Originally published 2021-06-17.
On 11 June 2021 the Pulitzer Prize Board gave a special citation to Darnella Frazier, the Minneapolis teenager who filmed police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck on 25 May 2020. She was 17 when she pressed record. Her video, posted online that night, became the most important piece of evidence in the case and set off protests across the United States and around the world.
A special citation is not one of the regular competitive Pulitzer categories. The board uses it rarely, to honour work that does not fit those categories. In Frazier's case, the board recognised her "for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world". Here is who she is, what happened that day, why the honour mattered, and what followed.
Who is Darnella Frazier?
Frazier was born on 23 March 2003 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and in May 2020 she was a junior at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. On the evening of 25 May she was walking her nine-year-old cousin to Cup Foods, a corner shop at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in south Minneapolis.
When she saw officers pinning a man to the ground outside the store, she sent her cousin inside and started filming on her phone. She kept recording for around ten minutes as bystanders begged the officers to let Floyd breathe. At 1:46 a.m. the next morning she posted the footage to Facebook and Instagram.
She had no plan to become a journalist or an activist. She was simply a teenager who stood her ground and kept her camera steady while officers told onlookers to back off.
Why her video changed the case
The Minneapolis Police Department's first public statement about the incident described a man who resisted arrest and then appeared to suffer "medical distress". It did not mention that an officer had knelt on his neck. Frazier's footage told a very different story: Floyd, handcuffed and face down, saying he could not breathe and calling out for his mother while Chauvin's knee stayed in place, for more than nine minutes in total.
Within a day, the four officers involved had been fired. Over the following weeks, Floyd's death drew protests in more than 2,000 US cities and over 60 countries, one of the largest waves of protest in modern American history. Most demonstrations were peaceful, though some were accompanied by rioting, looting and arson, and more than 62,000 National Guard troops were activated across the country.
Many legal commentators have said that without the bystander video it is far less likely that the case would have ended in a murder conviction.
Testifying at the Chauvin trial
Frazier was called as a prosecution witness on 30 March 2021, early in Chauvin's trial. Because she had been a minor at the time of the killing, she was identified in court by her first name and was not shown on the live broadcast.
Her testimony was one of the most emotional moments of the trial. She described seeing a terrified man pleading for his life, and she explained why the scene hit so close to home. "When I look at George Floyd, … I look at my dad. I look at my brothers," she told the jury, reflecting on her own Black family members.
She also said there had been nights when she stayed awake apologising to Floyd for not doing more to save him, before adding that the officer was the one who should have acted. On 20 April 2021 the jury found Chauvin guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
What a Pulitzer special citation means
The Pulitzer Prizes, run from Columbia University in New York since 1917, are the best-known awards in American journalism. Most prizes go to news organisations and professional reporters in fixed categories such as public service, breaking news and investigative reporting.
Special citations sit outside that system. The board awards them only occasionally, sometimes to honour a lifetime of work and sometimes to recognise an act that the normal categories cannot capture. In 2021 the board gave one to Frazier and another to the staff of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, for their response to the 2018 shooting in their newsroom.
Honouring a teenager with no journalism training was a strong statement. It recognised that ordinary people with phones now play a real part in documenting events, especially events that powerful institutions might prefer to describe differently. The same Pulitzer cycle also awarded the Breaking News Reporting prize to the staff of the Minneapolis Star Tribune for its coverage of Floyd's death and its aftermath.
The Pulitzer citation was not her first honour. In December 2020 PEN America gave her its Benenson Courage Award.
The cost of bearing witness
Frazier has been open about the toll the experience took on her. On the first anniversary of Floyd's death, she wrote a long post describing trauma, anxiety and the way her life changed, and she thanked her mother for supporting her. She also described being harassed online by people who accused her of seeking attention or of failing to intervene.
Tragedy touched her family again only weeks after the Pulitzer announcement. On 6 July 2021 her uncle, Leneal Frazier, was killed when a Minneapolis police car chasing a suspect crashed into his vehicle. He had no connection to the pursuit.
Her story is a reminder that citizen witnesses often carry consequences long after the cameras turn away, and that they rarely receive the support given to professional journalists.
What happened next
Chauvin was sentenced to 22½ years in prison on the state charges. In December 2021 he also pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and received a 21-year sentence, served at the same time. The three other officers, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, were convicted of federal civil rights violations and later convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, state charges of aiding and abetting manslaughter.
In June 2023 the US Department of Justice released a review of the Minneapolis Police Department. It found a pattern of excessive force and of discrimination against Black and Native American residents, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said those patterns "made what happened to George Floyd possible".
The protests also fuelled a national debate about police funding. The Black Lives Matter movement and allied groups campaigned to "defund the police", meaning shifting money from police budgets into social services. Some cities made cuts, including Los Angeles, whose city council voted on 1 July 2020 to reduce the LAPD budget by $150 million. Several cities later reversed or softened such cuts, and the slogan remains contested.
Through all of it, the ten minutes of video recorded by a 17-year-old on a street corner remain the central record of what happened to George Floyd.
Sources: The Pulitzer Prizes: Darnella Frazier, 2021 special citation; Wikipedia: Darnella Frazier; Wikipedia: Murder of George Floyd; CNN via KVIA, 30 March 2021: Chauvin trial witness sums up what George Floyd means for Black people in America; Global News, July 2020: Los Angeles cuts LAPD budget by $150 million. This story was first shared via the BBC.
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