I spent the first seventeen years of my life in Minneapolis, Minnesota, most of them living at 4220 Oakland Avenue. The city is full of parks. I had three within walking distance from my home. I generally played basketball at Martin Luther King Park as it had an indoor gym the others didn’t. We played baseball at McRae Park, where the diamonds were better marked, and our bikes were safer. Phelps Park on 39th and Chicago was best suited for soccer, sometimes baseball, and they flooded the park each winter to make an ice-skating rink. Phelps was the least maintained, though there’s a new building now that looks like it contains a gym. Phelps Park is also a block from where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers near Cup Foods, where Floyd is alleged to have presented a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. I say allegedly because he never stood trial; he was executed.
A sign in the window lets you know Cup Foods is under new management. I’m surprised they haven’t changed the name. It’s still open, selling overpriced goods, typical for small neighborhood stores in a food desert. There used to be a Red Owl and a Piggly Wiggly within a few blocks, but they’re long gone. I often rode my bike to the Red Owl for items; I don’t know how far I would have to go now, starting from my old home.
Approaching the site of the murder from each side of Chicago Avenue, there are now markers with a raised fist, signifying you are entering the Free State of George Floyd. The freedom mentioned is more aspirational than real. Black people, in general, and Minnesotans, are no better off than before. There was a brief period of hope which has since dissipated. I heard a minister say in church that “George Floyd changed the world.” I’m not so sure that’s true.
What is true is that in a few block area, the streets and walls are decorated. Homes and businesses have signs and murals memorializing George Floyd. They’re definitely art; some are beautiful, but what has been accomplished is questionable.
While in Minneapolis for a high school reunion, I visited the George Floyd memorial site twice. The first time I drove through, taking pictures from the car window, but I knew I hadn’t gotten a feel and went back the next day, walking at whatever pace was required.
As I walked, I set my alarm for eight minutes and 46 seconds; the length of time Officer Derrick Chauvin held his knee on George Floyd’s neck. Only later did I become aware of the poem by Donna Aza Weir-Soley.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Donna Aza Weir-Soley
Cue George Floyd
crying for his Black mother
for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
George Floyd’s Black life belonged to Derek Chauvin;
he took it because it was his to take.
in Amerikkka Black life is police property
Black life is state property
Black lives do not matter here
all lives do not matter here.
so, come by here for 8 minutes and 46 seconds
if you’re not busy, Mother God.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Come by here, Mama
fan the flames of resistance
in the hearts of your children.
cue the liberal sheep admonishing us
to sing Kumbaya to Jesus
and go back to sleep.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Cue Fox News telling its viewers
all the reasons George deserved to die.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
I heard George call for his mama
Kumbaya Mummah
in West Africa they say
the child not embraced by the village
will burn it down to feel its warmth.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
I heard George call for his mama
I guess she came
I guess she brought her sisters:
Mama Harriet and Sojourner
Fannie Lou Hamer and Audre Lorde.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall
not yet one full orbit round the ancestors’ sun
wondering why they have to return
to this scorched earth so soon!
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
I heard George call for his mama
I guess she came
I guess she brought her sisters with her.
Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons
Yaa Asentewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu in Ghana
Queen Nzinga Mbandi of Angola
The Mino, Amazon Mothers of Dahomey
Sarraounia Mangou, who refused to surrender to French colonizers
Hausa Warrior Queen Amina of present day Nigeria
Queen Amanirenas, one-eyed Kakande of the Kushite armies
who fought Augustus Caesar and the Roman soldiers
to protect her province in Egypt from 27BC to 22BC
forcing a peace treaty for her people lasting three centuries.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
I heard George Floyd call for his mama
I guess she came, bringing with her
all three warrior queens from the Virgin Islands
Queen Mary, Queen Agnes and Queen Mathilde
Rebel Mothers who kept the fires burning in the Danish colonies
in the 1878 rebellion.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
We all heard George Floyd calling for his mama
I guess she came
I guess she woke the children from their slumber
children of all races, creeds and colors,
children angry, sad, lost, crying
children marching with Black Lives Matter signs
children shouting “I can’t breathe”
in all 50 states of the union.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Alienated children looting
smashing and
defacing property
cue for the virtue signaling
from liberal media
ready to gaslight us
back into silence.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Come by here, Mother God
here, in the mouth of this dragon
where Black life is still white property
where all Black action or inaction are deemed criminal
and Black crimes are punishable by
death without trial.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Come by here, Mummah
here, where in 1865 they started the new doctrine:
your Black children — still property, but without value
yet expect these children to value another man’s property
in the height of righteous rage and
under the threat of annihilation.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
They dangle shiny things in the faces of your children
imprinting the notion that things mean more than their Black lives
yet in 2020 for every dollar that the white households make
Black households make 59 cents
in this great Amerikkkan de-mockery.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Come by here, Mother God
come help us teach the children
which knowledge to steal
and where to store it
how to loot wisdom and understanding
and when and where to deploy them.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Come here, now!
Mother-of-George and all our mothers
come show the children why massah’s tools
will only bury them under massah’s house.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Come by here see the American president
ordering the beating of peaceful protestors
for a photo-op on the steps of a church — with a Bible
turned backwards, held upside down.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Come here, Mother, if you’re not busy
to this place where #45 mocks our deaths
condemning even peaceful resistance as thuggery
cue the American Gestapo hiding their names and badge numbers
to kill us in anonymity, and still this genie will not go back into the bottle.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Cue white race soldiers infiltrating the resistance
causing havoc, undermining righteous rage
agent provocateurs of white nationalism
trying to change the narrative to suit their own agendas.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
The sitting US president is one tweet away
from ordering the execution of our children
the only thing saving them are other people’s children
joining ours down these mean streets (thirsty for their blood).
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
It has been two full weeks
in the middle of a pandemic
that disproportionately takes Black lives
yet — not tear gas, not rubber bullets
not shame tactics, not even death
has quelled this uprising of these children of the rainbow.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
This movement has spread like COVID-19 all over the planet
the spirit of resistance to tyranny and fearmongering
have infected the children marching on the US Embassy in Abuja
holding Black Lives Matter signs.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Your Maori children in New Zealand
perform a powerful Haka
for the beleaguered Black lives of your children in the USA
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Your children in France are marching for your children in America
they are marching in Germany, in South Korea and Japan
in Thailand, under strict social distancing lockdown, Zoom soldiers march
across computer screens, their virtual battle cry: Black. Lives. Matter.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Your children are demanding police defunding in Minneapolis and New York
cue for Fox News and Candace Owens bleating the end of civilization
erasing the precedent set in New Jersey in 2012:
a corrupt police department supplanted by true Public Safety Officers
protecting, serving and reducing crime to half in Camden.
Don’t label it anarchy; just say it is not politically expedient.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Your children demanding wealth redistribution, reeducation, rehabilitation
urban development I want to add consumer deprogramming.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
In America your children are demanding the removal of confederate statues
someone painted over the mural of racist Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo in Philly.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Your children are marching in England
they have tossed the statue of slave trader
Edward Colston into the Bristol Harbour.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Someone pleading
Someone crying
Someone not breathing.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
I see Nat Turner, Sam Sharpe and Dessalines
sharpening their tools for battle, waiting
in the wings for someone to call them.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
Take your knees off our necks
we don’t know how to stop our mothers’ rage
or our fathers’ battle cries.
8 Minutes and 46 Seconds
Kumbaya Mummah
(repeat until the clock runs out at 8 minutes and 46 seconds)
I say that little has changed after Floyd’s death because little if anything, has changed. For a moment, it seemed there would be real change in Minneapolis, America, and the world. Millions of people protested after the video was released of George Floyd’s death, moments after Minneapolis police described things quite differently. Because the video so clearly showed police brutality and the senseless murder of George Floyd. The usual suspects, like police unions, politicians, and the right-wing media, had nothing to say in response.
It looked like qualified immunity would end, and trained mental health workers might respond to some calls instead of men with guns drawn. Community oversight seemed likely, not just in Minneapolis but in Europe as well. It took a few months, but the usual suspects found their voice, falsely linking Black Lives Matter to ANTIFA and crying about the potential mishandling of money rather than ending lives. Little has changed in Minneapolis. A bill was introduced in March 2023 to end qualified immunity but may never advance in the state legislature. The federal government and the City of Minneapolis entered into a consent decree where the City promises to do better, but will they?
In the first year after George Floyd’s death, 229 Black people were killed by Police in America, with many more since. The Supreme Court has refused to act on qualified immunity, and community oversight has made limited progress in a few areas of the country. One of the pieces of art on the street in the Free State of George Floyd is where people have written the names of Black people murdered by police. The list keeps getting longer while progress is stalled. It’s time for a change!
