The writer is president of Pomona College

This isn’t over, not by a long shot. America’s cities are still in turmoil, as are hearts and minds across the world, after we watched the horrifying death by suffocation of George Floyd, an African-American man whose life was snuffed out under the knee of a police officer over 526 seconds. He pleaded for his life, asked for his mother. Onlookers begged the officers holding Floyd’s neck and body to the ground to stop — to have mercy.

It’s not over. It’s not even just begun. This is yet one more in a long line of deaths: pointless, painful, final. One man died by jogging. A woman by opening her door. A boy by playing in a park. And the crisis that has in America brought forth bloody flowers, and strange fruit (the blistering language used to describe lynchings sprung from trees across my country), has spread.