Authors and journalists Toluse Olorunnipa and Robert Samuels join Daniel Ford on the show to discuss their Pulitzer Prize-winning book His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.
Toluse Olorunnipa is the White House Bureau Chief of The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2019 and has covered the last three presidents. Previously, he spent five years at Bloomberg News, where he reported on politics and policy from Washington and Florida. Olorunnipa has reported from five continents and more than 30 countries as part of the presidential press corps. He started his career at The Miami Herald.
Robert Samuels is a staff writer at The New Yorker who focuses on stories about politics, policy, and the changing American identity. He co-authored His Name Is George Floyd while he was a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post, where he worked for nearly 12 years. He grew up in the Bronx and is an alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where he was editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern. He has also worked as a staff writer at The Miami Herald.
“Spending so much time with George Floyd and his spirit from the conversations and interviews that we did infuses you with that level of hope that even though he faced a tragic end, we still get to breathe and still have the opportunity to make things better for the next generation.”
“I left this project feeling a lot more hope for this country than I did when I came in. And that was because of the persistence and the beauty of the people we talked to.”
