APRIL 21, 2021 – We Twin Citians are relieved by The Verdict. Many call it “accountability,” not “justice.” It can’t bring back George Floyd, Jr. It can’t expunge generations of evil. But it marks a new beginning.
Just ahead of The Verdict, I drove to George Floyd Square, 15 minutes from our house. Mostly journalists crowded the area, and I engaged several in conversation. Their far-flung bases reminded me that our local story had become international.
My memory—and iPhone—are now flooded with images. One features a New York-based AP photo-journalist, (who, in this small world, was acquainted with my niece Hillary, a former AP special feature reporter), photographing a young, masked, tidily-attired white woman as she carefully unbundled an armful of carnations. She then placed them one-by-one amidst the “garden” that surrounds the lofty, iron, stylized monument—a giant fist—in the center of 38th and Chicago Avenue.
From there I drove to the heart of downtown Minneapolis. It was a ghost town except for the grassy area outside the barricaded Government Center. There again I struck up conversations with people waiting anxiously for The Verdict. The longest encounter was with a stringer from L.A. Between his full mask and wool cap, he looked about 30. He was an impressively educated college drop-out. Currently reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the reporter—a person of color—was a student of the French Revolution. We talked about American democracy, which he recognized as “a necessarily messy process.” Pessimistic about the country’s near-term prospects, he allowed optimism regarding our long-term resilience.
Not far away was a lone, masked, middle-age white woman standing next to a home-made sign. It said, “I’m not afraid of melanin.” When I stopped to read it, I felt her gaze wondering if I understood. Before she could ask, I satisfied her curiosity. “I get it,” I said. “And I’m not either.” A short conversation followed, in the course of which I discovered she was from a rural town some distance northwest of Minneapolis. She said she’d felt moved to show her support for the cause of racial justice—and set an example for her daughters. When I expressed solidarity, she thanked me, and said she’d carry back the message that “she’d met nice people down here in Minneapolis.”
Next was a middle-aged man from Washington, D.C. A long-time American, his origins were southern India. He had an autistic son and worried how cops would handle a very dark-complexioned autistic man over a routine traffic stop. The man was spreading word about an app he’d developed that would send an alert to nearby subscribers to rush to an unfolding police encounter . . . and video. He said he “wanted to make difference.”
Cautiously hopeful, I drove home and arrived just in time for The Verdict. When the first “guilty” was uttered by Judge Cahill, my wife burst into tears of relief. So did I. George Floyd lost his life to a cop last year, but yesterday, America won another chance to redeem itself.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
