How we covered the five-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder

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Months ago, my fellow Minnesota Star Tribune editors and I started planning how best to tell the story of what happened on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, and what’s happening today. Our goal was clear: to bear unflinching witness to that story. George Floyd took his last breath under a police officer’s knee right here. In Minnesota. The world watched and cried out for justice, and the outpouring of grief and protest that followed felt like an earthquake had erupted in Minneapolis, sending aftershocks throughout Minnesota, across the country and overseas.

Five years later, we knew this was a story we needed to keep telling, remembering and learning from – no matter how painful or uncomfortable.

Every department contributed to our series “The legacy of George Floyd.”The newsroom quickly rallied around one novel idea that would serve as the anchor for our coverage: an oral history of the six days after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, in the words of witnesses to those events.

This multimedia story was a massive undertaking, involving more than two dozen journalists and countless hours of interviews, photography from then and now, editing, and design for print and digital. We offer you this immersive story in hopes that it recalls your own experience, reveals new dimensions of those historic, tumultuous days, and forges a path for carrying hard-won lessons into the future.

Since I was a news editor in 2020, I thought I knew everything about the events of that week. But here are five things I learned from the oral history:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison fielded calls from famous people:

Former Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, in his new book, talks about the mayday message that went out the day the Third Precinct burned:

“When the emergency tone goes out over the radio, it pauses all other radio traffic. It’s a mayday alert. Wherever they are, officers go silent. Dispatch hit the tone and my voice emerged from radios across the city. ‘We’ve lost the 3rd Precinct,’ I said.”

Business owner Chris Montana’s harrowing account of surviving fires at both his business and apartment:

“I went to my window, which faced Lake Street. There are all these people standing there. When I pulled the shade to the side, they could see that I was there — that I was in the building. And the look of panic on their faces was, well, I’ve never seen anything like that before or since. They were frantically waving. What I didn’t know is that the building underneath me was on fire.”

Former MPD Sgt. Alice White’s internal dialogue while on the front line:

George Floyd’s aunt Angela Harrelson on the gift that her nephew left:

“We don’t have to be silent.”

We invite you to explore this story and all of our special coverage: