I am now home, after an evening where I both saw community uniting in peaceful mourning, and also, elsewhere, experienced a mild to moderate risk of being exploded. @JaredGoyette was riding shotgun with me. This will be a long thread.
First off, it turns out that I’m inept at simultaneous reporting and tweeting (also, the cell connection pretty quickly devolved to uselessness). So all of what I’m writing about happened hours ago. We left my house in Uptown around 9:00/9:30.
One of my big takeaways tonight is that there is not a single uprising. If you’ll forgive a tortured analogy, this event is less like a human brain and more like an octopus brain. It’s decentralized. There’s a brain in every leg. I may not be making sense ...
Instead of bad analogy, let me go for an example. When we left my house, we were planning to drive down to Cup Food where people have set up huge memorials to George Floyd. Then we hit a traffic jam at LynLake and discovered the jam was actually a small rally.
The rally was an organized event. But it wasn’t organized in a top down centralized way. It was the work of some folks who decided that they wanted to bring the mourning and the message to the wealthy, powerful and white neighborhoods. So they put a thing together...
I talked with Antionette Morris, one of the organizers. She and her friends started a with a few people at Bde Maka Ska around 3:00 and later started moving with the goal of eventually reaching Cup Foods. Along the way, she said, they were drawing in people and getting bigger.
Morris’ uprising was not the same as the earlier uprising in downtown. It wasn’t the same as what was happening on University. It wasn’t the same as what was happening at the 3rd precinct. It wasn’t the same as the scattered looting.
The murder of George Floyd, the rage people (especially black people) feel about that death and all the other deaths and mistreatment by police that came before ... that inspired all those uprisings. But it’s more like a bunch of events coincidentally happening at the same time.
At Morris’ uprising, there were people wearing custom tshirts commemorating George Floyd, there was chanting and a little dancing. There were tears and anger. There was an explicit message of “join us, march with us, listen to us”. They took over the whole intersection.
It started with black activists, Morris said. By the time I got there it was a racially diverse crowd. I’m no good at crowd estimation. But it was enough to fill a major intersection. We will say block-party size. 
This is Antoinette Morris, a college student and organizer of the rally I stumbled onto at Lyn-Lake, describing her uprising.
After a while, Morris’ uprising moved on. It was mobile. Traveling pied piper like down to another intersection. As it pulled out, it gained a new member, white Wedge resident Amy Fastenau.
Fastenau had literally been pulled to the sound of the rally and was planning to follow it to the next stop. “This one was different,” she said, about Floyd’s death. It wasn’t a split second decision. It was an officer making a choice. For 8 minutes.
Fastenau told me she sees a difference in how her wealthy, white neighbors are approaching the death of George Floyd, as well.
We didn’t follow that rally. My original plan had been to spend the evening driving around, seeing how many of these different uprisings we could find. Instead @JaredGoyette’s editor messaged that the 3rd precinct had been abandoned to protesters and he needed to go. So we did
And here’s the second takeaway I had from tonight: it is not easy for me to correctly describe how people felt about the destruction at the 3rd precinct, nor is it easy to describe the atmosphere there. It’s a lot.
Let’s start with what it wasn’t: Nobody was afraid. Even I wasn’t after the first couple minutes. I was scared of the fires and the occasional firework gone awry. The people weren’t scary. They were destructive. They were angry. They wanted to be heard. They weren’t scary.
It feels weird to say that I mostly felt safe with a bunch of people who were destroying a police station. But 🤷♀️. That’s how it felt. I saw them protect each other. I saw them “police” each other. “Hey no fire. No weapons,” man said to a guy carrying burning lumber thru crowd.
Mostly, I saw people who felt triumphant. Not about destroying things exactly. But about the idea that they’d won a fight here. That they were people who never win fights against police and they just did. And maybe now nobody could ignore them.
I’m paraphrasing here. From what I was told and what I overheard. Starting with a man we interviewed in front of a line of fire crossing Snelling like a scar. “I’m feeling calm,” he said. “This sends a wide message. This stops right now. The killings stop right now.”
My introduction to this sort of reporting —a pile of rocks in front of a burning fence.
There were no police anywhere that we saw. We were maybe there an hour and a half. So no tear gas. No rubber bullets. Definitely a party atmosphere. In contrast to our previous stop.
Some of the graffiti, and a man standing at a first aid station, keeping it lit, in case others needed it.
It was definitely destructive though. The people weren’t threatening, but this was not nice. This was people celebrating destroying a thing they hated.
They destroyed that police station in effigy, basically. “Peaceful protest isn’t a thing anymore,” said Forrest McClarron, a Minneapolis man I spoke to in the crowd. “I feel unity. It’s bringing us together. It’s beautiful.” He was silhouetted by the fire.
This was a small crowd, I should also say. Smaller than I would have guessed, anyway. @JaredGoyette and I debated the estimate, but 300 doesn’t seem off. Small compared to downtown. And it thinned a lot while we were there.
After a while, we noticed people had gotten inside the precinct. There were guys showing off their new cop shirts to friends. People on the roof.
Marcell Harris told me that yesterday he had been shot at by police wielding non-lethal rounds. “He hit me once,” Harris said. He used his backpack as a shield and went up to the man who shot him and swiped the officer’s baton. Now there was no threat.
“I’m nonviolent,” Harris told me. “But George Floyd popped the bubble. This feels like the beginning of the end.” End of what? “What we’ve been going through,” he said. “All the bullshit.”
As we walked through the crowd, we kept hearing the word “beautiful”. “It’s beautiful.” “You’re beautiful.” “My people are beautiful.”
It was mostly only black men who would agree to speak with me, but there were all genders and all races in this crowd. Age-wise, young. But otherwise very diverse. Here is a gentleman reclining and checking his phone on toppled fencing.
About this point we noticed the fire across the street was a liquor store and started to get a little anxious about our proximity to the flaming building full of alcohol.
We retreated into an alley, which turned out to have a back door to the precinct where people were going in and out. Water flowed out the door. There was graffiti inside. @JaredGoyette went a little ways in, but changed his mind when he heard people talking abt finding guns.
That part would have scared me, had I been there. I was, instead, busy outside striking out on new interview subjects.
At one point we talked to a group of older white men who were helping the owners of Ghandi Mahal protect that building. One was a physician, who was struggling with his own feelings about this particular uprising.
“I have zero faith in the cops,” he said. “They’re disrespectful and insensitive.” He’d watched police mistreat black people before, said.
The same white physician also saw chaos in this uprising, where others saw unity. His feelings tonight were shock. “Mesmerized and shocked. How could you not be upset by this level of destruction?”
It was right about then that @JaredGoyette’s editor told us a gas line was cut and there was an explosion risk.
Never let it be said that I don’t know when to fold ‘em.
Before we left, we got one more interview. Ralph J from St Paul. I’m using @JaredGoyette’s photo of him because let me tell you, folks, I’m a print journalist. Emphasis on “bad at photography.”
Ralph had a lot of mixed feelings about the uprising he was on his way to go join. With flames and smoke billowing like a volcano behind him, he told me he was disturbed by looting. “It doesn’t do anything for the justice of George Floyd.” But ...
“But people fail to realize the bigger picture,” Ralph said. “People like you, you don’t have to walk around afraid. People have lost friends and family.” He didn’t respect people for “tearing shit up”. But he understood.
Tonight, last night, to Ralph they felt like letting go of years of oppression. “I’m not mad at these people,” he said. “It is what it is. It’ll keep happening until they can bring some justice.” He sighed. “This shit’s fucked up.”
And now I need to go to bed. Goodnight, Minneapolis. Be safe. Love each other.
