A month after Fani Willis was sworn in as the first Black female district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., in 2021, her father said protesters arrived outside her house at 5 a.m. John Floyd III recalled that he “hadn’t seen anything exactly like it, before and after that happened.”

“There were people outside her house cursing and yelling and calling her the b-word and the n-word. And just — it was bizarre,” Floyd testified in an Atlanta-area courthouse Friday morning.

Five days after that incident, Willis announced a criminal investigation into whether former president Donald Trump conspired to try to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, setting off a chain of events that somehow had landed Floyd on the witness stand on Feb. 16, as part of an evidentiary hearing over misconduct claims against his only child.

Floyd’s personal testimony offered a break from the partisanship that has dominated the debate on whether Willis ought to be disqualified from the Trump case: contextualizing his daughter’s actions and revealing snippets of his own remarkable life.

Some have seen him as a quintessential Black father figure. Political commenter Reecie Colbert called his testimony “a Black History Month lesson.” Others took to social media to praise his fiscal advice on the stand: “Thank God for black fathers. My dad also taught me how to always save & to always keep myself some cash.”

From the start, Floyd was a disarming witness. He wore a simple black suit, white shirt and a red tie, with a small red pin bearing the crest of his fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, on his lapel. His graying beard and hair connected in one continuous curve, like a halo. When an attorney asked him to inspect a piece of evidence, Floyd, who wears glasses, noted that his eyesight was “very bad” and pulled out a magnifying glass from inside his suit jacket. He gently leaned forward to answer questions. He couldn’t help but let out a chuckle when asked if he had any children — “I have one daughter,” he answered. When asked about whether he traveled anywhere in 2020, Floyd lamented that not only did he not travel, he didn’t even go to movies, “which upset me so.”

In demeanor, Floyd was a sharp contrast to Willis’s fiery and defiant presence on the same witness stand the day before.

When Fani Willis took the stand, her fury was precise and laser-focused

But what the close father-daughter pair have in common — in her testimony, Willis noted that they talk on the phone 10 times a day — also came through.

Floyd said he was the one who advised Willis to always carry cash — and to keep “six months worth of cash always.”

“Excuse me, your honor, I’m not trying to be racist, okay, but it’s a Black thing,” Floyd said. He told a story about attempting to pay for his family’s meal at a Cambridge, Mass., restaurant; Floyd was at Harvard on a fellowship, and Willis was 3 years old at the time, he recalled. “The man would not take my American Express credit card. So I pulled out my Visa card, and he wouldn’t take my Visa card.” The same with his traveler’s checks. But the $10 bill Floyd had — that was accepted.

“I’ll never forget that as long as I live,” Floyd said.

Not only did Floyd keep three safes in his own home, he gifted his daughter “her first cash box,” he added. When she testified, Willis said cash meant financial independence and security, values her father had taught her.

The question of money and how it was used is significant in the misconduct allegations against Willis; one of Trump’s co-defendants has accused the district attorney of an “improper clandestine relationship” with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she had appointed to manage the election interference case. Defense lawyers accuse Wade and Willis of financially benefiting from the investigation, further alleging that Wade used those financial gains to pay her expenses on lavish vacations abroad. (Willis and Wade have denied any impropriety; during her testimony Thursday, Willis told the court she paid Wade back in cash for expenses he covered.)

The Fulton County DA’s office and a spokesperson for Willis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“When Fani Willis was talking about how she keeps money at home, it rang true for me as a Black woman watching the testimony,” said Colbert, who hosts a politics and culture radio show on Sirius XM. But “I also understood that the lens that it’s being received is on a person [Judge Scott McAfee] who probably doesn’t have that same cultural experience.”

Many watching the hearing online commented on details Floyd shared of his personal history. His youth was defined by the civil rights movement, which he said took him from Alabama back to his home in South Central Los Angeles, where he joined the Black Power movement. (As a young organizer, one of the projects Floyd had hoped to complete was setting up a credit union for his community, Floyd recently told California State University’s Tom and Ethel Bradley Center.)

After two fellow Black Panthers were fatally shot at a Black Student Union meeting, Floyd turned to law, enrolling at UCLA, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, though he remained active in human rights campaigns — on the stand, he mentioned he had worked for Nelson Mandela and the campaign to free him from prison.

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Floyd also spoke about how, as a criminal defense attorney, he had litigated “probably … a thousand cases” all over the country, though he spent most of his legal career in Washington. He was part of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, he added, and had hoped to live the rest of his life in South Africa, but had to return to the United States “for political reasons.” A film buff, Floyd now lives in L.A., where he is working on a documentary, he told the court.

Floyd also described his increasing fears for his daughter’s safety as threats mounted against her in the wake of becoming the most powerful prosecutor in the most populous county in Georgia.

At the time, he was living with Willis at her home in South Fulton, said Floyd.

The threats continued — “they said they were going to blow up the house, they were going to kill her, they were going to kill me,” Floyd said — and Willis was forced to leave the house, but Floyd stayed behind.

Floyd tended the yard. When vandals tagged the house with slurs, Floyd cleaned it off (“I don’t think my daughter even knew that,” he said). He was there when bomb-sniffing dogs circled the house — an event that happened once or twice a day at one point, Floyd testified. He would walk the home, peering out of every window and sleeping in different rooms each night.

When asked why he chose to stay, despite the dangers, Floyd said, “It was a four-bedroom, brand-new house.”

“That was a house that my daughter had worked for.”