ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. – The murder trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was wrapping up when Dakwon Gibbs told a friend that George Floyd’s killing — and others like it — would never happen in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. “I said, 'We live in a city that’s too small; we’re a small community,” said Gibbs, 22. “And two days later it happened.
I thought wrong. I thought very wrong.” The fatal shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. by sheriff’s deputies has sent shock waves through this small, majority Black city in the state's rural northeastern corner.
Despite holding an important place in African American history in the 19th and 20th centuries, Elizabeth City seemed too close-knit and too out-of-the-way to become a flashpoint