in police custody," Phillips said. "One gets very little attention until almost 100 years later. And the other gets immediate attention because of the time we’re in because people were able to capture that and showed it to the world. And the world reacted very differently. I hope we’ll continue to react very differently."