Minneapolis One Year After the Murder of George Floyd

After sparking global protests over police brutality, George Floyd’s killing has left the city searching for its political, social and economic future.

The sound of gospel fills the neighborhood. It’s coming from outside a church across from Cup Foods, near the corner where, almost one year ago that Sunday, George Floyd was killed.

"We have so much to be thankful for,” a woman preaches into a microphone. Down the block, children pop bubbles as they waft past a gas station sign that bears the words “No Justice, No Streets” instead of prices per gallon. Medicinal herbs and donated flowers fill garden plots. A folding table is stacked with t-shirts bearing Floyd’s face.

Since Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, the city at the center of a national reckoning on race and policing has sought to reinvent itself, trying on different iterations of the change that residents say is necessary to move forward.

As the gut-wrenching video of Floyd’s death circulated last year, the overwhelming consensus in Minneapolis was that the status quo was no longer working. Although Floyd was not the first Black man to die at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, previous efforts to hold the department accountable had progressed in fits and incremental starts. This time would be — and had to be — different, activists, locals and city leaders came together to declare. As protests and calls to defund law enforcement filled street after street in cities across the world, nine city council members pledged to dismantle the police department entirely and start anew.

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