Why Minneapolis Was the Breaking Point
Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden
Updated at 4:45 p.m. on June 12.
MINNEAPOLIS—Miski Noor watched just the first minute of the video of George Floyd’s killing before closing the tab and walking the two blocks to join the protests already forming at the scene. The days since have been filled with a maddening sense of déjà vu.
Noor had joined the Movement for Black Lives in 2014, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The 34-year-old activist’s first protest was that December, a demonstration that shut down the Mall of America during the peak of the holiday shopping season.
Noor soon became intimately familiar with the gruesome cycle: The police killed someone. Activists protested. Small reforms were won. The police killed someone else…
In Minnesota, St. Paul police killed Philip Quinn, a Native American man in the midst of a mental-health crisis, in September 2015. One week later, a Kanabec County Sheriff’s deputy killed Robert Christen, a white former fullback for the Wisconsin Badgers who was enduring a mental-health crisis of his own.* Two months after that, in November 2015, Minneapolis police killed Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old unarmed black man. Hundreds poured into the streets.
In response to Clark’s killing, protesters launched what would stretch into an 18-day occupation of one of the city’s police precincts. One night, a group of armed white supremacists showed up. One of the racists opened fire, wounding five of the anti-racist activists. Serving as a spokesperson for the protesters, Noor questioned why police hadn’t done anything to prevent the attack—after all, the activists had reported the threats they’d been receiving to law enforcement.
The next day, police 400 miles east, in Chicago, released a grainy dashcam video depicting a white officer opening fire upon a 17-year-old black boy. The officer shot Laquan McDonald 16 times. People across the nation took to the streets.
In July 2016, we all watched Philando Castile die on camera, shot five times at point-blank range by a police officer during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis. A week later Mica Grimm, one of the leaders of the local Black Lives Matter chapter, traveled to the White House, where the then-mayor and then–police chief of St. Paul dressed her down in front of President Barack Obama—declaring the protests about Castile’s death “a disgrace.”
Exactly one year later, in the same city, came the death of Justine Damond, a 40-year-old yoga teacher who had called police to the alley behind her house because she thought she heard a woman’s screams. A police cruiser arrived, but when Damond approached, the officer got startled and shot her.
It would take two more years, but in April 2019, the local prosecutor finally secured a conviction of a police officer. But instead of a victory for the protesters, it was a cruel irony. The convicted officer was a Somali
