Counterpoint: Imagining a story broader than George Floyd Square

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As Minneapolis considers the redevelopment of the intersection of E. 38th Street and Chicago Avenue (“Minneapolis unveils a new vision for George Floyd Square,” Oct. 30), we should look at the city’s plan with a thoughtful eye toward the future and ask: Might this be the first step in a greater opportunity to tell our region’s painful story and call toward a new hope for our nation?

The scene that made the intersection now known as George Floyd Square infamous is painfully burned into our collective memory. The last time I drove by it, I still winced when I forced myself to look upon the exact spot where the full weight of Derek Chauvin’s cruelty forced George Floyd to plead for his mother moments before extinguishing his light from the world.

But what happened that day doesn’t just affect us as members of this community. The horrifying event also became the epicenter of a global racial reckoning. While on a vacation two years ago, I still remember a young Dominican boat captain’s instantaneous recognition of where we were from.

“Minnesota! George Floyd?” he searched my eyes. I nodded in affirmation. His mates shed their tourist-hosting composure for a moment and asked solemnly, “Do you know [about] George Floyd?”

The uprising after George Floyd’s murder rightly reflected complex layers of grief, pain and rage. Amid this, something greater was bursting forth: a movement urging society to confront systemic injustice.

How might we join hands to think about something bigger?

Could we approach this as a transformative story?

What type of creativity do we actually need to make that happen?

Who might we partner with to invest the millions needed to do this?

For inspiration, we should consider the ways different narratives about similarly cataclysmic events in human history have been memorialized — events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bosnian genocide, and slavery and Jim Crow.

Importantly, these narrative structures in the built environment are not necessarily solely tied to the physical location where a particular action took place. On the contrary, they leverage the region as a cohesive, physical canvas on which they have chosen to paint a coordinated and intentional narrative.

The civil rights movement has many memorials across the American South. Some, like the Edmund Pettus Bridge, are suffering from relative disrepair. Others, like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice are so deeply profound in their immense scale and creative impact that one cannot visit them and leave without being fundamentally changed as a human being.

We must consider that George Floyd’s death is not simply an occasion for an isolated monument. What if we decided that Minnesota could say something bolder than has ever been said? Further, still, that Minnesota needs to embrace this as an onus because it was we who visited the images of George Floyd’s last earthly moments to the entire world’s horror.

How might our region become a canvas? 38th and Chicago, Minnehaha Avenue and E. Lake Street, the University Avenue corridor, Hamline-Midway: Taken together, the possibilities are incredible.

Imagine taking the light rail and looking out your window at a mile-long mural of still slides that give the animated illusion of George Floyd walking casually down the street with a smile, holding his daughter and shaking hands with Philando Castile as your train comes to a light.

What if Indigenous artist Marlena Myles made a series of augmented reality installations across the city that could be linked with walking and biking tours of our region, surfacing our complex and painful histories around racial divides, while inspiring the world we know is possible if we all come together?

This moment calls for a bold vision backed by deep collaboration and significant investment. Minneapolis has rightly taken the bold first step — it’s up to all of us to respond through engaged partnership to ask how we can build something bigger than all of us. With the world still watching to this day, we should ask: What story will we tell, and how might we change the course of history?