It has been a little more than a month since George Floyd was murdered in South Minneapolis. Since then, Black Lives Matter lawn signs have popped up all over, even in some of the city’s most elite residential areas.
I marveled at this on a recent Saturday afternoon. Under a blazing June sun (this has been one of the hottest Junes on record here), my eleven-year-old daughter and I spent an hour or so among the leafy streets of Minneapolis’s Lynnhurst neighborhood.
She has a bimonthly paper route, and I was there to help since her dad, who usually pitches in, was out of town.
Will the Black Lives Matter signs that seem newly fashionable become an easily stored substitute for structural change?
As we walked, tossing copies of the local Southwest Journal onto very tidy front walks, I stopped and took note of the sea of Black Lives Matter signs that greeted us. Stuck staunchly into jewel-like green lawns, the signs offered a striking message.
But what message is it?
Lynnhurst is a dreamy place to behold. The houses are mostly large and elegant, with gorgeous, though contained, expanses of flowers, shrubs, and artfully arranged front-yard hangout spots—some with fire pits circled by colorful Adirondack chairs.
During the paper route, I noticed that two homes on one block were listed for sale, so I checked to see what it might take to buy into Lynnhurst these days. A quick Internet search revealed that both houses cost more than $700,000 and both offer impossibly perfect interiors, with gleaming wood floors and private, park-like backyards with space for the kids to play.
The house that costs slightly more features a “massive owner’s suite”—a tantalizing extra in this neck of the woods. Most of the houses in Lynnhurst, after all, were built more than a century ago, when Minneapolis was just beginning to expand beyond its downtown nexus.
As the city grew in the late nineteenth century, wealthy speculators built a handful of homes in this formerly rural area, calling it “The Colony at Lynnhurst.” Gorgeous houses, well-built and equipped with indoor plumbing and electricity, were offered inexpensively to young, married executives in hopes that this would inspire others to follow suit.
It’s important to recall one essential truth: The Colony at Lynnhurst was built for white families. No, really. By the early twentieth century, racial covenants were already in place in certain Minneapolis neighborhoods, meaning realtors couldn’t sell homes to Black people, even if they had the money or qualified for a loan.
Redlining, a strategy for keeping people of color out of white neighborhoods, shaped Minneapolis and turned it into a key outpost for Jim Crow-like segregation.
Today, almost 90 percent of Lynnhurst residents are white—a number much higher than the city’s total. The average annual income in this area is inching up toward $150,000, more than twice the median income for the city as a whole.
And still, the Black Lives Matter movement has found a home here. Does this amount to a reckoning, brought about—at last—by the horror of watching a local cop kill George Floyd with an almost bored expression on his face?
Or is this evidence of a passing trend?
The New York Times reporter Nikita Stewart recently noted that many protests held in the wake of Floyd’s killing have included a lot of white people, whose presence is cause for both hope and consternation among Black activists.
It is thrilling, one biracial woman tells Stewart, to see protesters gathered in her mostly white hometown on behalf of George Floyd and other Black victims of police violence. But, she wonders, will they be there when the cause seems less potent?
I wonder the same thing about Minneapolis. Will the Black Lives Matter signs that seem newly fashionable become an easily stored substitute for structural change?
Let me be clear: I have benefitted mightily from the kind of policies that have kept this city largely racially and economically segregated. I grew up very close to the Lynnhurst neighborhood and spent many childhood days in the area, enjoying the creek that runs through it.
These days, I live in a part of Minneapolis that is less wealthy and exclusive—for now. Although the post-Floyd uprising destroyed many buildings near my home, I still live in an area that is rapidly gentrifying.
One day, the aging Craftsman-style bungalow I own will be worth far more than I paid for it. It will most likely be a wealth-generating asset for my kids, and I am acutely aware of how this makes it impossible for me, really, to throw stones at anyone living in the Lynnhurst neighborhood.
Is it enough to point out that we have a Black Lives Matter sign in our yard, too? A neighbor handed it to my husband and me the other night, from a stack she had amassed in hopes that others would put one in their yards. She wondered if we would help spread the word, so that the pile of signs on her lawn would soon be put to use.
Helping her disperse her stash of signs was an easy task. As summer moves on, and some of the protests seem like they’re beginning to die down, I wonder what else my neighbors and I will be willing to do on behalf of Black lives.
Most likely, not enough.