Minneapolis Uprising – April 2024
April 2024 in Minneapolis unfolded across several registers at once: active court proceedings, campus unrest, neighborhood recovery, and the steady hum of a city going about its nights. The month captured the city neither in crisis nor fully past one, but somewhere in the long middle ground that has defined Minneapolis since May 2020.
The through-line of this period, as with every instalment in this series, is the aftermath of George Floyd's murder at Chicago Avenue and East 38th Street. By April 2024, George Floyd Square remained a charged location — Metro Transit buses and Minneapolis Police squad cars moving through an intersection that had once been held by protesters and closed to traffic for over a year. Elsewhere on the South Side, Lake Street Market at 201 W. Lake Street removed the plywood boards that had covered its windows since the 2020 unrest, making its interior visible from the street for the first time in several years.
The most concentrated flashpoint of the month came at the Hennepin County Government Center, where Minnesota State Trooper Ryan Londregan appeared for a hearing on charges related to the July 2023 killing of Ricky Cobb II during a traffic stop. Hundreds of supporters, many arriving by private bus, gathered outside the courthouse — a public show of force that placed the trial squarely within the wider national argument over police accountability that Minneapolis has been at the center of since 2020.
On the University of Minnesota's East Bank campus, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at Coffman Memorial Union, where graffiti calling for a ceasefire and a free Palestine covered exterior walls. University of Minnesota Police were deployed to the scene, connecting campus activism to the broader protest currents the series has tracked across the city.
Meanwhile, a flyer posted to a utility pole on Lake Street made serious allegations about deaths at Riverside Plaza Apartments, and another affixed near the Third Precinct site carried the message "No New Third" — a reminder that the debate over whether to rebuild the precinct station burned down in 2020 remains unresolved. On Hennepin Avenue in Uptown, road reconstruction was underway, with workers excavating the existing roadway to install dedicated bike and transit lanes.
