The future of George Floyd Square is in scope, with many black living materials murals erased and reforms retreated. However, his family and supporters are determined to protect his legacy.
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Just a FAQ, USA TODAY
Five years after her nephew murder, what Angela Harrelson misses most is hearing about her phone and knowing he’s making a call.
“He’ll call me and say, ‘What’s wrong, Auntie? I’ll just call you to check on you,'” Harrelson said. “And that made me feel so good.”
Harrelson lovingly refers to her nephew with his middle name Perry, but the world knows him as George Floyd.
In 2020, millions of people watched in horror as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd under his knee for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. The murder caused a massive pouring of sadness and anger as protesters took some of his final words to the streets, saying, “I can’t breathe.” They kept pushing in the midst of a violent clash with police. The artist adorned the city with his image, signs of determination, and the effects of his death.
The intersection where Floyd last breathed was transformed from a gas station and a corner store into a living monument. Now that chaos and media frenzy have subsided, Harrelson visits the area known as George Floyd Square several times a week.
“It’s a safe haven to sit down and look back at everything that happened,” she said. “And that includes pain and heartache.”
The future of the square has been the subject of intense debate. All across the country, other monuments celebrating Floyd and the Black Life Matter movement have been removed, destroyed or devastated. As the symbols of Floyd’s historical status declined, there is also hope for federal police reform, commitment to diversity, hope for American optimism about the future of equity and inclusion, and racial justice.
A few days before his death on May 25th, the Department of Justice announced that it had withdrawn the Minneapolis Police Department and Phoenix’s findings and had withdrawn the findings they had withdrawn. Oklahoma City; Memphis, Tennessee. Trenton, New Jersey. Mount Vernon, New York; and Louisiana.
Family and supporters are determined not to erase Floyd’s legacy by the losses and the changing political climate of the nation. Many say preserving the final traces of the protest movement is an important part of continuing to push and recover from the changes that have been caused by his death. Some say it’s a cry of battle. It’s time to recommend to fight.
“The country is actually regressing,” said Aba Blankson, a spokesman for the NAACP. “Anniversaries, as we say, are not about recovery from grief or trauma, about the purpose, dedication and recommendations to ensure that the country is open to diversity, equity and inclusion.
George Floyd Square’s future depends on balance
The 38th and Chicago intersection have become a sacred space since Floyd’s murder.
Two iconic murals have been painted on the site. This includes blue and yellow tributes on the side of the cup hood, accused of spending a $20 bill and urged a fatal police response. The community installed raised fist sculptures at the center of the intersection and gravestones carved in the names of black people killed by police.
Residents build barricades to protect traffic and police until reform demands are met, and “understand how to build this space as one of the healing,” according to Ashley Tyner, co-director of “The People’s Way,” according to the co-director of documentary films about the square.
In 2021, the city removed the barricades and began developing a long-term plan for the area. Authorities spent countless hours with community members as one of the city’s busiest bus routes runs through the square.
““We’ve seen you get a lot of money,” said Alexander Cad, city’s senior project manager.
They have become a proposal for a flexible and open layout that will allow traffic to flow, provided they do not close some of the intersections of special events. The plan maintains space for Floyd’s family to build a permanent monument where he took his final breath, and finds someone to take over the former Speedway gas station, an estate the city has purchased and known as People’s Road.
However, the Minneapolis City Council rejected the plan and instead suggested that the city explore alternative options.
Then-Mayor Jacob Frey rejected the proposal. The council overturned Frey’s veto in February.
Councillor Robin Wonsley said that by allowing traffic, he would “eliminate” the square’s history.
“Essentially, the way the town is approaching, saying, ‘Let’s run the bus up and down the same street. Let’s run the bus and the car across the place where George Floyd was killed.’ “And that’s a signal of erasure to me,” Wonsley said at one city council meeting.
But Andrea Jenkins, who represents the area and supports the city’s plans, said residents around the square wanted vehicle traffic. She pointed to a survey by the University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, finding that about 70% of residents in the surrounding area preferred full transport access to the square.
For now, the fate of the square remains in the frontier. The final decision will not be made in a few months and construction will not be completed until at least 2027.
Jenkins told USA Today he hopes that businesses, public transport and national memorials to victims of police brutality can coexist.
“We want it not only to be a space to celebrate the art and artifacts left behind at George Floyd Square, but also to present new work.”
Save “offer” from the moment of protest
People from all over the world come to the square and leave flowers, balloons, signs and artwork. Residents like Leesa Kelly have stepped up to serve as caretakers and archivists of these “offerings.”
Kelly, executive director of Memorialize the Movement, said he was particularly moved by the murals painted on the plywood business that will be used to mount the windows during the 2020 protests. When the demonstration dies, she says, “Will businesses protect them? Will they abandon them?”
So Kelly began collecting murals, and eventually collected over 1,000 works. She said they portrayed many aspects of Floyd’s life. It features facets that are distinctive to his daughter and messages from his partner.
“It was really beautiful to see how we were able to see how tragic we were able to build something strong and impactful for our community,” she said.
The murals are on display in universities and gallery spaces around the Twin City. Art from the square has also begun to follow the paths across the country. Rashad Shabazz, a historic cultural geography at Arizona State University, helped bring hundreds of signs, posters and artwork from the protest to Phoenix in 2024.
Shabaz, a former Minneapolis resident, said thousands of people, including members of the Floyd family, visited the exhibition at the Arizona State University Museum of Art, and that he came from a movement called “one of the most important heritage.” He said it was very important for institutions like museums to display items – whether they were carefully painted with scrawled portraits and messages that they rushed to pizza boxes.
“Offensities are stories, and preserving them is stories,” he said. “And by doing that, we add those stories to our collective understanding of the world we live in, in the moment, and they serve as lessons.
Legacy under Floyd’s attack
There is also work to maintain movement memories, but others have found a symbolic, substantial way to try and erase it.
One by one, monuments to Floyd and the Black Life Matter movement have collapsed in recent years, including in Washington. Des Moines; Indianapolis; Salt Lake City; Santa Barbara, California. Asheville, North Carolina.
The push that jump started by Floyd’s death to remove or rename the Confederate monument was slowed. A recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Centre showed that in early 2024, only two people were deleted compared to almost 170 in 2020. More than 2,000 Confederate symbols remain, and have been recently restored, including the Confederate names of two Virginia schools that were changed during the 2020 racial calculations.
The precedents had a far-reaching impact on the racial justice movement after the Supreme Court declined to enter aggressive racially-based lawsuits at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023.
Citing the decision, President Donald Trump wiped out diversity initiatives across the federal government, urging schools and businesses to follow suit despite Floyd’s post-murder pledge.
In Minnesota, leaders have given Trump Chauvin, who serves simultaneous state and federal prison terms for murder, supporting Floyd’s constitutional rights and other crimes. Trump said his aides raised the idea but were not considering a federal pardon for Chaubin.
Changing the story: How Trump 2.0 is reshaping George Floyd and 2020 protests
In January, the DOJ announced it would make systematic changes to the police station in order to reach a court enforceable contract known as a consent ruling with the city of Minneapolis, and to make systematic changes to the police station after Floyd’s murder discovered a pattern of civil rights violations.
Hermet Dillon, the department’s Attorney General of the Civil Rights Office, announced on May 21 that the government would abandon these efforts, withdraw the Department’s findings in Minneapolis, and many other cities in 2020, including Louisville, Kentucky, where police killed Breana Taylor Drew Drew Outrage.
Among all the changes, Americans have become increasingly pessimistic about the interests of racial justice and the possibility that Black Americans have equal rights since 2020, according to Kiana Cox, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center.
“The vast majority of Americans believe that the attention the nation paid for race as a result of George Floyd’s murder is a turning point moment,” she said. “But when I ask a more specific question, there’s another story: “Do you think attention actually made a difference in the lives of black people?” ”
In 2023, 40% of respondents said that such changes had occurred. But in 2025, only 27% said the same thing.
Still, Harrelson said the current political situation cannot erase her nephew’s lasting legacy. “It doesn’t change how people feel about what happened five years ago. They still have that pain. They still carry that weight,” she said.
Harrelson said she saw Floyd’s influence every time she visits the square. There, dozens of families and thousands of people will soon meet for the three-day festival in his honor.
The annual celebration includes community discussions about live music, church services, racism, police reform and grief known as “Perry Talk.” But Harrelson’s favorite part is taking a quiet moment to think about her nephew during a candlelight vigil.
“I hope I’m doing as right as possible with his legacy,” she said.
Contributions: Philip M. Bailey and Savannah Kucher
