Opinion: Here’s what these Black Minnesotans say about how much has changed five years after the murder of George Floyd

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Grief and resolve

Five years after George Floyd’s murder, I stand at the crossroads of grief and resolve.

The grief lingers — not only for Floyd’s life stolen beneath an officer’s knee, but also for the broken promises of systemic change. Minnesota has seen some progress: the consent decree with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, state legislation banning chokeholds and requiring other officers to intervene, and the rise of civilian oversight models. But too often, political will has faltered in the face of police union resistance and public fatigue.

And now, we are witnessing a dangerous backlash: the gutting of DEI initiatives, the vilification of truth-tellers, and renewed calls for “law and order” that ignore the roots of injustice.

Still, I refuse to give in to despair.

I draw strength from the people — especially grassroots organizers, young people and allies who have sustained this movement. Their courage reminds me that real change has never come from the top down; it rises from community. It is visible in mutual aid networks, community healing circles and the unrelenting demand for a justice system rooted in accountability and care.

Hope, for me, lives in our refusal to forget. In our insistence on truth. In our audacity to reimagine what justice can look like. Floyd’s legacy demands nothing less.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, Twin Cities-based civil rights lawyer

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Hopeful despite broken promises

It seems just like yesterday when I, like most of the country, was transfixed by the horrible video of a Black man killed at the hands of police. At the time I did not know his name, but I knew he did not deserve to be murdered. Before I knew what I was witnessing, I had tears running down my face as I kept screaming at the screen for the police to get off him.

His name, we found out later, was George Floyd.

Five years later, we are faced with many broken promises from police departments, from corporate America and, in some cases, from communities. As I am writing this, I am aware of the current headlines. The police officers accused of fatally beating Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tenn., were acquitted of murder charges. A young white mother was videotaped at a park in Rochester using the N-word toward a young Black child. And politics from the White House continue to try and divide us and erase us from history. The most painful is removing information about veterans who served our country from websites. Amid all of this, it can feel hopeless right now.

But for me, I remain hopeful. It was Peter McWilliams who said, “You can’t afford the luxury of a negative thought.” That has been my mantra moving forward. Like many of you, I come from a long history of fighters. Those who endured slavery were denied the opportunity to be educated or to vote. The rights that many of our people fought for with their livelihoods are now being attacked.

This is what I believe is the secret to unlocking the path to change our future. We must be willing and able to vote. (And we will soon have a new group of graduates and others who are eligible to vote for the first time.) We must be willing to take a stance and change our communities. We must be willing to stand up and fight for love — the same love that brought many of us into the streets to march for the life of Floyd so that his name will never be forgotten. That love and energy are still within us. We must ignite it at this time. That movement brought the world together, and now we need that more than ever. Yes, I am hopeful because I believe in love, and I believe in the strength of us coming together. That is the only thing that has ever changed the world.

Race will always be a challenge here in this country and abroad. I embrace and love the skin that I am in as a Black man, but I also know that his country has had a strange relationship with my people. Race matters in this country. Imagine what it would be like if one day you woke up and there before us was the dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — a beloved community where we take care of each other rather than live in fear of each other. Together we can win this battle and ensure a better future for us all. But we must understand that I am your legacy and you are my future. We are forever connected.

Carl Crawford, Duluth-based vice chair of the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage

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Lower crime, better policing

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.” ― James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

As a 59-year-old African American woman whose parents grew up in the Jim Crow South, I never imagined I would live to see a time when I felt more physically and emotionally unsafe in parts of my own state and country than I do today. I, like many others, am struggling with news about the continued brutality of police across our country, which is being exacerbated by the unchecked racism the current administration is unleashing.

There is a festering virus in the soul of our country hellbent on erasing all traces of diversity, equity and the rule of law, as well as the true historical and current experience of descendants of enslaved Africans. And yet, against all hope in hope, I still believe; I believe because Minneapolis plays a significant role on the world stage in the promotion of human dignity. George Floyd was murdered in our state for a reason. I believe we will use this tragedy as an opportunity to become the beacon the world needs symbolizing justice, equity and love for all humanity — and yes, that includes Black and brown people.

As people continue to descend on our city to stand in the spot where Floyd was murdered, my vision is that they experience a justice-minded model for policing and the eradication of racial disparities for which Minnesota is infamous. In fact, youth crime and violence declined 39% in six months within the past year, with a 66% reduction in new youth entering the system. This is in part due to a caringly innovative approach called the Curfew Task Force, which the Minneapolis Police Department created in partnership with community groups to establish relationships with and alternatives for “at-risk” youth.

Furthermore, I am pleased with the direction our city is taking in diversifying and increasing the recruitment of new culturally responsive police officers. The result of their efforts is clear: As a 28-year resident of north Minneapolis, I’ve never felt safer in my own neighborhood! I don’t hear gunshots any longer, and crime in my part of town is the lowest in a decade.

With enough resources for recruiting more community-loving officers, and enough courage on the part of all our leaders to stand courageously united in defense of our most cherished American values of liberty and justice for all, Minneapolis will become a city on the hill that gives light to the entire world.

Sondra Samuels, CEO of Northside Achievement Zone

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Slap in the face

I don’t see much has changed over the last five years. I can’t tell you on the scale of the world; I can only tell you what’s affecting me right now. I run a restaurant, so I don’t follow the police around. And I don’t follow politics. Have I seen a change? I can’t see the change.

But the crime rate has gone up. And we are still being faced with police brutality.

Our restaurant has been at 38th and Chicago for 12 years. My mom and dad ran it before I took it over. The small businesses up here [at George Floyd Square] are struggling. Things have gone downhill. The area is not the same. It’s more cluttered with filth. You have more homeless people who have moved in.

There’s no movement, no traffic. You all have been following what’s going on between Mayor Jacob Frey and the council members. Some people do walk by when visiting the memorial, or they mention us in their tours, saying this is so-and-so. But after that, they don’t come in. They don’t support us.

So I’m hoping they bring the traffic back. Bring the bus line back.

We took a big hit — a big profit hit. But we own this property so it’s not like I’m just going to go somewhere else. We’re going to figure it out.

But it’s a slap in the face then they’re trying to get this man [Derek Chauvin] a pardon. That tells you right how the system is not fair. It’s a slap in the face — a slap in the face of Black people.

Dwight Alexander, owner of Smoke in the Pit restaurant at George Floyd Square, as told to the Minnesota Star Tribune

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Refusing to forget

Some wounds live in silence. Passed from one generation to the next, they shape us before we even have the words to name them.

In April 1992, during the unrest following the Rodney King verdict, my grandfather, Dwight Taylor, was murdered. His case remains unsolved. Though his death faded from the headlines, it never left our family’s memory. Like so many Black families, we inherited the silence — a quiet legacy and a vivid reminder that in America, justice is too often selective, delayed or denied.

Twenty-eight years later, in May 2020, George Floyd’s murder forced the world to look again. I was 17, already in law school, and I felt something shift. Not just in policy debates or protests, but in the generational understanding of what it means to survive in this country as a Black American.

Now, five years after Floyd’s death, I’m an attorney, living in a nation where the urgency for justice has been met with a deliberate retreat. The language of equity is being stripped from our institutions. DEI efforts are under coordinated attack. And President Donald Trump is not merely governing, he is reshaping power to suppress memory, distort truth and reverse the very progress born from our collective grief.

But my generation, Gen Z, recognizes the pattern. We’ve inherited not only the pain, but the clarity that comes with witnessing repeated injustice. We don’t see Floyd’s murder as an isolated tragedy. We see it as part of a long, unbroken line of lives taken, voices silenced and futures denied. And still, we carry those names, not as a burden, but as a mandate.

Because what we choose to remember will define what we’re willing to accept. And we refuse to forget.

Haley Taylor Schlitz, attorney and writer based in St. Paul

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Change hasn’t come yet

Five years after the murder of George Floyd, I wish I could say I feel hopeful. I want to believe Minnesota can become a beacon of justice in a nation plagued throughout its history by white supremacist terror. But in truth, the change we’ve needed hasn’t come.

Maybe if the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign, which proposed replacing the Minneapolis Police Department, had gained just 7% more of the vote in 2021, we’d be living in a different reality. Instead, we watched Black “leaders” appear in commercials calling for more police — not less. Some won elections. Some launched nonprofits and raised staggering sums. Meanwhile, the most marginalized among us remain at the bottom.

And now, in Rochester, an autistic Black child is attacked with racial slurs, and we watch a campaign raise more than $700,000 in defense of the white woman responsible. This is Minnesota. We pride ourselves on progress, but symbolic gestures and monuments to past injustices don’t change the systems harming us right now.

My cousin pleaded with Derek Chauvin to let up, to release Floyd from under his knee. He sat through a painful trial. And yet, five years later, it feels like the beat goes on. Jamar Clark. Philando Castile. How quickly the names fade for some — but not for us.

As I sit and wait to hear from the Minnesota Clemency Review Commission about whether I will be pardoned for harms caused in my teens and 20s, I recently watched a white woman who caused harm just three years ago get pardoned.

Still, I haven’t given up. My hope lives in the American-born descendants of slave communities that refuse to forget, in the families who keep showing up and in those of us who speak the truth — even when it’s inconvenient. Because that’s how real change starts.

Jason Sole, Twin Cities-based educator and organizer

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Better and worse

Five years after George Floyd’s murder shook our nation’s conscience, we find ourselves in a landscape of competing truths. In what may be the defining paradox of our era: Things are both better and worse than before. This tension isn’t cause for despair, but an invitation to embrace the complex reality of social change and to continue reimagining what justice can look like.

In Minnesota, tangible reforms offer evidence of progress. The Minnesota Police Accountability Act and Minneapolis’ consent decrees (while the Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss one of them, the agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights still stands) represent meaningful steps toward systemic change even as national momentum has waned. These local commitments to reform demonstrate that the path forward, though uneven, continues to bend toward justice when communities remain vigilant.

My hope isn’t primarily in policies or programs, but in people and places. For over 400 years, Black identity has transcended external definitions — rooted instead in vibrant culture, resilient community and enduring faith. While facing authoritarian headwinds and deliberate erasure attempts, Minnesota communities persist in doing what’s right.

And so there is hope. Not in performative gestures, but in genuine solidarity. In Black brilliance that wasn’t born from tragedy, but has always been present. In a rising generation that refuses to accept injustice as inevitable. The current environment of DEI cutbacks may represent a backlash, but such resistance often follows meaningful progress.

The work of racial justice isn’t a fleeting moment, but a memory we must vigilantly protect. Our goal transcends performing change — it’s about creating conditions where all people can truly live with dignity and belonging. Five years later, I remain hopeful not despite the contradictions, but because our capacity to hold them honestly signals our collective growth toward a more just future.

Adair Mosley, CEO of African American Leadership Forum in Minneapolis