Last May, Roger Floyd and Thomas McLaurin walked along the length of the 38th street and from Chicago avenue to Minneapolis, passing a roundabout with a garden and a vacant service station with a large panel that was read: “Where there are people, there is power.” Although this has not been for four years since the murder of George Floyd, their nephew and cousin, respectively, of concrete barriers erected by the city to protect the area still completed at the corner of the street where he was killed by the Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, May 25, 2020.
Behind these barriers is a memorial with a black and white wall of George Floyd on the side of a bus stop shelter. “It is my blood that was going to take its last breath there. What was going on? ” McLaurin remembers thinking when he was standing in front of the mural. Flowers and animals in plush from visitors surrounded the memorial. Roger said he was struck by a range of emotions from sadness to peace. “You are thinking of the racist behavior that these individuals had towards him, and it was as if his life did not matter,” he told the Guardian. “The whole space for me is simply sacred.”
Now, five years since the murder of George Floyd, the future of the place where he died remains uncertain, because the municipal council deliberated on development plans. McLaurin and Roger Floyd want the region to be commemorated as a historic site that has launched a global movement of racial justice and served as a rallying appeal for the responsibility of the police. Roger Floyd would like this to become a pedestrian place which includes a memorial to its nephew as well as in stores and a library.
“We want to see the companies that are restarting their momentum there, for the traction they could have lost during this chronology,” said Floyd about the circulation of limited vehicles since the murder. “This place is actually a destination for visitors to the world, because it is also a global business.”
The future of the place has served as an existential conflict in Minneapolis while a divided municipal council decides in the best way to commemorate the site of Floyd’s death and the place of birth of a world movement. Most members of the municipal council wish to create a pedestrian investment that restricts buses and the movement of vehicles to emergency vehicles, local businesses and residents, and which will include a memorial and a shopping center which, according to them, will bring vitality to the region.
Meanwhile, the mayor, Jacob Frey, and most business owners want an open flexible street plan to increase the circulation of vehicles and reintroduce the main bus routes that have not stopped in the region for several years, while allowing streets to be temporarily closed for festivals and gatherings. At the end of February 2025, the disagreement came to the head when the municipal council voted 9-4 to prevail over the veto of Frey on the development of the place. The council had asked the staff of the city to create a study on the pedestrian square, with which Frey did not agree.
For Dwight Alexander, co -owner of the Soul Food Restaurant Smoke in the Pit near George Floyd Square, the solution is clear: bus routes and traffic must come back to help rekindle its companies and others. The historically black commercial district of South Minneapolis housed the oldest newspaper belonging to blacks and exploited in Minneapolis, as well as more than 20 companies belonging to blacks from the 1930s to 1970s.
Alexander said that the region had changed for the worst: “There is no traffic here, no movement, no energy here, no life as before.” Over the few years following the murder of Floyd, he said that the region had become equipped with a “ghost city” that arouses dark. When people see photos in the Memorial of the Place commemorating Floyd and other blacks who were murdered by the police, Alexander said that visitors were not impatient to eat food afterwards.
“By the neighborhood being so closed, negative energy prevents people from the interior of Minneapolis here,” said Alexander. “Many people don’t even want to come and visit more, just because of production and printing in the neighborhood.” The tension on the square illustrates the complicated dance between the commemoration and the continuation that American cities must face the following tragedies.
“ We cannot disinfect what happened here ”
In 2020, when the world looked at the nine minutes and 29 seconds during which Chauvin knelt on the neck of Floyd, the south of Minneapolis was irrevocably changed. The demonstrators took control of the place and he became the scene of regular dead ends between police and militants protesting against police brutality. In June 2021, the city reopened the area for vehicle traffic. However, one of the most popular bus routes in the city has never returned to stops in the region.
In several years, the city has spent $ 17,000 and 2 million dollars in staff times between listening sessions, meetings and doors to determine what residents wanted to see in the square, Frey at the Guardian told. Most people in these listening sessions want an open flexible street plan that allows buses to come back and so that the city lies a memorial: “Everyone is suitable that we have to honor the long -term heritage of George Floyd and the movement that has emanated from space.”
In support of Frey’s favorite plan, Alexander said that his business was down approximately 50% due to the drop in car traffic and pedestrian: “We want this neighborhood to come back to the place where it was before.”
Michael McQuarrie, director of the Center for Work and Democracy on Arizona State University, which conducted research on the place during the 2020 demonstrations, said that the city had been divided on how to move forward with the region in the past five years. He considers the closure of rue from 2020 to 2021 as a transformer for the community.
“It really allowed a kind of mourning and commemoration that would have been impossible if the street was open,” said Mcquarrie. Defenders of the pedestrian square can prove that when the street was closed, “it was really a very special place for people victims of state violence”.
When people cry in private, McQuarrie said: “It has a way to hide the type of systemic violence that the police do to people.
For the member of the Council Linea Palmisano, who oversees the district 13 to approximately a mile and a half of 38th and Chicago, a study on the pedestrian square delays a flexible concept plan of the open street which would bring back an essential traffic in the region. About 6,000 residents, owners and business owners in the four surrounding districts were interviewed and more than 70% of them said that they did not want a pedestrian place that would restrict the circulation of vehicles and buses, she added.
“You generally do not get 70% or more people who say the same thing, whether they want a dynamic corridor, not the one that is closed,” said Palmisano. “Here, we are almost five years before the murder of George Floyd, and we still have no plan to move forward, to revitalize the region and honor the memory of Mr. Floyd. I find it incredibly shameful. We do not honor Mr. Floyd by doing nothing. ”
But some members of the community, members of the municipal council and Floyd family members say that there is no way to rush. The member of the Jason Chavez Council of Ward 9, where part of the square is located, said that it should be recognized as “a historical element of our history of the city which will never be forgotten”.
“This has caused training effects across the country and around the world, and I think it is a reminder to minneapolis residents that police brutality continues to be something that happens to minneapolis residents,” said Chavez. He added that it is a reminder for “ordinary people” to put pressure for a change in the police service.
“We cannot disinfect what happened here in the summer of 2020,” said Chavez.
Americans are concerned about joyful resolutions for calamities, said Yohuru Williams, history professor at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota and founding director of the school’s racial justice initiative.
“When you target the tragedy with a happy ending, wages for this are always this form of forgetting, then you are waiting for the next incident to awaken people’s sensitivities,” said Williams.
The moment that inaugurated George Floyd Square deserves a memorial that honors the movement he inaugurated, he said. “How do we remember all the things that came to the confluence that led to this tragedy?”
