Will Minneapolis become the Selma of the North?

The private memorial service for George Floyd had ended and Martin Rogers stepped out into the hazy afternoon light. He walked across the street and sat down on an empty park bench, and from that vantage point, he looked back and ahead, to the struggle then and now for racial justice in America.

He recalled a recent trip to Selma, Alabama, with his wife, who grew up there. They visited the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where in 1965 state troopers and sheriff’s deputies armed with tear gas and billy clubs attacked peaceful demonstrators marching in support of voting rights for African Americans. “Bloody Sunday,” as the confrontation became known, marked a seminal moment in the civil rights movement and prodded Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act that year.

“Walking onto that bridge – that was powerful,” says Mr. Rogers, a former grade-school teacher. “You could feel the history of what those marchers achieved.”

A Connecticut native who moved to Minneapolis in the early 1980s, he attended the memorial here for Mr. Floyd last week on

A different kind of movementGrief and catharsis“Good intentions aren’t enough”