Johnny Wilk couldn’t bring himself to watch George Floyd die.

The video evidence of Floyd’s killing spread like wildfire on social media, and yet Wilk, a 1993 Palmerton Area High School graduate, refused to play it for himself. Wilk had heard about the brutal depiction, “but I couldn’t watch it,” he said.

Then the protests began. Stirred by Floyd’s death in May, demonstrations erupted across the nation, and even the world. Many were also fueled by the deaths of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman who was killed by Louisville Metro police in March, and Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was fatally shot by white men while jogging in Georgia in February.

So, Wilk changed his mind.

The recording shows former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into 46-year-old Floyd’s neck until he lies still.

“I did watch the video,” Wilk said, “and that’s when I said, ‘I got to do something.’?”

A graduate of Kutztown University with experience in communication design, Wilk took an image of Floyd and made it the center of a few posters.

He placed a torn American flag behind Floyd’s rendering and surrounded him with the Minneapolis skyline and words like “fight hate.”

On one composition, Wilk wrote, “Please, I can’t breathe,” quoting Floyd’s pleas to Chauvin for the officer to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck.

Wilk colored the posters in hues of orange, red, blue and black, wanting the images to be “bold and in your face,” he said. He shared the finished products on Facebook.

“It’s time for healing America!” he wrote in one post.

Wilk’s designs eventually made their way to Selwyn Jones, a South Dakota hotelier and uncle of George Floyd. The two connected. Their conversation ended with the decision to take one of Wilk’s motifs and put it on a T-shirt.

Wilk teamed up with his brother-in-law. Zach Romig, who owns the T-shirt company Freshest Earth, made the tees, and Wilk expedited the shirts to Houston, Texas, where, days later, hundreds gathered and many more tuned in virtually to lay George Floyd to rest.

On the day of Floyd’s funeral, Jones wore a white blazer, with one of Wilk’s designs peeking through.

“I have one on right now,” Jones said over a phone interview Monday, referring to a T-shirt Wilk made. “I love it.”

Jones, who has been outspoken in the wake of his nephew’s death, said Floyd was killed “not because he was angry, or fighting, or struggling” but “because he was black.”

“People are mad,” he remarked.

But Jones said his focus has shifted from anger to something else. “I just want to see if I can make a change, and make people realize that this racial indifference has been going on for us for hundreds and hundreds of years,” he said. “Will it ever change? I don’t know.”

Jones said he does know his nephew’s death won’t be in vain.

“It’s going to change a lot of things,” he said.

And when this modern-day turmoil is remembered - when America and the rest of the world recall Floyd’s death and the moment it marked in history - Jones wonders about the significance this one shirt might hold.

“Imagine the impact of this shirt 30, 40 years from now,” Jones said. “That shirt was worn at George Floyd’s homegoing ceremony.

“He (Wilk) did me justice.”