Tiffany Haddish appeared on Tuesday’s episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers and spoke about attending George Floyd‘s memorial service in Minneapolis.
The 40-year-old actress was one of the many mourners to gather at Trask Word and Worship Center last week to remember Floyd, who died on Memorial Day at the hands of police. While Haddish said she was invited to attend, she also said she wanted to be there because she has watched her friends “be slaughtered by the police.”
“I have watched people be murdered in front of me as a 13-year-old, 14-year-old girl,” she said. “And there was nothing I can do except, ‘No! Don’t do that!’ Just yelling out. What does that do? And so, I wanted to be there in support of the family because I understand how they feel. And being there was like being there for all my friends whose funerals I already went to. But all my friends who passed away, all the people that I went to school with who’ve passed away, have been locked up for no reason just because they can’t afford a good lawyer or, you know, accused of things that they didn’t do.”
Haddish said being there was “powerful” and that she “cried so much.”
“I was crying so much, and it was like tears of, not just for Floyd, but for all of those people that passed away and all of my friends and my family members that are locked up,” she said. “It was like all the tears that I ever wanted to cry were coming out.”
The Girls Trip star also recalled standing in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds—the amount of time Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd’s neck.
“When they had that moment of silence—that eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence on that stage—and I’m standing there, next to one of the mothers of a victim, and the quietness and then the thought of what if someone’s knee was in my neck for this long?” she said. “How helpless were my friends when they were being attacked, you know?”
“The tears—I was trying to swallow them,” she continued. “And they was coming out through my nose, and my mask was full of snot. And I was, like, holding it, trying to, like, keep the snot off my mouth. But there aint no holding it. And I wasn’t going to take it off because I didn’t want to look like a scene out of a bad movie. The pain, the amount of pain that I felt was tremendous.”
Haddish also addressed criticism she received after the Rev. Al Sharpton mentioned her name during the eulogy and several social media users accused her of “getting shout-outs” and “forcing her presence.”
“I don’t care if they’re tweeting about me,” Haddish, who had also shut down the accusations on Twitter, said. “If they’re tweeting about me and that’s bringing more attention to what’s going on right now, great.”
In addition to the Minnesota memorial service, there were services for Floyd in North Carolina and Texas. He was laid to rest in Houston on Tuesday.
(E! and NBC are both part of NBCUniversal).
