Long Form Stories

I have been living in Minneapolis since about 1993 summer of 93 so it's been about 17 Nope. Excuse me, 27 years. My math was off. Yeah. Decades get lost, too. It's been about 27 almost 30 years since I moved here. I'm originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. I grew up there. That's where my father's from. My mother is originally from Minneapolis. She graduated from Holy Angels when it was an all girls school, I want to say in the 70s, not trying to age her, but yeah, that's who I am and where I'm from, and how I got to Minnesota. Leading up until George Floyd, we were all stuck in COVID. Nobody was really like leaving the house. The streets were pretty you know, I live right next to Lauren Park, right on the outskirts of downtown Minneapolis. And, you know, just walking around my house, the park was pretty much empty. You know, streets are empty, stores are empty, and it was just like a ghost town for a while. So, you know, really, when it happened, there was really nothing else to watch. It was like when it happened. Everybody had it on their stories and on their Facebook and on their Instagram. It was on the news. So it was kind of hard to miss when it happened, because we weren't doing anything else. And COVID had us all just paying attention to like that tragic incident that happened. And so when I saw it. You know, for me, the first emotion was not, not again. You know, that was my very first emotion. Like, here we go again. Why us? Why does this keep happening? And you know, for me, I tell, I tell my friends sometimes, you know, it's probably one of my like, you know, bad traits right now is that I'm too numb to all the murders and all the violence and all the police brutality that has happened in the city because I grew up in it, and so I've seen too many of my friends tased by the police for no reason, beaten up by the police, handcuffed for no reason, arrested for no reason. And when you see it so many times, eventually it just becomes another day. It's just Tuesday, you know? It's just Saturday. In Minneapolis, we're taught it doesn't take much to get you arrested. Being black in America, and I had many family members told me that, you know, and that's a sad reality is that we are taught that as children, that it won't take a lot for you to get arrested, where a white kid will can do the most and not get arrested, but you can mess up just the smallest little bit and you will go to jail. And that was true. You know, I've been, I've been in handcuffs in front of my own house for no reason, and they held me for five minutes and let me go no charges. Had no reason to put me in handcuffs. And, you know, they didn't even put the guy I was with in handcuffs. They just put me in handcuffs because I was black and he wasn't. It was, it was definitely emotional, you know, when I saw Mr. Floyd on camera dying, but at the same time, like I said, my emotions have been numbed down to the point where I don't get irate and angry like a lot of people do anymore, because I've seen it too much. I've seen it so much it doesn't take away my anger. You know, I'm still angry on the inside. It's just I don't show out as you know, I've learned to control my anger and control my outrages and control my emotions. Because if I was going to get outraged and do and, you know, burn something or fight somebody every time they call me the N word, or every time a man, a black man, dies in my neighborhood, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be fighting my whole life, every day, every day I'm breathing. And you can't live like that. You can't we have to, like, look at this as this is a this is a problem, but solutions happen through rational thinking, not irrational behavior. What I saw was I saw a city that was fed up. The day after he died. I went to the protest on Tuesday. I saw a city who was fed up, but they were not angry. They were not rioting. They were like me. They just had had enough, and they wanted to come together and respect this man. And you know, the fact that he got murdered in his own neighborhood, and they wanted just to respect the memory and try to try to show people that we are not against each other. You know, I saw white people, black people, natives, Mexicans, everybody, all in one area, to respect the fact that this man died unjustly. And that was the first time I realized, yo, we could come together, you know, we actually could do this. We could be peaceful and come together and work together. And so that day, took a friend of mine up. She had said she had my friend, Ellie, had never seen my neighborhood before. She's from a suburb, so she doesn't know about the south side. So she goes, Yeah, I want to see your neighborhood. Let's go to the let's go to the March and see, see what's going on. I said, All right, cool. I was gonna go anyway. You can come with me. So I bring her to my neighborhood. Sure, sure. Where I grew up, on 34th, and third by Central, Richard Green, you know, on the way there, we park, we start walking peaceful, you know. Um, I go, I see people kneeling and praying. Where he died, there was flowers at the memorial. And then real peacefully, somebody got on his iPhone. Was just like, we're going to start marching, which we need everybody that's going to march with us to come this way down 38th and if you're going to stay here, just keep it peaceful. But we're going to start to march. And soon as that happened, soon as we started the march, you could see down the street, like abundance of cop cars lining up in like SWAT formation, like they were about to attack some people. And I'm like, what's going on? Like, there's nothing going literally, I'm standing in the middle of all the people. Nobody's fighting, nobody's upset, nobody's throwing anything, nobody's breaking anything. And these cops, what I'm talking about not just not five, not 1020, 30 cop police SUVs, and they were all in attack gear, ready to ready to attack rioters. And there were no rioters yet. So I was confused on why they have were already in attack formation when there was no violence to be to address. You know, they were prepared already for what they instigated, you know. So they came say, as the march started to walk, I saw this, and I told my friend, like, Look, I know what's about to happen, and I don't think it's going to be safe here for you anymore, so I want to get you out of here. So I walked her back to her car, got her out of there. Soon as we got her in her car, I looked at my phone. Posts are up. They're breaking cop cars, you know, I'm saying they're there. It's already starting up. Like 15 minutes later, the cops had rushed all their cars down to where the protest march was going, and they stopped them and stood outside in riot gear, and like they they're not allowed to march. That's That's why people don't know that is why they got so mad and upset. Is because the police antagonize them and told them they couldn't, they couldn't practice their civil rights. And so people lost it. You know, you just killed one of ours, and now you're telling us we can't even mourn him the way we want to mourn him. So I understand, I understand the frustration and the anger at that point, the police were way out of line. They had no reason to do what they did, and they literally stopped a peaceful protest without cause. So that led to the, you know, the initial rioting on Tuesday. And so I stayed out all night that Tuesday, after I got my friend home safe, I walked downtown to see what else was going on. There were some protesters on sixth, and Hennepin that was still trying to protest. It's like 10 o'clock at night, you know, it's not after, it's not, nowhere near too late to be out. You know, I'm saying it's literally 10 o'clock at night, where people have the right to be out. They're not doing anything but protesting and, you know, screaming for justice. And the cops are sitting there, 50 deep in riot gear, you know, ready, ready to tear guys, ready to ready to hit him with rubber bullets. And I had to stop these kids. I seen these kids running from the police. I said, Why are you running? And the kids say, because the police over there. I said, so I'm like the police supposed to protect you. They like but they got guns. I said, everybody in America has guns. It's your right to bear arms. Do you not know that? I'm like, just because they have guns don't mean you should run from them. There are people just like me and you. You're not supposed to run from people. You're supposed to run from danger. Are you? Do you feel in danger? You know, like, Did you do anything to put yourself in danger? So why are you running? And they started to rationalize it after I talked for about five minutes. And like, you know what? You're right? Why are we running? We didn't do nothing to get arrested. We're just standing here, you know, we're just talking speaking. They can't stop us. And they went back and protested. But kids were running away from protests, scared to get rubber bullets, scared to get, you know, tased and tear gassed. And I'm like, Look, if we keep running, they're going to keep doing it. We got to stand together. They can't tase and tear gas all of us. They don't have enough ammunition. It's 1000s of us. It's 50 of them. Why are y'all running? You know? And I made them understand. I was like, if we don't start standing together. They'll win. That night, after those kids went back, I told my guy that I was with. I said, Yo, I'm gonna go with them, just to make sure they're okay. So I went down there, and there was a couple knuckleheads irate, trying about to throw stuff at the police. And we stopped them. You know, I work at Gold Room restaurant. So my guys, the head of security there, my guy, Sally, he was, he was running security. They had like three, four security on the corner. He said, he told the police, I look, y'all got to be here. This our corner. This is our business. We got this. We don't need you here. You see us. We get paid to do this job. You don't. We don't need you to do our job. And he's trying to get the police won't leave, so I joined him. I said, Look, man, y'all don't do nothing to the police. Don't throw nothing at them. Don't touch them. But they can't touch you. I said they can't move you. They're not legally allowed to move you off of off a public corner. There's no crime being committed here. They can't move you from this space right now. And I told them, just, just protest. Say what you want to say. Right, but don't touch them. Don't throw nothing at them, and they can't do anything to you. As I kept saying that over and over again, people started to listen, and they got peaceful fist in the air. George Floyd say his name, you know, I'm saying No justice, no peace. And that went on for about 2030, minutes. Cops got bored and they left because there was nothing to do. They realized these people weren't gonna attack and do nothing stupid, and that they were literally getting tired of standing on their feet for nothing. And they were they removed themselves and went back to the precinct, and that's the point. Is, like they're the ones antagonizing the people. The people are not antagonizing them. Squadrons of police literally trying to trap people, to arrest them for nothing. They were like, We're gonna make you do something stupid so we can arrest you. And that's the wrong mentality. You guys are here to protect us. You guys are here to encourage us to do smarter things, not wrong things. But every time you put a gun on and put a shield on and put pull your billy club out, it shows me that you're you have the intent to hurt somebody, and I'm the only person in front of you. So what else am I supposed to think? You know, if a guy, just a civilian, has a gun and a billy club and a riot gear in front of me, I feel in danger. Why don't they get that your perception you're giving us is making us scared as a society, and it takes really educated people to understand that fear tactic that they're using. The next day, I went to that protest at the government center on Wednesday. It was a march, set up protest and a march. I went to protest, and on my way to the protest, I saw people passing out from the heat, you know, I got to the Government Center, and I immediately saw somebody passed out. And some people were trying to, like, pour water, get them cool. And so as I'm listening, and as I'm seeing how hot it is, I'm like, I'm hot. So I say, You know what, I'm gonna go get some waters, and, you know, I'm gonna start passing them out because, you know, it's hot out here, and nothing was open because of the riots. The night before, target was boarded up, all the stores, gas stations were boarded up at this point, so there's nowhere to go get waters. You know, in the area. Luckily, my guy was down the street when we marched. I saw him and he had waters. So I said, Yo, I was just about to go get waters for all these people. Let me help you hand these out. He was like, Well, look, bro, I gotta go anyway, get my kids. Why don't you just take these waters and then you can go back to the Government Center and hand them out. I said, perfect. So I saw one of my guys that I work with downtown, my guy house. He said, I hope you carry those waters over so me and him carry like four cases of water over to the Government Center. I started filling my T shirt up, and I put them in, you know, because of COVID, I couldn't touch everybody to touch the waters, so I just put all the waters in my shirt. And I told everybody. I walked through the crowd while people were listening to the protests and listened to the speakers. I said, free waters. Stay hydrated. It's hot, free waters. And I did that for like an hour, until I ran out of the waters. And then I'm like, I gotta keep doing this. It's like 1000 people out here, you know. And I clearly saw the waters were going fast. People were thirsty, you know. So I hit my friend up, Ellie, who was there with me the day before. I said, Look, I know, you know, yesterday got kind of crazy, and we were supposed to hang out today to, you know, to fix yesterday. But I really got to get these people some water. So you mind if we go make a water run, and I help these people with this water, you know, and then we can hang out later? She said, Yeah. So she runs me over northeast off of Johnson to the speedway over there, we grab whatever water they had left, like four or five cases, put it in the back of her car. Then I come back to the Government Center and I go out, and I'm out more, you know, I did this for like, two, three hours. And he said, he said, The 38th in Chicago area is no longer safe. He said, our brother, this guy by the name of Jared bruinson, had called him and said, Look, I talked to the people at the art at the art building that's attached to cup, and he said they they're gonna let us use their their driveway and set up. So he said he Phoenix was like, Yo, can you bring the DJ equipment and come with me? And he said, I'm not from the south side. He said, I could do this by myself, but it wouldn't be the same. He's like, you from there. Can you come to come over to 38th in Chicago and help me keep this crowd calm. And I said, No problem, no problem. I got you. I go home, grab my DJ equipment. I'll be right there. So I did. I went, got the DJ equipment, speaker and mixer, microphone, you know, my laptop, and shot over to 38th in Chicago. Met him. We set up a table, we set up a DJ equipment. I was about to I was just starting to play music, and then he cut me off. He said, No, no, no, no, no, you know, right? When people started dancing, he said, That's not why we're here. We're not here to party. He's not a party. We're here. We're here to remember this man, respect his memory, and we're here to talk about the problems and the issues in our city. And we started. To let people pray. Do spoken word, you know, I spoke, he spoke. We educated people. And then as it started to get dark, something really special happened, you know, like, right after I was playing a little couple feel good songs and people were dancing, he stopped the music again. He brought this lady up and said, this lady just came to me, and this can't happen right here, right now. I won't allow it. He said, this lady lives right here. She lives right right across the street in apartments above the brown building next to the speedway. And he was like, she hasn't been able to pay her rent for two months. She's gonna get evicted. She doesn't pay her rent, and it's a sad thing that we are all here partying on her block and she can't pay her rent. So he said, we're not gonna allow this today. He said it's what, 100 150 people out here. He said, I need everybody give me five $10 right now. We're gonna pay this lady's rent right now. In 510 minutes, people started handing 510s 20s, we raised $1,000 and paid that lady's rent in 10 minutes. Beautiful thing. So I started to play another song, and then the family came up. Some of the extended family came up. He said, No, no, no, you know what? That wasn't enough, right? Before he let the Extended Family Start, starting to speak, he said, she said she had been able to pay her rent in months. We just paid one. What we gonna do about that? Y'all, we paid her rent twice. So in the next 20 minutes, we raised another $1,000 paid that woman's rent two times over, right there, you know, and she was, she thought she was gonna get kicked out of her place, you know, let alone figure out how she was gonna eat or anything else. She didn't think she didn't think she was gonna have a place to sleep. So we paid every lady's rent twice over. And then right after that, we let some of the extended family talk, from the George family, George Floyd family, and they they spoke, and they were deep, you know, they were in tears. They were hurt. They were telling people that they didn't want to see the city on fire. They didn't want to see all this violence and destruction and that. They just really wanted justice for their family. You know, they just wanted justice. They don't want to see the neighborhood go up. They wanted justice. And people heard it. And you know, as as the night winded down, at that moment, you can look to the right and you can see, like the orange glow from Lake Street being all on fire, and we were getting text messages and, you know, we could see on people's Snapchats and stuff that it was on fire. So we knew, you know, at that time, while we're still keeping people calm, we knew the rest of the city was not calm. We knew that surrounding us was a bunch of fires, and we kept that. We kept that block from we literally kept that corner from burning itself down. A lot of people, when we first got there, were leaning towards that direction. We should burn it down. You know, F cup, F cup foods, we should burn it down. And, you know, we heard that for about 30 minutes. We cut that out. We cut that we changed that narrative. We changed that emotion, that energy there. Energy shifted from hate and anger to love. And you know, people actually pouring out their emotions, you know, crying and sadness and all the emotions that are running through them that people are normally too scared to show those. People showed that that night, we drove up to Lake Street, right there where the post office is, you know, like Lake and first, I think that is or lake and Nicolette. It's almost like this lake and first, or look Lake and Stevens. That's what it is. It's Lake and Stevens. So it was right there on Lake and Stevens, or whatever, Lake and first, and we pulled up the Lake Street, and we could see the National Guard. They had Humvees, you know, like you could see the National Guard driving, and everything was on fire. Literally, like the Chinese food place was on fire. The post office was on fire. The only thing you could see left to tell it was a post office was the eagle. Like the word post office was burnt. You could see the eagle still. And like, Oh, that's it. And the whole building was in flames. Everything was in flames. So at this point, you know, we got a little bit of footage, and then we were like, yo, let's get out of here. We tried to turn on the Lake Street, and then we saw Lake Street was actually on fire. The street itself was on fire. So we couldn't go, we couldn't drive through a bunch of fire on the street that was right there, where the bridge is a 35 right underneath there was all lit on fire, like somebody had poured gas on the street and lit it on fire. You know, it was like that bad. So we had to turn around, go back towards your 38th and then we back toward Chicago. I mean, we went back towards Chicago, and we took Chicago down to Lake. Luckily, they hadn't blocked off that part yet, because it was still being looted. Literally, there was hundreds of people all over the streets. Just to get through the intersection, we had to, like, slowly go through and not hitting anybody, because we didn't want nobody to mess up the car, you know, you know, thinking we were somebody else. So we slowly drove through and made it through. But it was hundreds of people on Chicago and like and Popeyes was burning. You know, we saw, matter of fact in this building we're sitting in right now. I saw the Midtown exchange food area on fire, and I saw the. Lots of fires, so we finally made it through. And then that's when I saw the saddest thing I had ever seen. The Children's Hospital was boarded up. Like that's sad when you think people are so sick they're gonna burn up a hospital full of kids. But the reality of it is, that's how bad it was. They were burning schools. You know, they were burned. They were burning buildings that kids go to, and it was just the most tragic thing I'd ever seen. And that hurt my heart more than anything, seeing my entire my entire city on fire, it was like surreal. I had never thought I would see it in my life. The next day, I got up, I hit up. I hit up. A couple friends of mine said, Look, I was out there handling our waters and stuff. And I was out there on Chicago last night, after the after last night. We need to go out there and do some these people had their houses burnt, you know, they they had their grocery store burnt. You know, all their supplies are gone. There's nothing. We got to go do something. So I said, Let's go out to cub and target out in the suburbs. So I think the one off, the only cub I found open that day was the one in Robbinsdale, off of 36 and 100 so I went to that cub. We went and got a bunch of waters, Gatorades, snacks, like chips and, you know, protein bars. We filled up the cars, and then we we filled up the car, and then we went back. So we went up there. I went to Target, got a generic sign, and I just wrote, you know, black lives matter. I said, free food and water. Hashtag. George Floyd, you know, I had a generic sign, and me and him took turns holding up the sign. And then we gave away free, free water, free, very free chips, free protein bars. We did that like, most of the day, you know, we did that for like, four hours until everything was gone, and then, so after we did that, and I saw all the people there, I was like, Yo, this is this got to get under control that. Because that Thursday, it was like 2000 people at the memorial site, and they had no vendors. They barely had any security set up. You know, there was no, like, control of the traffic. There was no food for all those people that were out there. And so I said, You know what? We got to do, this even bigger. So I hit up a couple more friends of mine. Said, Look, we what we did yesterday wasn't enough. Can you come help us? We need to buy a bunch of supplies and go back out there and really help these people. Because it was a lot of people out there that had nowhere to go and didn't know what to do. So this time we go back out there, we set up two tables. We have, like, three times the supplies we had yesterday. And we have deodorant, you know, toothpaste, toothbrush. We have soap, you know, like household needs that you can't buy right now. And that's how it grew. It grew. It grew into that. It grew into just like me trying to feed people and keep them hydrated while they were protesting, you know, keeping people safe to like we have to facilitate target and cub now, because they're not there anymore. We have to stand together regardless of what our differences are, what we look like. We all live in the same land and we all live in the same country. We got to stop running from people who live here with us, stop being afraid of people who live here with us, and until we start standing together and understanding each other, we're going to keep having the same problems and going through the same cycle of hate and violence because people hate what they don't understand.