George Floyd Square, Five Years Later
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There's a kind of endurance test happening at the corner of 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You know this intersection, even if you don't know this intersection. It's where George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer back in 2020. In the years since, it's become a site of protest, an ad hoc memorial.

There's still a giant statue of a raised fist, planted right there in the middle of the four-way intersection where Floyd was killed. It's transformed into a roundabout now, with cars swerving around the art. Something else is planted in this intersection too, though. Or more accurately, some one. Marsha Howard. She's a teacher, known for her TikTok presence.

She used to spend most of her time online posting about recipes and fashion, until one of her former students recorded that video of George Floyd dying a few steps from her door. Then, most of Marsh's videos acquired a new tagline. We said no justice, no streets, and we meant that. As in, we will not move until certain demands are met. Precisely that. It's 24 demands.

Those 24 demands are part of Justice Resolution 001, a document with conditions that activists like Marsha want the city of Minneapolis to meet before fully opening George Floyd Square. I first spoke to Marsha about her demands a few years back. I wanted to check in with her now because it is the five-year anniversary of the uprising George Floyd inspired. It just felt like time.

Have any of those demands been met? Oh, yeah. Many of them have. But I've been black for 52 black ass years. And I know that if three of them had been met, then they say, aren't you satisfied? Seven of them being met, aren't you satisfied? Go away. They always want marginalized people to settle for less, to be placated, to be mollified,

to be bought off. We say we want justice, and then they start talking about aesthetics. What Marsha wants is the big stuff, the hard stuff. No more qualified immunity for cops, for one. A rule that every police officer maintain professional insurance to deter them from using deadly force. These are demands that remain unfulfilled.

It's why every morning she is still out in the square at 8 a.m. strategizing. I just came from George Floyd Square for this interview, yes. We meet every single day and that started in 2020. You know, I last spoke to you four years back and I was struck then by your energy. You were doing like overnight shifts to try to keep the intersection safe. And I read that

All of this did take its toll on you health-wise. You actually suffered a stroke? Yes. I got to say, being under fire, literally, has taken its toll. Always being on the watch, that hyper-vigilance. I've had multiple strokes. I'm getting a little choked up because today at our morning meeting, we looked around and

It was, you know, it's a Monday morning. It was about a dozen people. And I think about the clockable trans folks. I think about the Jewish woman coming off what just happened in Boulder, Colorado. I think about the women when so much violence is targeted toward women. You're saying you all feel vulnerable. We always feel vulnerable. That's why we still stand. And I told them,

I have never brought a weapon out to GFS, but that might change. The Second Amendment applies to me too. Do you feel like things are ratcheting up in that way in this moment? Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at elderly Jewish people. In Colorado, you mean? Yes. People who were marching for the release of hostages. The same thing we talk about

at George Floyd Square. We're fighting racism. We're fighting systemic oppression. And we're doing it at 38th and Chicago. So, five years after George Floyd's murder, has protest led to real change? Today on the show, we return to Minneapolis to find out. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next? Stick around.

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I wanted to start out by understanding exactly what policies have changed in Minneapolis in the last five years. So I called up Brant Williams at Minnesota Public Radio. He covers race, class, and communities. Brant says, since George Floyd died, Minneapolis has tried a number of reforms and failed to implement a few too. Back in 2020, city leaders were promising to end policing as we know it.

But that is not what happened. Of course, there was the push to change the city's charter to...

Eliminate the police department. This is a city ballot back in 2021. That's right. The first attempt to get something on the ballot in 2020 failed. There was a charter commission who said there wasn't enough time to get this prepared to be on the ballot and they had some other questions about it. So it failed that first year to even make it. Then there was the measure that came in 2021 and that also failed.

But the mayor then wound up making his own changes to the city. And so he was able to come in and create this new office of community safety and appoint a community safety commissioner. So what is his effort actually done?

Like by the numbers, maybe. Well, you know, it's hard to quantify. So has the police force gotten smaller? The police force has gotten smaller, but not because the council cut funding for them. The budgets for the police department has actually stayed either pretty much the same or increased over the years.

There are many officers, several hundred officers left since 2020. Many of them retired, but also a lot of them took workers' compensation claims based on reports of PTSD. And so they left the department. The department is in the process of rebuilding, but their decrease in numbers was not anything to do with their budgets being cut. So it was just attrition? Yes. Okay.

What would the mayor say a success has been for his effort to restructure policing in the city? Well, the mayor's been very much on board with the Human Rights Department agreement that the city struck yesterday.

I believe it was either 2023, I want to say, which mandated certain reforms. I mean, what we can say is immediately when the Minnesota Department of Human Rights opened their investigation and this lawsuit saying that the Minneapolis Police Department has violated the civil rights and human rights of communities of color, they immediately mandated some changes like banning chokeholds.

They also mandated that the police chief makes some when he makes disciplined decisions, that those be published and be out there for people to see to encourage more accountability. Those are things that that have changed. But I mean, it's hard to quantify how all these these changes have led to either improved

police community relations or reduce in complaints against police officers. Yeah. I mean, like just listening to what you're saying, it sounds like budget for the police in Minneapolis has stayed the same or gone up. Number of officers has gone down. There have been some changes like no chokeholds, more transparency about investigations into officers. Right. But those seem minor, if you ask me.

Yeah, I mean, it's very these are very incremental changes. I mean, we've just surpassed the one year mark monitoring segment of this agreement between the city and the Minnesota Human Rights Department. Now, the independent monitor released a report which shows that the city has made some significant gains in at least complying with these initial parts of the agreement.

Again, they're very incremental. For instance, they have to create better structures for administering support for officers like officer wellness is what they're trying to what they're calling it. And those are structures that had not been there before. So they're trying to build those and then they're going to be evaluated on how well they do with those.

That seems like such a strange metric to me when the thing that prompted so much talk about reform is the

murder of an unarmed black man that you're talking about officer wellness as your end point. Well, that's just one small part of the agreement. I mean, there's many metrics involved in this. But I mean, there are folks who also tell you, you know, as the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. And if there are officers who have been doing the type of work where they're exposed to trauma every day on the job,

that those officers may also be in need of some help themselves to prevent them from carrying out biased policing or using excessive force because they themselves have not learned any other way to handle or to react to the stress that they find on the job. In a setback for reform efforts, last week, a judge overturned the federal government's consent decree against the city of Minneapolis. This was at the request of the Department of Justice.

The decree was created after a two-year investigation into Minneapolis' police department found that MPD's culture cultivated systemic problems that made the killing of George Floyd in 2020 possible. For what it's worth, the state of Minnesota still has its own consent decree in place against Minneapolis. And the city's mayor has said he still plans to implement the federal decree, even if its reforms aren't mandated.

But the move was still a symbolic blow to folks who want to see greater change. And some on the right are pushing for even more, urging President Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, who is the officer who murdered George Floyd.

It's always good to remember that Derek Chauvin was convicted in a state court of murder, and that's the majority of the sentence he's serving. He was sentenced to serve over 22 years for that. Then he was also the federal civil rights charge that he was also found guilty of.

is being served concurrently with his state charge. So if the Trump administration decides to pardon him for that federal civil rights charge, he will still serve time in prison, but he would likely do it in a state prison instead of at the federal prison where he is now. So Derek Chauvin will not be released if he is pardoned. In the midst of all this, is there any reason to believe that relations between police and the local Minneapolis community have improved at all?

You know, you're taking a deep breath there. I mean, what is hardest to get at is, you know, this the prevailing community sentiment. You know, we pay attention to the activists and the demonstrators when they come out and say, hey, there's something that we don't like about what's happening with the Minneapolis Police Department. And we cover those and we note those.

But on the other end, there are people living in neighborhoods throughout the city. I used to live in one of those neighborhoods that had some challenges with crime. And those are people who are not going to show up at demonstrations or show up at City Hall to speak at a public hearing.

But they have what I would think is a little bit more nuanced connection with the police department. They need police services. They don't deny that. These are not people who had called for the abolition of the police department, but they want good policing. Obviously, they don't want to see people being harassed or beat up by police officers for no reason at all. So getting a handle on how those people are feeling over the years is going to be the real test.

And it's not clear to me so far in the reporting that we've done how far people are coming along in that level. You know, we are seeing major changes in how the police department is responding to certain types of calls. You know, for the last couple of years, the city has instituted a behavioral crisis response team, which is comprised of people who are mental health professionals. They're not armed. They're not uniformed.

Um, and they respond to these lower level types of, um,

mental health calls where before it would be police officers going out there, perhaps trying to talk somebody out of a backyard who is, you know, been sitting there and the neighbors call because, you know, they see this person sitting in somebody's backyard and it just doesn't seem like they're well. There's something going on and the police come there. And, you know, one of the major complaints has been that, you know, when police officers arrive, they have guns, they have uniforms that can escalate a situation into something violent.

And this behavioral crisis response team has reported positive results. They've taken over many of those calls, hundreds of those calls that police officers would take. So that frees up police officers to handle things that are perhaps going to be a little bit more dangerous. But I'm struck by the fact that that would not have helped in the George Floyd situation, right? Because while he was using drugs at the time, he was called because of shoplifting? Yeah.

Yeah, they thought he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Yeah. So it's hard to say, I mean, in hindsight, whether that would have been a good call for a mental health crisis response team. Yeah. It just strikes me that it's hard to solve the root problems in policing when you can't even agree on what the root problems are. Yeah. Yeah.

Is there a bigger lesson about the Black Lives Matter movement in general from what's happening in Minneapolis? Because it seems like you're painting the picture of something that's long, drawn out, bitterly fought. Well, so...

Like in many cities, Black Lives Matter became more vocal and a larger movement after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. We had a killing of another young black man in 2015, a man named Jamar Clark. And that really led to a lot of larger participation in Black Lives Matter movements.

And, you know, fast forward to the killing of George Floyd and, you know, Black Lives Matter signs were on lawns everywhere and in windows and all parts of the city. You don't see as many of those now. There's definitely been a bit of a pullback. And frankly, some of the protest leaders from back in the day there have they burnt out.

Many of them just have had to step back. You know, we've tried to reach many of them for our coverage of five years later. And there's there's people have told us, you know, it's like I'm just not in it anymore. I mean, you should probably talk to somebody who's more involved now. After the break, I'll talk to one of the people who is still involved in reform in Minneapolis. Marsha, who we spoke to at the top of the show. What is she holding out for?

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Hi, I'm David Sirota, investigative journalist at The Lever, Oscar-nominated writer on the film Don't Look Up, former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, and host of the chart-topping news podcast Lever Time. Each week, our team of reporters at The Lever exposes the events, news, and corruption that often go unreported by corporate media.

So if you're looking for a podcast that goes below the surface, listen to Lever Time every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Even as some protesters packed up and tapped out, Marsha Howard, who we talked to at the top of the show, she never left George Floyd Square. That's in part because it's where she lives. She likes to say she's precisely 263 steps from where George Floyd was killed.

For a while, she served as ad hoc security for the square. She stopped teaching, made the square her whole life. But even after she went back to work, she still met with other community members just about every day at the defunct gas station that shut down in the wake of protests. She'll tell anyone who will listen. She's still waiting on the protesters' 24 demands to be met. Her leverage is her ability to take up space.

Even though the square is technically open to traffic, it's still blocked off enough to prevent a city bus from rolling through. Some politicians want to change that. The city wants the fist without the fuss. They want the protest zone without the protesters. They want the memorial space without the 24 demands because they know that this place is a mecca for people who come to Minneapolis.

When people come to Minneapolis, they tend to come to George Floyd Square. Every convention, every family reunion, every person that is coming through Minneapolis want to come see what the quote unquote fuss is about. Is that weird to you? It's a place where a guy was killed. That's a glib way to say it's the place that galvanized the entire nation. In fact, the entire world is.

into a racial reckoning. That's what it is. When you have everyone who was cognizant in 2020 during a pandemic come together in defense of Black lives, railing against racial oppression, naming it and standing up for it and feeling intrinsically that for once they can say, I'm on the right side of history.

They do want to be in the place that has not changed in five years. Yeah, we keep it exactly the way it looked from that day for a reason. This is where it started. And Cup Foods can change their name to Unity Foods, but everything that was placed down there

in tribute to the Black man that spent nine minutes under a white officer's knee in broad daylight, is still there. They got to change the system if they want it to change. Over the years, there have been different proposals about what should happen to George Floyd Square. Last year, the mayor of Minneapolis recommended a plan that would restore full transportation access to the intersection.

But instead, the city council voted to research the feasibility of a pedestrian mall at the intersection. And a final resolution seems a long way off. In the meantime, when traffic returned to 38th and Chicago, Marsha and other organizers put up more fist statues in the street to slow things down. Marsha says disruption is the point. A protest ain't a protest unless you fuck up somebody's day. That is the whole point of a protest. You have to have a person protesting.

Think about why you are doing what you're doing. What would make a mild mannered teacher whose whole life, whose whole social media profile suggested her interests were nothing more than vintage clothing and home decor and fitness? What would radicalize her?

To the point where she would spend the last five years of her life standing on a street corner yapping about social justice. But I do have to say that there are a number of residents of Minneapolis who...

who, to use your words, you know, the fucking up of the day, it's happening for them too, right? The people who live in your neighborhood and they're struggling. Business owners saying, you know, the lack of traffic has been a problem, that there are safety concerns. Let me ask you something. Have you actually done any reporting of business owners of 38th and Chicago?

I mean, I'm just telling you what I can read in the local papers because I'm in Brooklyn. So let me talk to you about this city. It's a circle jerk of corruption. No one in this city does any reporting. Minneapolis and St. Paul are little towns in a trench coat pretending to be a metropolitan area. So when y'all look at papers of note, newspapers of note,

You don't understand that this is a family owned media outfits that literally just send out information that is not actual reporting. Well, so here's what I can read. And I know you'll have a response to it.

But, you know, I can read that the city says they've spent $2 million on community outreach and they did a survey and most of the respondents said they wanted the streets around the intersection to have full transportation access. So what would you say to that? I would say we got a false choice survey.

So the surveys that we've gotten since 2020 have always been a cattle shoot of a choice so that you give us choices, whereas do you want the streets open in this or the streets open in this? Do you want the streets open this way or the streets open in that way? But here's what's really interesting, Mary. We say we want to save Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives, and they start talking about building ownership.

We say stop killing Black folks with impunity and they start talking about right of way and infrastructure. We say Black Lives Matter and they want to give us a street name because that's what racial capitalism does. I guess I wonder, here's my question for you.

I think any protest, especially a long-lasting one, like the one you're engaging in at George Floyd Square, it has costs, right? You have to wait people out. You have to – it's a game of chicken of, like, who is willing to absorb the cost for how long. I think you know that. No. This is different. This is different. How? How?

You speak of the occupation of George Floyd Square as if it is merely a protest. George Floyd Square is a memorial. It is a place of resistance. But first and foremost, it is my neighborhood. I live here. I live here. I live here. This is my home. I live here.

And I plan to live here. But I want little black boys and little black girls and indigenous boys and girls. I want native Latino, Hmong and black folk to be able to live here. That's why we still stand. That's what's at stake. Don't lose sight of that.

You know, I noticed that in the years since I first spoke to you, your job changed. You had been a full-time teacher and you've evolved. You're a union activist now full-time. You're the president of the... I'm now the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59. How many teachers are you representing? About 3,500. I am president of the teacher chapter. That was...

Interesting because I've always been an active member of my union, but only as a dues paying member. And I paid attention, but I never really did much other than try to be a great teacher. But when my former student Darinella filmed the lynching of George Floyd, I went outside and stayed outside. My then president, Greta Callahan,

plucked me out of the square and basically let me do the outside game while she was negotiating during our historic strike in 2022. My union paid for me to be outside, actually, that first year. I didn't go back to work, right? And by that time, you had a lot of experience organizing people because you've been in the square for a couple of years. Mm-hmm. And organizing thousands of people,

in front of the governor's mansion or in front of the Capitol or in front of the Davis Center, our district, that was, you know, child's play at that point. But having teachers recognize that they had already marched for brown kids in cages, you

They had already marched for Black lives. There was no shame in marching for themselves and our students and the families that we serve. What's interesting about what you're saying and how you're saying it is that this whole conversation is that you are braiding together a whole bunch of fights as one fight. It's the same fight. And that is what I said on the back of a truck in front of a picket line.

in 2022. And that is what I said under a defunct gas station awning in 2021. And that is what I said this morning when we talked about what happened in Colorado at the P-Way at George Floyd Square. It's the same fight. And that is why we still stand. Marcia Howard, thank you so much for joining me, coming on the show, talking to me. You're welcome.

Marsha Howard is the president of the teacher chapter of Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59. She's also a steward of the protest site in George Floyd Square. Earlier, you heard from Brant Williams. He's a senior editor covering race, class, and communities for NPR News. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Paige Osborne, Alaina Schwartz, Rob Gunther, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Ethan Oberman, and Isabel Angel.

Ben Richmond is the Senior Director of Podcast Operations here at Slate. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.