Minneapolis Uprising – June 2022

By June 2022, Minneapolis was two years into a period of visible, unresolved tension that had reshaped its streets, storefronts, and public spaces. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, had set off weeks of unrest concentrated along Lake Street and into surrounding neighborhoods, leaving a corridor of burned and boarded buildings whose recovery was still incomplete.

The physical markers of that unrest remained legible across South Minneapolis. The East Lake Street Target, damaged in May 2020, was still boarded and in the process of being repainted with murals commissioned from seven local artists — work meant to signal the store's planned reopening and the neighborhood's reclamation of the site. A Wells Fargo branch destroyed during the protests had not been rebuilt; a mobile ATM unit stood in its place. The strip malls, parking garages, and pedestrian bridges of the corridor carried graffiti memorializing people lost in the years since Floyd's death, among them Winston Smith, killed by a federal task force in June 2021, and Deona Marie Knajdek, struck and killed by a car while protesting Smith's death ten days later.

A new wave of protest arrived at the end of June when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion. Crowds gathered on the University of Minnesota campus and marched through downtown Minneapolis as part of a nationwide response to the ruling.

Running alongside these specific crises was a broader condition the city had not yet moved past: memorials to children killed by gun violence in North Minneapolis, graffiti naming the police department, and murals asserting community ownership of spaces that had been contested or destroyed. Two years after the initial unrest, Lake Street and its surrounding neighborhoods remained a landscape where recovery, grief, and ongoing political argument occupied the same blocks.