MINNEAPOLIS — At the corner of East 38th and Chicago, the Minnesota Timberwolves are not front of mind.
The people who come here, 10 minutes or so from downtown, where the city’s NBA team is in the midst of a renaissance, don’t bring up Anthony Edwards or the unceasing comparisons of him to Michael Jordan. They don’t seem to care much about Rudy Gobert winning his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award, or Naz Reid getting his first Sixth Man of the Year award. They have come, this day — from Michigan and Oregon and Colorado and California and New York and Ghana — to see the spot where George Floyd was murdered, in front of the Cup Foods store, and how they reconcile what that means to them.
They are, all of them, quiet, contemplative, nervous. Black, White, Latino, male and female, on foot or bikes; it doesn’t matter. They don’t know where to stand or where they should walk or what they should say. Knowing what happened here, they seem not to want to trespass on the grounds.
An Asian woman has brought flowers. She is crying.
“Would you like a hug?” asks Bridgett Floyd, George Floyd’s younger sister, in town last weekend. They embrace.
East 38th and Chicago is in the heart of what people in this neighborhood call “The Free State of George Floyd,” more commonly known as George Floyd Square. At intersections surrounding the corner, raised fist sculptures patrol the blocks now rather than the police, and the Pan-African Flag of Black liberation flies high.
The handmade memorials and flowers surround the spot in the street where a former Minneapolis police officer choked the life out of Floyd, who was in handcuffs and lying on the street, by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes, on May 25, 2020, as the officer’s partners rejected urging from people watching — and, vitally, though achingly, recording on their phones — to let Floyd sit up and breathe.
Floyd’s death — the officer who killed him was convicted in 2021 of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison — sparked worldwide protests condemning police violence against people of color. The decentralized movement known as Black Lives Matter led marches across the country, demanding civic and political change.
For a few fleeting months afterward, the nation seemed to be at least trying to rectify some of its most egregious blind spots on race and systemic racism. Corporate America committed to addressing hiring and promotion inequities, bolstering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion departments, as did schools and universities. Cities and towns removed Confederate monuments and statues from public squares and grounds and renamed schools named for Confederate generals.
The power of the movement, though, has been manifested by the intensity of the backlash against it in the nearly four years since Floyd’s murder.
As the four-year milestone of Floyd’s murder approaches, this city and the nation seem unsure of what to do next, from the macro of the next stages of the social justice movement — and who wants, and does not want, that movement to proceed apace — to the micro of how to develop this space.
And, within that micro, does the wild success of the Timberwolves, who’ve become one of the NBA’s best teams, reaching heights they haven’t reached in two decades and who play in a sold-out arena full of well-heeled fans, mean anything? Does it have any tangible impact?
“The city wants to sit down and talk to us. But the city’s the reason Floyd’s dead,” says Eliza Wesley, the Minneapolis resident and “gatekeeper” of the Square, who patrols the grounds almost daily to ensure visitors know as much of the story of Floyd and the community as possible.
In the early days following Floyd’s murder, she gave out free masks and hand sanitizer, controlled the endless traffic flow of cars going around the small circle that intersects East 38th and Chicago and continued to fundraise and keep local food pantries running as COVID-19 raged.
(David Aldridge / The Athletic)
The local residents and Floyd’s family aren’t angry with the Wolves. They appreciated the gestures the team made after Floyd’s death, and that Karl-Anthony Towns has been here, early and often. Amid his own grief in 2020, after his mother, Jacqueline, died from COVID, Towns came here, just as Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock and others have in the years since.
But people come here, and they leave, and it’s been almost four years now, and these people in the community are still here, day after day, and they want George Floyd and his death to be honored in the way they think he should be honored. They’d like the Wolves and the other pro sports teams here to play a front-facing role, with their profile and resources.
The Wolves have their own answer to the impact question.
“My answer is yes, and I’ll tell you why,” says Tru Pettigrew, the chief diversity and inclusion officer for the Wolves and the WNBA’s Lynx.
“The unfortunate, man, the tragic murder of George Floyd was actually a catalyst to how and why our team has actually become much more intentional about being present in the community, and building relationships with the community,” Pettigrew said. “That’s how I came into the organization. After the murder, myself and so many others, across the league and across the country, in these positions of chief diversity and inclusion officers, these positions emerged at a rapid pace across the country. The Timberwolves were no different. Where we may have been a little different (was), one, we were the epicenter of so much social and racial unrest, because that’s where the murder of George Floyd took place.
“But, also, I give Ethan (Casson, the Wolves’ CEO) a lot of credit, because when he brought me in, I came in as the head of diversity and player programs. I came in on the basketball side of the business. After that first year, he and I both realized that the passion and the vision and mission in which I was there best served the organization on a more holistic level.
“Working with the players was great. But this needed to be something that permeated the whole organization, across all four franchises (including the Wolves’ G League affiliate, the Iowa Wolves, and the franchise’s 2K League team, T-Wolves Gaming). My role was evolved to chief impact officer, very intentional to impact the entire community, the culture of the entire organization, and how we showed up in communities.”
Pettigrew was hired by Gersson Rosas, the Wolves’ former president of basketball operations who is now the Knicks’ senior vice president of basketball operations. Originally, Pettigrew’s job description dovetailed with many in the community. He was tasked with building bridges between the Wolves’ players and the Minneapolis police.
“That relationship was strained,” he says now. “It was already a very fragile relationship with law enforcement and the Black community to begin with. Now, you add this, and the players were like, ‘Yo, we’re not feeling MPD.’ That was really my initial assignment.”
The team met with Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other local officials and civic groups in the summer and fall of 2020, often via video during the worst of COVID-19. The team connected with then-Minneapolis NAACP president Leslie Redmond and Elizer Darris, the former co-executive director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund.
That doesn’t mean every relationship with every community group was great, then or now. Where there was community connection, the team tried to double down and replicate it. But where there wasn’t, the Wolves tried to listen to why “and start to resolve and reconcile those relationships,” Pettigrew said.
The club reached out to the Floyd family, many of whom lived in Houston, inviting them to a Rockets-Wolves game when the Wolves came to Houston in 2021, a week after the guilty verdicts came down. Two of Floyd’s brothers, Philonise and Rodney, and his cousin Brandon Williams came to the game. They received a game ball from the team, game-worn jerseys from Edwards and Towns and a custom team jersey with Floyd’s name on the back.
“I told them, I don’t know what I can do, but whatever I can do, let me know,” Pettigrew said. “We can commit to you as an organization, you will never have to pay for a game (in Minneapolis), because I knew basketball could serve as a welcome distraction for them. … I knew they were going through so much trauma, as a family. That brotherhood just grew and grew. Over the years, they said, once the cameras went away, and the lights turned down, they said, ‘Y’all were the only organization that still rock with us. Everybody else was just doing it for the photo ops.’”
Pettigrew ticks off, with pride, the off-court honors the team has received in the succeeding years.
The Wolves won the NBA’s Inclusion Leadership Award this year, given out annually by the league to recognize “an organization’s history of and commitment to inclusion as a key business strategy, evaluating the team’s full slate of inclusion programming.”
The organization got the award for its “Pack the Vote” initiative, which focused on providing nonpartisan voter education, increasing voter registration and civic engagement. That dovetailed with the Wolves’ role in the “Restore the Vote” statewide initiative, a program that restored the voting rights of 50,000 formerly incarcerated citizens in the state. The bill passed the Minnesota Legislature early last year and was signed by Gov. Tim Walz in March 2023.
And, earlier this month, Towns won the NBA’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award, named after the Hall of Fame center who has spent much of his life off the court raising awareness for social justice ideals and movements worldwide. Towns represented the Wolves as they promoted Restore the Vote with local civic organizations.
All those honors were well-earned. But they don’t feed the vision of what people on the Square want to happen with this space. As the days, and then years, wore on, the crowds coming to honor Floyd diminished in size. But they didn’t stop. They’ve never stopped.
“We had a group come here from Antarctica,” says Angela Harrelson, Floyd’s aunt, saying a group received dispensation to leave their work on the remote continent to come to Minnesota.
The community wants any development of the Square to come from their hands and minds, not from well-meaning bureaucrats and planners who don’t live here, and don’t know what Floyd’s life and struggles were like. Floyd — everyone, including family members, calls him “Floyd,” not “George” — wrestled with addictions. Ideally, a youth center focusing on job creation and substance abuse rehabilitation, along with a museum/memorial that would house the hundreds of thousands of artifacts left by tourists, would be the centerpieces of a reimagined Square.
And folks out here figure the Wolves, with their individual and group largesse, could help with that.
It has been hard for Bridgett Floyd, who lives in North Carolina, to continue to return to the place where her brother was slain. She was here with other family in the days and weeks after the murder and during the police officers’ 2021 trials. But this was the first time in a couple of years that she’s been back. There is so much pain and, even with all the convictions, unresolved anger.
She feels a calling to keep his memory, and the causes raised by his death, in the public’s consciousness. She hands out flowers she bought to visitors.
“I knew Floyd has been here, and there’s something I have to do here,” she said. “So I’m walking in it.”
Of course, a sports team doesn’t have budgetary power or zoning authority. It can’t conduct environmental studies or call public meetings. It’s but a symbol of a city, and there’s only so much it can do that isn’t performative.
Only a handful of players remain from that 2020 team. Pettigrew is leaving the organization at the end of the playoffs. It’s sports; people come, and they go. And the Wolves are in a knockdown, drag-out fight with the Denver Nuggets that will crescendo with a Game 7 Sunday night in Denver. All their attention and focus are on trying to defeat the world’s best player and the NBA’s defending champions.
When the playoff run ends, though, this community will still be here, waiting for someone to listen to them, work with them and see their dreams come to fruition — dreams no more audacious than the ones George Floyd had for his daughter, Gianna.
“Daddy changed the world,” she said in 2020, on the shoulders of her dad’s friend, former NBA player Stephen Jackson, and she’s right. George Floyd changed the world. He still does, even when people show up here from so far away and can’t explain why they’ve come.
(Top photo of the George Floyd memorial at East 38th and Chicago: David Aldridge / The Athletic)
