Al Sharpton told mourners on Thursday George Floyd’s fatal encounter with police and the nationwide protests his death ignited marked a reckoning for America over race and justice, demanding, “Get your knee off our necks.”.

Memorial tributes to Floyd in Minneapolis, where he was killed on May 25, and in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, a major flashpoint for demonstrations stirred by his death, came as protesters returned to the streets of several U.S.

Delivering the eulogy at a memorial service inside a university chapel in Minneapolis, Sharpton said Floyd’s fate - dying at the hands of police, pinned to the ground under the knee of a white officer - symbolized a universal experience of police brutality for African Americans.

The size and scope of disturbances seemed to ebb after prosecutors in Minneapolis on Wednesday elevated murder charges against one police officer jailed last week in Floyd’s May 25 death and arrested three others accused of aiding and abetting the first.

Chauvin is the officer seen in video footage kneeling on Floyd’s neck as Floyd gasped for air and repeatedly groaned, “I can’t breathe,” before passing out.

The four former officers, all dismissed from the Minneapolis police department the day after Floyd died, each faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charges against them.

His brother, Terrence Floyd, joined an outdoor memorial on Thursday in a Brooklyn park where many in the crowd knelt in the grass in the afternoon sunshine in a symbol of protest and chanted, “No justice, no peace.”.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio took the stage to pledge that Floyd’s death would lead to substantive changes in police practices in the nation’s largest city, and called for greater interracial empathy.