The Fury That Led to Nothing: George Floyd Square

The run-down intersection at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis exposes the empty promises of the revolution of 2020.

When I arrived in Minneapolis, the frost had just lifted, and gray clouds hung low over the horizon. I had come to make a pilgrimage to George Floyd Square, where the revolution of 2020 began. It has been more than five years since Floyd lost his life and became a patron saint of the Left, and I wanted to see what had happened here since then.

The square is situated in a run-down intersection that now features a statue of a clenched black fist in the central roundabout. On one corner stands a minimarket called Unity Foods—formerly Cup Foods—where George Floyd passed the counterfeit bill that set off the chain of events that culminated in his death. Across the street is an abandoned gas station that has been covered in graffiti and protest slogans since the initial unrest.

A group of vagrants had lit a bonfire in a metal drum beneath the gas station canopy. When I asked them about Floyd, they avoided the question; they weren’t interested in politics. They had chosen the spot to light fires, fence stolen goods, and smoke fentanyl, because it was peaceful and nobody bothered them.

In the frenzied year of 2020, politicians in Minneapolis and the Minnesota state government made grand promises about what George Floyd Square would become. They purchased property and pledged monuments. Then, as the years passed, their political will evaporated and everything ground to a halt. One city official told me the neighborhood wanted to reopen for business, while political leaders wanted to preserve the square as an ideological symbol. The result: nobody got what he wanted.

The scars of the revolution remain. The intersection at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue now has an eerie feeling, as if the George Floyd moment were frozen in time. A shattered window at Unity Foods has remained unrepaired for five years. The graffiti on the bus-stop shelters has started to chip and peel. The slogans scrawled on the gas station walls are fading reminders of the naive ebullience of that early moment.

As I walked around, I spotted two smartly dressed white women who appeared to be visiting the square as one might a religious shrine. Striking up a conversation, I learned that one was a Minneapolis resident; the other, her sister, was visiting from New York City. They wanted to pay their respects to Floyd. They seemed to be trying not to show fear at the visible homelessness and disorder.

When I asked the women about Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, the local woman said, “No comment.” She instead shifted the conversation to President Trump, who, she said, was “clawing back all of the progress” that had been made toward social justice.

I was dumbfounded. George Floyd Square was a single street corner in Minneapolis, fully under the jurisdiction of local and state authorities, who had five years to fulfill their promises and turn the square into something more. But rather than address this obvious failure, both women blamed Trump for the fact that racial justice had not materialized.

One man was still trying to do something about it. He called himself Maestro. He presided over a community garden sprawled along the street outside Unity Foods. He spoke with the nervous, rapid cadence of an addict.

After pressing me for a donation, Maestro said that the white man continues to promise justice but only exploits the black man. Instead of waiting for the white city officials to transform the square, he had taken it upon himself to evict the homeless campers from the bus-stop shelter and to bring in dozens of potted flowers along the road.

Maestro had known Floyd from their time hustling together on the streets. He seemed to be the only one who remembered him in an idealistic way. Reggae music throbbed from a Bluetooth speaker as he dashed madly from plant to plant with a watering can.

I looked at his greenhouse and told him that, if he kept his plants tightly inside, some might survive the winter. Whenever a white person passed by, he hectored them with a QR code that links to his Venmo.

The scene saddened me. I never supported the George Floyd revolution and knew it would end in disappointment. But to witness that disappointment firsthand still stirred a sense of pity. The political leaders who turned that summer’s events into a multibillion-dollar activist apparatus never built anything that would last. The fury they unleashed remains visible in the abandoned storefronts and burned-out corners of cities like Minneapolis; their promises of social justice have vanished into memory.

There remain some true believers like Maestro. But in the centers of power, the activists have already moved on to the next revolution. Mayor Frey is struggling to salvage his reelection campaign with promises of “affordability,” while his opponent—left-wing Somali politician Omar Fateh—vows to deliver the racialist revolution promised in 2020.

I left Minneapolis that night for New York City, which has its own mayoral race featuring choices ranging from bad to worse. Many residents have seemingly forgotten the damage that bad leadership can do to a city. In a contest between Frey and Fateh, the most productive outcome would be for both to lose. But inevitably, one will win and, in doing so, make Minneapolis worse. And neither, I would wager, will build a monument at George Floyd Square.