Portside

Five years ago this week, George Floyd was murdered on a South Minneapolis street corner, suffocated under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. That street corner, now part of an intersection known as George Floyd Square, is part of a neighborhood known as a historic African American district—yet this detail is often forgotten in the retelling of Floyd’s murder and the nationwide uprising that ensued.

That neighborhood, known as Central, is more than a thousand miles from his childhood home in Houston’s Third Ward, but the two areas are linked by a common history of disinvestment, overpolicing, and criminalization in historically Black communities. The impact of police bias and brutality in Floyd’s life began long before May 25, 2020.  “From the day George Floyd moved to Texas as a child to the day he was killed in Minneapolis,” wrote Washington Post reporter Arelis R. Hernández in the aftermath of his death, “the police were omnipresent in his life.” 

Floyd grew up in a public housing complex in Houston’s historically African American Third Ward, where his neighborhood was beset by such constant overpolicing that residents often took plea deals for any number of minor violations, knowing they likely wouldn’t win in court no matter the details of the case. In the years following his return to Houston after attending South Florida Community College on a football scholarship, Floyd was incarcerated several times while struggling with addiction and mental health issues. In 2014, he moved to Minnesota at the suggestion of a close friend, seeking a fresh start and a chance at rehabilitation.

Floyd’s Third Ward neighborhood in Houston was once known for its glittering avenues filled with Black-owned businesses, and became famous as a hub of Black culture, art, and civil rights protests. But by the time Floyd lived there in the 1980s and 1990s, over-policing, disinvestment, and crack cocaine had destroyed many residents’ livelihoods. Today, the Third Ward’s Black population is rapidly declining amid the neighborhood’s gentrification. 

To Floyd and other men he knew from Houston, Minneapolis represented hope. Addiction recovery services were more plentiful in Minnesota, and many of Floyd’s neighborhood contacts had made the journey north seeking new opportunities for growth and healing. Floyd appeared to have initially adapted well to the change, first attending a ninety-day treatment program in North Minneapolis in 2017, and then finding work as a bouncer.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, while living in South Minneapolis’ historically Black and disinvested Central neighborhood, Floyd lost his job. On May 25, 2020, at a corner store called Cup Foods, Floyd allegedly tried to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. He was killed by Chauvin minutes later, in a neighborhood plagued by the same forms of systemic injustice as the one he fled years earlier.

Like Houston’s Third Ward, South Minneapolis’ Central neighborhood has a rich history built by Black people who had faced discrimination elsewhere. Prior to the 1960s, Central was a flourishing district for a majority of the city’s Black population, who had been pushed into the neighborhood and a handful of others by racial housing covenants and other redlining tactics. Pillars of this community include St. Peter’s AME Church, which dates back to 1880 and still holds services today, and the once-glorious Central High School that counted Prince among its graduating ranks but was demolished in 1989. 

But much like the Third Ward, Central’s vibrancy was systematically dismantled in the last decades of the twentieth century, owing in part to the construction of  35W, the highway that connects Texas and Minnesota and runs directly through the heart of South Minneapolis. 

Local historians have documented the impact of 35W on Central in particular, as well as its connection to other parts of Minneapolis. Many of the Black residents who were previously shuttled into the area after being unable to purchase houses elsewhere due to redlining and racial housing covenants saw their homes confiscated by the state via eminent domain in order to make way for the new highway. Others found themselves suddenly cut off from friends and neighbors in other parts of Minneapolis, and the area’s businesses suffered.

Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Eric Roper documented some of this history in his 2024 podcast, Ghost of A Chance. After buying a home across the highway from Central in 2020, Roper discovered that the house had been purchased by a Black couple named Harry and Clementine Robinson in the 1920s, just as redlining was taking hold in Minneapolis. He traced the couple’s journey to Minnesota from other states as they pursued opportunities denied to them elsewhere.

After Harry passed away in 1959, Clementine ended up in a small home in Central, without much in the way of resources—despite her groundbreaking career as a beautician with both white and Black clients. She was buried in an unmarked grave six years later, although the publicity from Roper’s podcast has resulted in a fundraising campaign to honor her with a headstone.

Despite decades of disinvestment, Central remains a rich and historic neighborhood with a closer look. Visitors to the area should consider driving along the Tilsenbilt Homes Historic District that stretches along Fourth Street just west of George Floyd Square. This district is home to Minneapolis’s first privately funded, interracial housing development, and many of the sturdy ranch-style homes still stand. The project came together in the 1950s through the efforts of Archie Givens, Sr., a well-known Black realtor and advocate for affordable housing, and a Ukrainian immigrant named Edward Tilsen.

Black residents then received mortgages for the Tilsenbilt homes from the Federal Housing Authority, which was interested in promoting racially integrated housing developments at the time. Just a few years later, however, 35W bulldozed part of the neighborhood and cut it off from the whiter, wealthier areas of South Minneapolis. Statistics show that to this day, Central is 35 percent white while the King Field neighborhood just across 35W is nearly 80 percent white. 

George Floyd was one man whose life was stolen from him, and his murder matters because of that. But the trajectory that took him from one formerly vibrant Black community to another, and then to an untimely death in South Minneapolis, where he had hoped to make a better life for himself, also belongs to a larger story of systemic racial injustice throughout the country. He indeed changed the world, as Cadex Herrera’s richly colored mural in George Floyd Square announces, in large part by humanizing the very dehumanizing practice of police brutality. But our work is not done yet. As we grapple with the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back police accountability measures that took hold after Floyd’s murder, however, it is clear that our work is not done yet.

Sarah Lahm is a Minneapolis-based writer and researcher. Her work has appeared in outlets such as The Progressive, where she writes the Midwest Dispatch column and contributes pieces to the Public Schools Advocate project.

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