Just before dawn on a warm night in early June, a line of city vehicles pulled into a four-block area in South Minneapolis that has come to be known as George Floyd Square. Groups of workers fanned out in the darkness and started removing barricades and other structures that, for nearly a year, had cut off the flow of traffic on two major thoroughfares: Chicago Avenue and East Thirty-eighth Street. The reaction to what looked like a cross between a covert op and a public-works project was immediate; residents of the mixed-income neighborhood began texting and posting a flurry of messages on social media as they streamed out of their homes. Across town, one of those texts reached Jay Webb, a gardener and a caretaker of the Square. He got dressed and hustled out the door. Another observer said in a video on Instagram, “Greetings from G.F.S. They’re coming! They’re coming!”
Since last summer, the barricades had told visitors that, as a hand-painted sign announced, “you are now entering the Free State of George Floyd.” At the center of the area was the intersection outside the Cup Foods grocery store, where Floyd died, on May 25, 2020, after the police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds during an arrest, while three other officers stood by. In the chaotic fury that swept the nation in the days afterward, hundreds of businesses in Minneapolis were vandalized, and a hundred and fifty buildings, including the Third Precinct, where Chauvin worked, were set on fire. There were protests in the intersection, but mourners, activists, tourists, and community members soon turned the area into a sort of shrine, leaving messages, flowers, and candles. A painted silhouette marked the spot where Floyd had died.
One night, a week after his death, law-enforcement officials drove through the makeshift memorial. In response, residents dragged cinder blocks, furniture, and even an old refrigerator into the streets to block traffic. Mayor Jacob Frey, who at one point referred to the area as “sacred ground,” had concrete construction barriers placed at the intersection, ostensibly to protect pedestrians. But the barriers also deepened the sense that George Floyd Square was now a place unto itself. An ad-hoc committee of activists and residents erected and staffed guard shacks at entrances. An abandoned Speedway gas station was repurposed as the People’s Way, and an improvised fire pit, set up between empty pumps, became a gathering place. Webb collected the detritus of the protests—bricks and plywood that had covered windows—and used it to build a roundabout structure in the middle of the intersection. It included a platform where visitors could leave flowers and messages, and a nine-foot-tall steel sculpture of a fist that the artist Jordan Powell Karis had designed, as a replica of an earlier wooden sculpture, and that residents helped assemble. The Square was becoming more than a shrine to Floyd’s life; it was a monument to others who had died in encounters with police, and a headquarters for an emergent movement.
Then, on April 20th of this year, Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. On June 25th, Judge Peter Cahill sentenced him to twenty-two and a half years in prison. The three other officers will be tried next year, and federal indictments have been handed down against all four of them. Many Americans saw the verdict as a just resolution to a public tragedy. The Square’s reopening seemed part of a general spirit of relief and a desire to move on from the horror of Floyd’s death and the tensions that had turned Minneapolis into a microcosm of the national debate about race and policing.
But another view, held with at least equal resolve, considered the trial only one concern in a constellation of many that needed to be addressed before there could be anything resembling closure. During the trial, Webb, who stands six feet nine inches tall and looks to be about fifty (though he said that he considers himself just a day old—the day he’s living), told me he was concerned that “when the flowers die, and the helium is gone from the balloons, people will forget the entire case.” The monument that he built was intended to prevent that from happening. “This cannot just be another corner,” he said. His implication was that, although the world saw Floyd’s death as a singular incident of spectacular violence, people in parts of Minneapolis, particularly in the Square, were more likely to connect his death to a long genealogy of events that both preceded and followed it, and which few outside of that community knew much about.
The disparity in the reactions to the Chauvin conviction can be partially explained by the fact that, despite the clear evidence, the verdict was never a given. When I arrived in Minneapolis in April, at the start of the second week of the trial, the downtown was deserted, devoid of the scenes of rage and bedlam that had played out there last summer. Every so often, an almost empty tram slipped into the Government Plaza station, near the Hennepin County courthouse, released two or three passengers, and then departed. Yet a cluster of satellite trucks, military transport vehicles, and National Guard troops stationed at the courthouse entrance suggested that the city was prepared for every contingency.
Early on, though, a consensus emerged: the prosecution was handling its case impressively. The attorneys, led in the courtroom by Jerry Blackwell and Steve Schleicher, elicited mesmerizing testimony from the witnesses, including a nine-year-old girl who had been on her way to Cup Foods just before Floyd’s death; her seventeen-year-old cousin, Darnella Frazier, who shot the video that sparked global outrage at the murder; and Charles McMillian, a sixty-one-year-old man who broke down while recalling his helplessness as Floyd cried out, “Mama, they killing me.”
The prosecutors also called Medaria Arradondo, the first Black police chief in the city’s history, to testify. He told the court that Chauvin’s actions were “certainly not part of our ethics or our values.” Richard Zimmerman, the head of the Minneapolis Police Department’s homicide unit, testified that Chauvin’s actions were “totally unnecessary.” Johnny Mercil, a lieutenant who conducts the department’s use-of-force training, said that officers, when using body weight to control a suspect, are instructed to “stay away from the neck when possible.” When he was asked whether placing a knee on the neck of a suspect who is “under control and handcuffed” would be authorized, he replied, “I would say no.”
The recruitment of Blackwell, Schleicher, and two other attorneys, Lola Velazquez-Aguilu and Neal Katyal, all of whom are in private practice, was credited to Keith Ellison, the former congressman who is the first Muslim Attorney General of Minnesota and the first African-American elected to statewide office there. Ellison had taken over the case from the Hennepin County Attorney, Mike Freeman, at the request of Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat. This arrangement was hailed as tactically brilliant—Ellison had credibility among progressives who were skeptical of the system’s ability to handle the case—but it also reflected the fraught circumstances under which the trial took place.
In 2019, Freeman, who is the son of the former governor Orville Freeman and had previously served as a Democratic state senator, oversaw the prosecution in another prominent police shooting. In 2017, Justine Damond, a white Minneapolis resident originally from Australia, called the police to report a possible assault taking place in an alley behind her home. Mohamed Noor, a Black officer of Somali descent, arrived and, mistaking Damond for an assailant, shot her dead. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison. Yet the case caused consternation because, amid a spate of killings in the area committed by white police, Noor was the only officer found guilty. His conviction fuelled the perception that in Minnesota there were separate legal systems for Blacks and for whites.
A consequence of this belief was that activists, notably Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer and a former president of the Minneapolis N.A.A.C.P., began pushing for the Chauvin prosecution to be handled by outside counsel. “The activists were demanding it,” Ellison, who ran as a progressive reformer and was elected in 2018, told me, but Freeman, whom he described as a friend, had also asked him to take on the case. “It was really the County Attorney asking the A.G. to be involved, and the Governor appointed us at the same time,” he said. Freeman assisted the prosecution team, but Ellison’s presence was reassuring in a system whose legitimacy had come into question.
Last year, Samuel Myers, Jr., a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, published a post on the school’s Web site about what he called the Minnesota Paradox. The state, which typically ranks among the best places to live in the country, has a strong economy (3M, U.S. Bancorp, General Mills, and Cargill are all headquartered there), respected institutions of higher education, affordable homes, abundant natural resources, and a landscape (eleven thousand lakes) that feeds a thriving outdoor-recreation industry. The Twin Cities, in particular, seem to have been granted an exemption from the postindustrial malaise that has defined other Midwestern cities. Moreover, the area’s long liberal political tradition and the presence of resettled Somali and Hmong refugee communities have burnished its reputation as an outpost of progressivism.
But, Myers wrote, “measured by racial gaps in unemployment rates, wage and salary incomes, incarceration rates, arrest rates, home ownership rates, mortgage lending rates, test scores, reported child maltreatment rates, school disciplinary and suspension rates, and even drowning rates, African-Americans are worse off in Minnesota than they are in virtually every other state in the nation.” Blacks constitute just seven per cent of the state’s population (of five and a half million), a number that includes both African-Americans and recently arrived immigrants, such as the Somali refugees. The median-income gap between Black and white Minneapolis families—forty-seven thousand dollars, as of 2018—is among the largest in the nation. Floyd’s death was one of some eighty homicides in Minneapolis last year; the majority of the victims were Black and male. Duchess Harris, a professor of American studies at Macalester College, in St. Paul, told me that Minnesota is “everything anybody would ever want, unless you’re Black.” She echoed a sentiment voiced by Leslie Redmond, another former president of the Minneapolis N.A.A.C.P., that the state is “Wakanda for white people.”
“It’s not that Minnesota is not a liberal state,” Ellison said. “It’s just it’s not only a liberal state.” For most of the twentieth century, a limit of that liberalism could be found at the edge of the Northside, where the historic Black community was relegated, owing to restrictive housing covenants and redlining. By the nineteen-thirties, St. Paul had a thriving Black middle-class neighborhood, called Rondo, but in the sixties it was, as with many such enclaves in American cities, partly demolished to make way for an interstate highway.
The Black population of Minneapolis grew significantly during the eighties and nineties, as residents of struggling communities in Detroit, Chicago, and Gary, Indiana, sought opportunities there. Ellison, who is fifty-six, grew up in Detroit and attended law school at the University of Minnesota, and he recalls the disdain that some white Minnesotans expressed. “When I first got here, people moving from Gary were being told, ‘We’ll give you a one-way ticket back.’ ” Those new arrivals also entered a climate in which relations with the police were becoming increasingly antagonistic—a situation that intensified in recent years with a couple of high-profile cases.
In November, 2015, officers responding to a call about a dispute at a party fatally shot Jamar Clark in the head while attempting to arrest him. The officers maintained that Clark, who was twenty-four, had tried to take a gun from one of them. Some witnesses disputed that account, saying that Clark was already in handcuffs when he was shot. (Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney, did not file charges in the case.) The Clark shooting, which occurred a year after the national wave of protests over the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, galvanized the Black Lives Matter affiliate in Minneapolis and led to an eighteen-day occupation of the grounds of the Fourth Precinct. A week into the occupation, Allen Scarsella, a twenty-three-year-old white man, fired a gun in the direction of the protesters. It was later discovered that he was friends with a Minnesota police officer who testified during Scarsella’s trial that the two had frequently exchanged racist messages.
The following summer, the police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old school-cafeteria worker, during a traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb, as he sat in his car with his girlfriend and her young daughter. Castile, who was a licensed gun owner, had told Yanez, as he complied with the officer’s request to retrieve his driver’s license, that he had a weapon in his possession. Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter and was acquitted, in 2017. In the midst of these conflicts, the B.L.M. affiliate disbanded. Under the glare of national attention, and with scant funding, the group “burned out,” in the words of Kandace Montgomery, one of its organizers.
That year, which marked the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the M.P.D.’s founding, a coalition of activists calling themselves MPD150 produced a report titled “Enough Is Enough.” It concluded, among other things, that the department’s core function is to protect the wealthy, and that “racialized violence” has always been part of that imperative. Communities United Against Police Brutality, a grassroots organization that documents and investigates incidents of excessive police force, has compiled data from the city’s Office of Police Conduct Review. The group found that, of nearly twenty-eight hundred civilian complaints lodged during the eight years before Floyd’s death, the department ruled that only thirteen were warranted.
This history helps explain why, locally, people tended to view Floyd’s killing not as an anomaly but as part of an enduring narrative. “Police have killed other people,” Steve Floyd, a sixty-two-year-old gang-outreach worker in Minneapolis, told me. “Not only Philando and Clark—all the other people who have been killed at the hands of the police.” (The Star Tribune has recorded two hundred and nine such incidents statewide since 2000.) Floyd, who is originally from Chicago, and is not related to George Floyd, advises the Agape Movement, a violence-intervention organization created in 2020. The group has enlisted former gang members to defuse community conflicts and has coördinated patrols of the Square. For the past nine months, it has been housed in a building two doors down from Cup Foods.
As Floyd knows from experience, another element of life in the Square that went largely unnoticed in the tumult and debate of the past year was the level of internecine violence. Chicago Avenue between East Thirty-seventh and East Thirty-eighth Streets is tattooed with graffiti featuring the names of people of color, most of whom died in interactions with the police. But there is also graffiti identifying the block as a redoubt of the Rolling 30s Bloods gang, which has operated in the area for decades. In the Twin Cities during the mid-nineties, the growth of gangs associated with other cities, such as the Chicago-based Vice Lords and the Los Angeles-born Bloods, gave rise to a police task force. Murder rates in Minneapolis have declined since then, as they have across the nation, but, according to the Star Tribune, a significant number of the forty-eight homicides that occurred there in 2019 are thought to be gang-related.
On March 6th, as jury selection for the Chauvin trial was about to begin, a thirty-year-old man named Imez Wright was standing near Cup Foods when another man jumped out of an S.U.V. and shot him several times in the chest. Wright, who had two young children, died just feet away from where George Floyd was killed. Prosecutors attributed the homicide to a conflict within the Rolling 30s Bloods. A suspect, identified as a member of the gang, has been arrested; according to court documents, he will argue that he was acting in self-defense.
Wright had joined the gang in his youth, but he sought to leave that life, and expressed a desire to help young people avoid the mistakes he’d made. Steve Floyd had helped supervise him at another organization, where Wright mentored schoolchildren. Floyd cited his story as an example of the dangers that continue to plague the neighborhood. “That’s what we deal with all the time,” he told me.
The community patrols have stepped up in recent months, in response to a spike in neighborhood crime. In March, Arradondo, the police chief, reported that in 2019 there were three victims of nonfatal shootings in the vicinity of Thirty-eighth and Chicago; last year, that number rose to eighteen. The city’s shot-spotter technology, which detects the sound signature of gunfire, logged thirty-three shots fired in the area in 2019, and seven hundred in 2020. But crime has increased throughout Minneapolis and in cities across the country. Steve Floyd added that a common misconception that the police were staying out of the Square had also made it vulnerable to crimes of opportunity. (A spokesperson for the M.P.D. said that it “patrols all areas of the city—bar none.”) Three people had committed robbery and assault at a pizzeria just outside the Square, Floyd said, and then had run past the barricades into the area, thinking that they’d be less likely to be caught there. It appears to have worked.
The city first announced last August that it planned to reopen the Square. Some people who had become regulars there set out to draft a response. One of the leaders of the group was Marcia Howard, a former marine in her late forties who teaches English at the nearby Roosevelt High School. (Imez Wright and Darnella Frazier had both been her students.) When I met her one morning in April, she bounded across the Square, despite the fact that she had been on guard duty since 3 a.m.—and that it had started to sleet. She called out, “The late, great Prince said, ‘Sometimes it snows in April.’ ” Howard has lived a block away from the spot where George Floyd died since 1998. (The day she moved in, she told me, there was a drug raid on her street.) Shocked by the murder, she found herself drawn into the activist network, took a leave from teaching, and spent nearly every day in the Square. Her front porch was crammed with boxes of goggles, hand sanitizer, and Gatorade, which supporters across the country had sent through an Amazon wish list. “Welcome to the quartermaster’s office for the movement,” she said.
Howard and others canvassed residents, and in August they released “Justice Resolution 001,” a list of twenty-four demands that needed to be met before they would agree to a reopening. The list included the immediate recall of County Attorney Freeman, millions of dollars in investment in businesses in and around the Square, and information on or investigations into ten police-related deaths, dating back to 2002.
But, over time, there was disagreement about the Square. In March of this year, the city conducted its own survey, asking about four thousand residents and business owners for input on its proposals for the future of the Square. Most of the respondents supported retaining some aspect of the memorial, but in a way that allowed for reopening the streets to traffic. Andrea Jenkins is a city-council member whose district includes most of the Square. In 2017, she ran on a progressive platform and became the first openly trans Black woman elected to political office in the country. We spoke by phone after Chauvin was convicted, and she told me that most of the community favored the reopening. “We hear from a small number of people who are occupying this space, and those are the people who are saying that the trial wasn’t justice and there needs to be more,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re asking the city of Minneapolis to atone for the four hundred years of oppression that America has brought on African-Americans.” She paused for a moment, then added, “That’s not to say that Minneapolis has not contributed mightily to it.”
The near-unanimity of the law-enforcement opposition to Chauvin on the stand heartened people, but it also raised other concerns: if officers’ testimony made the difference between acquittal and conviction in this case, it suggested that their reluctance to testify in previous cases may have been a causal factor in failures to convict. More profoundly, it suggested that the police are still the arbiters of good judgment, even in cases which call that presumption into question.
The officers on the stand could not have appeared more unlike the ex-officer on trial—and that, perhaps, was the point. Chauvin was a bad cop, and the rest are not. Yet the distinctions don’t entirely hold up. The M.P.D. fired Chauvin a day after Floyd’s death, but a police association funded his defense. He worked for the department for nineteen years, including as a field-training officer. That fact weakened the argument that he was fundamentally different from the men who said that his actions were “uncalled for” and contrary to his training. Chauvin was employed, promoted, and rewarded by the same system whose representatives now condemned his actions from the stand. In that sense, the jury—and the public—was being good-copped. And all parties were acutely aware that Minneapolis and many other cities would likely explode if Chauvin went free.
The Reverend Al Sharpton, who since the nineteen-eighties has been an activist involved in police use-of-force cases—pushing prosecutors to bring charges and pressuring elected officials to institute reforms—arrived in the city shortly before the end of the trial. He told me that, in the past, “the blue wall of silence is the wall that separated us from justice.” Floyd’s death was so egregious, though, that “the officers started to see Chauvin the same way I see jackleg preachers—just bad for the profession.” Yet the idea that Chauvin’s trial might serve as redemption for the police establishment was undercut just before the third week of the proceedings, by the death of Daunte Wright.
Ten miles north of the courthouse, on the afternoon of April 11th, three officers from the Brooklyn Center Police Department pulled over Wright, who was twenty years old, for a tag violation. He called his mother, and was on the phone with her during an exchange with the police that ended with Wright, who was by then out of his car, trying to get back into it. As an officer attempted to stop him, Kim Potter, a twenty-six-year veteran of the department, drew her gun and, shouting “Taser!,” fired a single round into Wright’s chest. (The police later said that Potter had mistakenly drawn her gun. She resigned—as did the city’s police chief—and was charged with second-degree manslaughter. Her trial is scheduled to begin in December; Ellison will again lead the prosecution.)
About four hours after the shooting, Kieran Knutson, an activist and the president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250, which represents A.T. & T. workers, sent me a link to a live stream of a protest on a street in Brooklyn Center. When I arrived, thirty minutes later, the demonstration was breaking up, but about two dozen people lingered, and members of Wright’s family were speaking quietly with local activists. Some wrote his name on the street in chalk. Much of the crowd reconvened about three miles away, in front of the Brooklyn Center Police Department. Scores of officers in riot gear stood outside, as the crowd grew to a few hundred. Demonstrators started to throw rocks and garbage toward the police, and the officers responded with flash grenades and tear gas. The crowd scattered but then regrouped nearby. The winds were in the protesters’ favor, and most of the tear gas blew back toward the police line. A young man standing next to me reached into his pocket and dropped a large rock onto the grass. This point-and-counterpoint went on for hours that night and on several subsequent nights.
Wright’s death was interpreted as a rejoinder to the contention that the current system is redeemable. Calls to defund or abolish the police, which were also being heard in Seattle, San Francisco, and other cities, began to gather momentum among groups including Reclaim the Block, which formed in 2018 and advocates for defunding, and Black Visions, a network of activists that formed after the local Black Lives Matter affiliate dissolved. Last June, the Minneapolis city council voted unanimously to take a first step toward creating a “transformative new model for cultivating community safety.” The municipal charter requires the city to have a police department, which reports directly to the mayor’s office. But there are multiple routes to amending the charter, including with an ordinance from the city council, calling for a referendum on the amendment in question, or with a citizen petition that garners twelve thousand signatures, which would also trigger a referendum.
This situation has been complicated by a depletion of the M.P.D. ranks. In February, the department reported that it had only six hundred and thirty-eight officers—roughly two hundred fewer than it would normally have—as a result of an exodus after last year’s riots. So the same city council that had voted in favor of creating a new model for community safety also voted unanimously to release $6.4 million to hire more officers for the old one. The seeming reversal soured relations with some in the activist community.
Michelle Phelps, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who has studied the recent rise of police-related activism, told me that the council members were caught in the cross-currents of public opinion. She noted that Andrea Jenkins has “described herself as an abolitionist and yet is consistently voting with the camp on the city council to keep giving money to the Minneapolis police. Why does she do that? It’s not because she’s duplicitous. It’s because she also hears from her constituents—many of whom are people of color—that they are worried about violent crime in their neighborhood.” Abolition, Jenkins told me, “is an aspirational goal,” but there are practical realities for which, in her view, it has few answers. “Everybody has got guns,” she said, speaking of the country at large. “Help me figure out how you have an unarmed police department when everybody has got guns.”
The clash between those in favor of replacing or getting rid of the department and those trying to retain it did not capture the entire spectrum of sentiment. Dave Bicking, a member of the board of Communities United Against Police Brutality, said that serious reform was needed but that, in his assessment, the council’s pronouncements last June were “all rhetoric.” He told me, “It had no basis in reality from the standpoint that anybody thought that it was possible or desirable, and was merely a way to calm the crowd.”
It is unclear what would come after abolition. “The current proposal that we are offering the residents of Minneapolis is a department of public safety to be created and the Minneapolis Police Department to be dissolved,” Julia Johnson, a twenty-nine-year-old organizer with Black Visions, told me. The group argues for moving responsibilities such as mental-health interventions and traffic enforcement from armed officers to unarmed civil-service groups, while maintaining a small number of armed “peace officers,” who would respond solely to violent conflict. I pointed out that the proposal resembles those of groups calling to defund police departments, not to abolish them. Johnson corrected me. The ultimate objective is “total abolition,” she said. “We want to reach, in the next couple, five, ten years, a place where we no longer need police officers to be part of our community-safety system.” When I asked how this would work in a nation that has more firearms than people, she said, “There was a time before police, and there will be a time after police.”
Ten days after the Chauvin verdict, Yes 4 Minneapolis, a campaign gathering signatures for a referendum, delivered more than twenty thousand of them, and a vote will be held in November. Public opinion is divided. In a poll last August, sixty-one per cent of likely voters in Minneapolis supported a charter change that would give the council the authority to replace the current police department with a new public-safety entity. Another poll showed that nearly three-quarters of registered voters supported cutting the police budget to support social services. But, in the same poll, only thirty-five per cent of Black respondents (and forty-one per cent of white respondents) supported even reducing the size of the police force.
Michelle Phelps told me that a backlash against council members who are considered to be too closely aligned with abolition is already building. “There could be a world in which the charter amendment passes but the people who were behind it and have the vision for it get voted out,” she said.
The outcome of the Chauvin trial offered the city a temporary reprieve from these debates. On April 20th, outside the Hennepin County courthouse, people crowded around cell phones waiting for word of the verdict. A fifty-four-year-old man named Willie Austin told me that he was trying not to get his hopes up. “I mean, it can get ugly either way it goes,” he said. A man in a green T-shirt and a matching ski cap strode past me, holding a large wooden cutout of a hand with a raised middle finger and “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) written across the bottom. But when another man with a bullhorn shouted “Guilty!” on all three counts, people broke into cheers, many of them crying as they hugged apparent strangers. A contingent of National Guard troops watched from an elevated plaza. Amid the jubilation, the man with the bullhorn offered a sedate verdict of his own. “Justice,” he said, “is living in a world where George Floyd never died.” I made my way across town, to George Floyd Square, where an interracial crowd that numbered in the thousands had poured into the intersection. A procession led by two trumpeters and a man playing the tuba chanted, “We got that justice, now we got that peace.” A few hours later, I found Willie Austin in the Square. “It feels good to finally win one,” he told me.
Two days later, though, a kind of civic whiplash set in, as Daunte Wright was laid to rest. The Shiloh Temple International Ministries church is in a broad, low-slung building at the intersection of West Broadway and North Girard Avenues, in a weathered portion of Minneapolis’s Northside. A crowd spilled into the street as a few photographers navigated drones overhead. A security team from a Black paramilitary group called the Minnesota Freedom Fighters was positioned along the street, bearing rifles. (Minnesota is a licensed-open-carry state.) Inside, Al Sharpton, who delivered the eulogy, sat on a dais near the altar alongside Benjamin Crump, the seemingly ubiquitous trial attorney who, with Antonio Romanucci and others, represented the Floyd family in a civil suit and, in March, secured a twenty-seven-million-dollar settlement from the city. Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, and Amy Klobuchar, the state’s senior U.S. senator, sat nearby. Mike Elliott, the thirty-seven-year-old Black mayor of Brooklyn Center, sat in the audience.
As the service began, a trumpeter named Keyon Harrold played “Amazing Grace.” Last year, Harrold, who is Black, was in the lobby of the Arlo Hotel, in New York City, with his fourteen-year-old son, Keyon, Jr., when a white woman accosted the boy, accusing him of stealing her cell phone. (It was later found by an Uber driver, in whose car the woman had left it.) Crump took on the Harrolds as clients. He also represents the Wright family, and when he stood to deliver his comments he introduced not the dignitaries in attendance but the people who had been inducted into what he called “a fraternity that no family wants to be a part of.” Valerie Castile, the mother of Philando Castile, was there, as were members of the families of Emmett Till, Jamar Clark, and Oscar Grant, who was killed in Oakland, in 2009, also by a police officer who said that he had been reaching for his Taser. Many of George Floyd’s relatives were present as well.
During the invocation, a pastor named Carmen Means said, “We experienced this week the god of justice,” and prayed that that god would do for the Wright family what he had done for the Floyds. The prayer, as much as anything else said that day or on any other in the past year, summarized what George Floyd has become in death: an aspirational symbol for justice, offering a plaintive hope that if people fail to prevent more deaths of this kind, then at least let the extinguished life be mourned and the wrong adjudicated.
The reopening of George Floyd Square came six weeks after Wright’s funeral. Steve Floyd and some members of Agape provided security as the workers began dismantling the barricades. He told me that people in the Square were shocked that they were assisting with the reopening. But it was apparent to him that the city would reopen the streets eventually, and so the most practical thing to do was to negotiate with the officials as it happened. The city agreed not to remove the art work and the memorial, a decision that Floyd credited to such discussions. For weeks, though, Marcia Howard had been decrying “plantation politics”—an assumption that the city would use Black people to undermine the Square, a monument to lost Black lives. As dawn broke over Chicago Avenue, Howard, streaming updates on her phone, stood in the intersection that was no longer distinct from the city surrounding it.
Jay Webb called Andrea Jenkins’s office and the mayor’s office to set up meetings to discuss preserving the monument he built and the fist sculpture. Chicago Avenue, he told me, should be remade as a new Black Wall Street, the thriving Black business hub that was destroyed in the Tulsa massacre, a hundred years ago. For Webb, George Floyd’s death is an installment in a far longer saga, stretching back to the first Africans enslaved in the North American colonies. He told me, “For the four hundred years we put in, we’re gonna get something out.” ♦
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