Race/Related: 5 years after George Floyd’s murder, what happens to the site where he died?
A Site of Protest, Art and GriefThere's no place in America quite like George Floyd Square. More than 300 responses to our story about the site have reinforced this sentiment. Even if you landed in this place without any context, you would know something significant happened at the intersection of 38th Avenue East and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. From the sculptures of raised fists marking the intersections that border the street to the closed gas station bearing the hand-painted title "The People's Way," the corner where a police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck on May 25, 2020 now feels like the physical outpouring of a community's grief, anger and hope. It is currently a place suspended in time. Since its days as a barricaded protest zone filled with residents and activists, members of this community remain divided over what to do with the impromptu memorial that was created here. If there's consensus on any point, it's that change is both inevitable and necessary. But there are conflicting visions over what the city should do with the site, which has been the object of a still-unresolved struggle between Mayor Jacob Frey and the Minneapolis City Council. We asked Ernesto Londoño, The Times's Minneapolis bureau chief, and Joshua Rashaad, who photographed the George Floyd protests for The Times in 2020, to show us the square as it currently stands, alongside the perspectives of some of the people with a say in what it becomes. We wanted to document the site as it exists today, knowing that it will eventually change. You can see the product of their work here. The events of the past five years have reinforced this fact again and again: Memorials can divide because they shape collective memory and reflect very different ideas about what should be remembered and what should be left in the past. The protests that followed George Floyd's killing prompted debates over the removal of Confederate monuments all over the U.S. Long-simmering tensions over other monuments also finally moved toward action: In 2016, The Times covered a conflict in Frederick, Md., over a bust of Roger Brooke Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision ruling that enslaved people were not U.S. citizens. Within two years of Floyd's murder, Taney's bust had been replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, who was the Supreme Court's first African American justice. But Floyd wasn't a public figure. After his death, Margaret Sullivan recounted for The Washington Post, he became another target of the "he's no angel" trope, which has been applied to many Black victims of police violence, including in The Times. He was another person with feelings and foibles, which made him a fitting figure for the movement his death made into a rallying cry. Black Lives Matter became a potent phrase because it expressed a simple truth in the face of events that seemed, again and again, to undermine it: that Floyd inherently deserved dignity and due process.
The fact that many of the circumstances of Floyd's life and death were not unique has become a central aspect of the place that bears his name. All along the block, Chicago Avenue is painted with the names of some 170 people killed by police. Another hundred names grace headstone-shaped signs in the "Say Their Names" cemetery down the block. Posters honoring people like Philando Castile and Amir Locke hang from a clothesline over the corner where Floyd was killed. Part of the reason the future of this site is so particularly disputed and powerful is that if not for the killing and its aftermath, it would be an ordinary corner on a well-trafficked artery in a neighborhood. People catch the bus around here, go to church, get coffee. In other words, they live here. So the site's future touches on a larger question: What will they be living with? READ MORE:
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