Last May, Roger Floyd and Thomas McLaurin walked the lengths of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, passing a roundabout with a garden, and a vacant gas station with a large sign that read: “Where there’s people there’s power.” Though it had been four years since the murder of George Floyd, their nephew and cousin, respectively, concrete barriers erected by the city to protect the area still cordoned off the corner of the street where he was killed by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020.
Behind those barriers stands a memorial with a black-and-white mural of George Floyd on the side of a bus stop shelter. “That’s my blood that was laying there taking his last breath. What was he going through?” McLaurin recalled thinking as he stood in front of the mural. Flowers and stuffed animals from visitors surrounded the memorial. Roger said he was struck with a range of emotions from sadness to peace. “You think about the racist demeanor that these individuals had toward him, and it was just like his life did not matter,” he told the Guardian. “The entire space to me is just sacred.”
Now, five years since George Floyd’s murder, the future of the square where he died remains uncertain, as the city council deliberates on development plans. McLaurin and Roger Floyd want the area to be commemorated as a historic site that launched a global racial justice movement and served as a rallying call for police accountability. Roger Floyd would like it to become a pedestrian plaza that includes a memorial to his nephew as well as shops and a library.
“We want to see the businesses that are there get their momentum restarted, for whatever traction they may have lost during this timeline,” Floyd said of the limited vehicular traffic since the murder. “This place is actually a destination for world visitors, because this is a global undertaking as well.”
The square’s future has served as an existential conflict for Minneapolis as a split city council decides how best to commemorate the site of Floyd’s death and the birthplace of a global movement. Most city council members want to create a pedestrian plaza that restricts buses and vehicular traffic to emergency vehicles, local business and residents, and that will include a memorial and mall that they say will bring vitality to the area.
Meanwhile, the mayor, Jacob Frey, and most business owners want a flexible open street plan to increase vehicular traffic and reintroduce major bus routes that have not stopped in the area in several years, while also allowing for streets to be temporarily shut down for festivals and gatherings. In late February 2025, the disagreement came to a head when the city council voted 9-4 to override Frey’s veto on the square’s development. The council had asked the city staff to create a study on the pedestrian plaza, which Frey disagreed with.
For Dwight Alexander, the co-owner of the soul food restaurant Smoke in the Pit near George Floyd Square, the solution is clear: the bus routes and traffic need to return to help revive his and others’ businesses. The historically Black commercial district of south Minneapolis was home to the oldest Black-owned and operated newspaper in Minneapolis, as well as more than 20 Black-owned businesses from the 1930s to 1970s.
Alexander said that the area had changed for the worse: “There’s no traffic up here, no motion, no energy up here, no life like it was before.” In the few years since Floyd’s murder, he said that the area had become tantamount to a “ghost town” that elicits somberness. When people see pictures at the square’s memorial commemorating Floyd and other Black people who have been murdered by police, Alexander said that visitors were not eager to eat food afterward.
“By the neighborhood being so closed, the negative energy is keeping people from inside Minneapolis coming up here,” Alexander said. “A lot of people don’t even want to come up and visit no more, just because of the output and the impression on the neighborhood.” The tension over the square illustrates the complicated dance between commemoration and moving on that American cities have to contend with following tragedies.
‘We can’t sanitize what happened here’
Back in 2020, as the world watched the nine minutes and 29 seconds during which Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck, south Minneapolis was irrevocably changed. Protesters took over the square and it became the stage for regular standoffs between the police and activists protesting against police brutality. In June 2021, the city reopened the area to vehicular traffic. Yet one of the busiest bus routes in the city never resumed stops in the area.
Over several years, the city spent 17,000 hours and $2m worth of staff time between listening sessions, meetings and door knocking to ascertain what residents wanted to see in the square, Frey told the Guardian. Most people from those listening sessions want a flexible open street plan that allows bus traffic to return and for the city to erect a memorial: “Everybody agrees that we need to honor the long-term legacy of George Floyd and the movement that emanated out from the space.”
In support of Frey’s preferred plan, Alexander said his business has been down by about 50% because of the decreased car and foot traffic: “We want this neighborhood back to where it was before.”
Michael McQuarrie, the director at the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, who conducted research at the square during the 2020 protests, said the city has been divided on how to move forward with the area for the past five years. He sees the street closure from 2020 to 2021 as transformative for the community.
“It really did enable a kind of grieving and memorialization which would have been impossible if the street was open,” McQuarrie said. The advocates for the pedestrian plaza can point to evidence that when the street was closed, “it really was a very special place for people who had been victims of state violence”.
When people grieve in private, McQuarrie said, “that has a way of hiding the kind of systemic violence police do to people. Once you make it a communal experience, you can see the systematicity of the violence of the state or the violence that Black people experience.”
For council member Linea Palmisano, who oversees Ward 13 about a mile and a half from 38th and Chicago, a study on the pedestrian plaza is delaying a flexible open street concept plan that would bring much-needed traffic back to the area. About 6,000 residents, property owners and business owners in the four surrounding neighborhoods were surveyed and more than 70% of them said they did not want a pedestrian plaza that would restrict vehicular and bus traffic, she added.
“You don’t usually get 70% or more of people saying the same thing, that they want a vibrant corridor, not one that is closed off,” Palmisano said. “Here we are almost five years out from the murder of George Floyd, and we still do not have a plan to move forward, to revitalize the area and honor the memory of Mr Floyd. I find that to be incredibly shameful. We are not honoring Mr Floyd by doing nothing.”
But some community members, city council members and members of Floyd’s family say there’s no way to rush healing. Council member Jason Chavez of Ward 9, where part of the square is located, said it needed to be recognized as “a historical component in our city history that will never be forgotten”.
“It caused ripple effects across the country and across the globe, and I think that it was a reminder to residents in Minneapolis that police brutality continues to be a thing that happens to Minneapolis residents,” Chavez said. He added that it is a reminder for “regular people” to push for change in the police department.
“We can’t sanitize what happened here in the summer of 2020,” Chavez said.
Americans are preoccupied with joyous resolutions to calamities, said Yohuru Williams, a professor of history at Minnesota’s University of St Thomas and the founding director of the school’s racial justice initiative.
“When you aim for the tragedy with a happy ending, the wages for that are always this form of forgetting, and then you’re just waiting for the next incident to reawaken people’s sensibilities,” Williams said.
The moment that ushered in George Floyd Square is deserving of a memorial that honors the movement it ushered in, he said. “How do we remember thoughtfully all the things that came to confluence there that led to that tragedy?”
