Minneapolis Uprising – August 2021

By August 2021, Minneapolis was more than a year into an unresolved reckoning that had begun with the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Derek Chauvin had been convicted in April, but the city remained unsettled: barricades still surrounded the Third and Fifth Precinct stations, George Floyd Square at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue remained an occupied autonomous zone, and new deaths had added fresh grief to unfinished demands for justice.

The months leading into this period had brought additional killings that kept protests active. Winston Smith Jr. was shot and killed by a federal task force on top of a parking ramp in Uptown Minneapolis in June 2021. Two weeks later, Deona Marie Knajdek, 31, was killed when a driver accelerated into a crowd of demonstrators gathered at West Lake Street and Girard Avenue during protests over Smith's death. Both names joined the memorials at George Floyd Square alongside those of Floyd and others honored at the nearby Say Their Names Memorial.

Along Lake Street and the surrounding corridors of South Minneapolis, the physical landscape reflected the collision of destruction and tentative rebuilding. The Coliseum Building on East Lake Street, a former auto dealership and event space destroyed by fire on May 28, 2020, stood boarded and fenced, its facade covered in community-painted messages. Nearby, construction had begun on new apartment buildings and a replacement US Bank branch on sites cleared by the unrest, while a mobile Walgreens pharmacy operated on the sidewalk outside a future store replacing a damaged Office Depot. The former O'Reilly Auto Parts lot on Nicollet Avenue had been transformed into the Community Living Room, an open-air gathering space.

August also saw protests extend beyond the city to the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, where demonstrators established an encampment with tipis on the capitol grounds to oppose Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline. The project, which transports tar sands oil from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin, had become a convergence point for environmental and Indigenous rights activism, with opponents warning of threats to the Mississippi River and violation of treaty lands. When the permitted demonstration expired, roughly one hundred protesters remained; the Minnesota State Patrol made four arrests.