Thousands mark 5th anniversary of George Floyd's murder as they call for justice and decry Trump

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Police reform and civil-rights activists joined thousands of ordinary people Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and decry the Trump administration for actions they say set their efforts back decades.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said at a graveside service with the dead man's family in Houston that Floyd, 46, represented all of those “who are defenseless against people who thought they could put their knee on our neck.”

He compared Floyd's killing to that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black child who was abducted, mutilated and slain in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman.

“What Emmett Till was in his time, George Floyd has been for this time in history,” Sharpton said.

Events in Minneapolis centered around George Floyd Square, the intersection where police Officer Derek Chauvin used his knee to pin Floyd’s neck to the pavement for 9 1/2 minutes, even as Floyd cried “I can’t breathe.”

By midday Sunday, a steady stream of people were paying their respects at a memorial in front of Cup Foods, where he was killed. Across the street, activists had set up a feeding area at an old gas station that has often served as a staging area since Floyd’s death. In the middle of the street, a fake pig's head was mounted on a stick. The head wore a police cap.

Events started Friday with music, a street festival and a “self-care fair.” It culminated Sunday evening when hundreds gathered at the square for a candlelit vigil that included a worship service, a gospel concert and speeches calling for racial justice. A brass band then led the crowd on a short march through city streets.

Even with Minneapolis officials’ promises to remake the police department, some activists contend the progress has come at a glacial pace.

“We understand that change takes time,” Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, said in a statement last week. “However, the progress being claimed by the city is not being felt in the streets.”

Activists had hoped that the worldwide protests that followed Floyd's murder on May 25, 2020, would lead to national police reform and focus on racial justice.

Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. Justice Department had aggressively pushed for oversight of local police it had accused of widespread abuses. But the Trump administration moved Wednesday to cancel settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville that called for an overhaul of their police departments following Floyd’s murder and the killing of Breonna Taylor.

Trump also has declared an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within the federal government, and his administration is using federal funds as leverage to force local governments, universities and public school districts to do the same. And Republican-led states have accelerated their efforts to stamp out DEI initiatives.

In Houston, Sharpton castigated the administration’s settlement cancellations, saying they were “tantamount to the Department of Justice and the president spitting on the grave of George Floyd.”

“To wait to the anniversary and announce this, knowing this family was going to be brought back to the brokenheartedness of what happened shows the disregard and insensitivity of this administration,” he said. “But the reason that we will not be deterred is that Trump was president when George Floyd happened and he didn’t do anything then. We made things happen. And we’re going to make them happen again.”

Detrius Smith of Dallas, who was visiting the Floyd memorial site with her three daughters and five grandchildren, told one granddaughter about how people globally united to decry racial injustice after Floyd's murder.

“It just really feels good, just really to see everybody out here celebrating the life, and the memories of George Floyd and just really remembering what happened,” Smith said. “We want to do everything we can to work together so everybody can have the same equal rights and everybody can move forward and not have something like that to continue to happen in this nation.”

Gail Ferguson of Minneapolis visited the site of Floyd's death on Sunday, as she has done every year on the anniversary of his death. Ferguson, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development leading an anti-racist parenting intervention program for white parents of young white children, said Floyd's murder brought attention to what she calls a racism pandemic.

“It exposed white supremacy, and it exposed the fragility and the passivity that can be part of the culture of whiteness,” she said.

LaFleur contributed from Houston.

Dancers perform at a park near George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

People attend a concert at George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

Flahn Manly works on a painting in a park near George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

People work on paintings in a park near George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

Eva Ngono works on a painting in a park near George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

Rev. Al Sharpton, left, speaks with Attorney Ben Crump during a memorial service on the anniversary of George Floyd's death on Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Houston. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Attorney Ben Crump, second from left, raises his fist with George Floyd's sisters, LeTonya Floyd, left, and Zsa Zsa Floyd, second from left, along with great niece Arianna Williams, 7, and niece Bianca Williams, right, before a memorial service on the anniversary of Floyd's death on Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Houston. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

A view of the spot of George Floyd's murder at George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

A person visits the spot of George Floyd's murder at George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

A person visits the spot of George Floyd's murder at George Floyd Square on the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death, Sunday, May 25, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)