MINNEAPOLIS — Philonise Floyd wrapped his arm around Gwen Carr’s shoulder, staring into the throng of television cameras outside the Hennepin County Government Center.

Before the news conference on a recent afternoon, the two — bound by the grief of losing a loved one at the hands of police — had only met a few times.

Carr, whose son, Eric Garner, was killed by a police officer’s chokehold in New York in 2014, traveled here in the days after George Floyd, Philonise’s older brother, died last May under the knee of a police officer.

They cried together and prayed together. And now, they were together, again, publicly calling for justice.

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TUSKEGEE, Ala.  — Omar Neal often thinks back on the calculated betrayal of hundreds of Black men and how it still shapes so much about this rural Alabama community.

He remembers the mechanic who went from house to house fixing cars and the sharecropper who lived off a narrow dirt road. He thinks too of his uncle Freddie Lee Tyson, a carpenter, and how the betrayal shaped his life.

“These men believed so-called medical experts and were deceived,” said Neal, a lifelong resident of Tuskegee.

The name of the town evokes feelings of both pride and pain — for its legendary Black airmen and for the infamous government-backed healthcare study. For now, the legacy of the study, in which Black men with syphilis were left untreated for decades, stands front of mind for many contemplating whether to get a COVID-19 vaccine recommended by federal officials.

Neal’s uncle was among the more than 600 African American men from here who were enrolled under false pretenses in the deadly long-term health study coordinated and financed by the federal government beginning in the 1930s.

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TWO GREY HILLS, N.M.  —  The man on the other end of the speakerphone gasped and let out a thick, phlegm-clogged cough before responding to Marlene Montoya’s question.

“We got it, I think, on a quick trip to Albuquerque,” he said. “Me and my oldest boy are in bad shape.”

Montoya, a COVID-19 contact tracer here on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico, leaned close to the phone and spoke in a low, soothing tone to the man, who introduced himself as Freddie. Before long, she assured him that another Navajo Nation Department of Health worker would bring him a cardboard box packed with canned food, fresh produce and water.

“Please,” she told the man in his early 50s, who lives in a desolate area of the sprawling reservation, “just stay home. We need you to stay put and monitor your symptoms.”

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LORDSBURG, N.M.  —  The whispers around town started this spring during the early days of the shutdown. Something felt off, even here in this windswept crossroads far from most troubles. Dean Link had a hunch about what was to come, but when the mail arrived in August, despair overwhelmed him.

“You will be laid off effective September 7, 2020,” stated the letter from the mayor of Lordsburg informing Link that his part-time job at the museum was over.

In that moment, Link joined the growing ranks of some 20 million other Americans — many employed by corporations, industries and mom-and-pop shops, but also public sector employees like him — who have lost their livelihoods during the punishing economy wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The museum’s only paid employee, Link, a gregarious man with a drawl that immediately gives away his Southern roots, appreciated the paycheck from the $9-an-hour gig. But it was serving as the gatekeeper to the deep and at times uneasy history of this town — home to both a Japanese internment camp and a landmark aviation mission — that gave him true purpose.

“In life, I try not to harp on the bad things,” the 61-year-old said on a recent afternoon, while standing outside the A-framed museum, which now has a chain-link fence blocking the driveway.

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MINNEAPOLIS — Before he drove to the grocery store parking lot, Romeal Taylor did the same thing he’s done every day this summer — he holstered his9-millimeter handgunto the waistband of his gym shorts until he could feel it hug his right hip.

When he arrived at the store in north Minneapolis he spotted six other Blackmen, some in tactical gear, armed with Glock 23s and Smith & Wesson M&Ps. One of them beamed when he spotted Taylor and hugged him.

“Bro, good to see you,” Taylor said, muffled through a face mask.

They had come together for a meet-and-greet to introduce themselves to the community, marking one of the first public gatherings of the Minnesota Freedom Fighters.

The ad hoc groupof about two dozen men — including a retired firefighter, a healthcare worker and a veteran — formed in the days after George Floyd’s killing in response to the local NAACP chapter putting out a call for residents in predominantly Black north Minneapolis to protect small businesses from destruction as fires and unrest engulfed the city.

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MIAMI — Almost every day, it seems, a parishioner comes to Father Reginald Jean-Mary with the same plea: Pray for us, we’re scared. We can’t go back, not now.

They live in fear of a forced return to Haiti, a country where they were born and that they love, but one that’s been paralyzed by poverty, violent protests and a debilitating cholera epidemic.

They fear even more for their American-born children, who, unlike them, would be eligible to remain in the only country they’ve ever known. For many Haitian immigrants, the idea of uprooting preteens to live for the first time in a deeply impoverished country seems out of the question.

“Haiti will always be my home by birth, but this is my new home,” said Luce Janvier, a parishioner at the church. “It’s not safe in Haiti — not now, maybe never.”

Here in the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti — along the asphalt streets where chickens run wild and Creole is the predominant language — Jean-Mary’s cream-colored Catholic church serves as a refuge for Haitians from across the city.

After a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti in January 2010, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead and crippling infrastructure in Port-au-Prince, the capital, tens of thousands of survivors fled to south Florida.

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