38th and Chicago: The Crossroads of Love and Compassion

On any other Saturday, the sights would seem rather normal and mundane.

People walking along the blocked-off street. Mothers making sure their children have enough sunscreen on their arms and faces. Curbside vendors serving up everything from small trinkets to pulled pork sandwiches.

… but here, it’s not normal - and, certainly not mundane.

This is E. 38th St. and Chicago Ave. in South Minneapolis, and there will never again be just any other Saturday.

It was here on May 25th where George Floyd was detained by four officers of the Minneapolis Police Department. Floyd had been accused by an employee at a nearby deli of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.

While he was in custody, one of the officers, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. When that time expired, so did Floyd’s life.

The four former police officers - Chauvin, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao - are now all charged in Floyd’s death. Chauvin said almost nothing during an 11-minute hearing Monday in which he appeared on closed-circuit television. A judge set bail at $1.25 million without conditions, or $1 million with conditions.

Since May 25th, normalcy has been replaced with anger, sadness and reflection at E. 38th and Chicago.

This past Saturday, the crowds returned in the morning to visit the site of Floyd’s death. There are three focal points of mourning - the actual spot on Chicago Ave. where Floyd died, a large mural for Floyd painted on the Cup Foods facing E. 38th St., and a large circle of flowers in the center of the intersection.

“I think people know this can’t be just another hashtag,” Pastor Edrin Williams of Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis said to WEAU on Saturday. “This has to be a change in our society. This has to be a moment where you shift how we view policing, how we view black people in our nation, how we respond to these things. This feels different.”

Williams was one of many at E. 38th and Chicago on this day, looking for answers while asking many more questions about what took place here.

What took place on May 25th at the meeting of these two streets has triggered protests and looting across the country. On this day, however, this was the crossroads of love and compassion for a grieving nation.

The grieving was with Grant Sparks from St. Paul. He was back for a second time at the intersection, wearing plenty of Minnesota Vikings apparel - including a purple face mask - and holding a sign calling for justice for George Floyd.

“This is my backyard. This is my community. This is all of our community. We have to be here. I have to be here,” he said.

The emotion Sparks carried overflowed when he talked with a member of the New Covenant Church of God in Christ in South Minneapolis. Despite now living in a time when social distancing has been preached, Sparks leaned in for an embrace.

“I wanted him to know that I’m going to do everything that I can to reach out to lawmakers. There has to be a change. For him just to hug me, meant the world to me. I will absolutely be a voice for George,” Sparks said.

The New Covenant Church of God in Christ arrived at the site Saturday to offer its voice

Before May 25th, E. 38th and Chicago had been just another intersection, where businesses were located, including Cup Foods and a Speedway convenience store. When 2020 began, Carley Kammerer was planning to open her non-profit coffee shop a half-block north of the intersection on Chicago Ave.

“We wrapped up a big fundraising effort at the end of 2019 to move from our mobile coffee cart into an actual shop,” she said Saturday. “We were pretty close to signing a lease in March, when COVID kind of swept the train of retail.”

The 2014 UW-Eau Claire alum had begun preparing the store location she had chosen for Wildflyer Coffee.

Then, came May 25th.

“This area, in general, has been really pretty peaceful especially to what happened here and now the mourning that’s happening here. In that way, this whole block has been amazing.”

Kammerer spent this Saturday handing out small cups of coffee and lemonade at no charge to the people who came to this critical crossroads.

The people were young and old, black, brown, and white, tall and short. They included Jessica Gunter. She stood by the mural for George Floyd and was conducting a live broadcast through her phone.

Taking a stand is something she was doing in more ways than one.

Gunter is with “The Amputee Experience: ‘Connecting the Dots’” - a community organization which bills itself as a safe place for all amputee and adaptive questions.

“A lot of our amputee community here in Minnesota would love to have come and see the memorial, but for our lower-limb amputees, sometimes walking with prosthesis in groups, you get tripped up and they get a little bit nervous,” Gunter said.”

A lower-limb amputee herself, Gunter stood and reflected on what happened here less than two weeks earlier.

“I’m a mother. So, hearing anyone call for his mama, he was my son in that instant and every part of me wanted to fix it,” she said, referring to the video of Floyd’s death which has dominated broadcast and social media since May 25th.

The images in that video, and the subsequent reactions, have been brought into homes across the nation and around the world. In fact, on this Saturday, a reporter from Al Jazeera stood in front of a large depiction of Floyd and talked into a television camera, providing his audience a sense of what this spot now means.

However, this is not a foreign location for western Wisconsin. E. 38th and Chicago is slightly less than 100 miles west of Eau Claire. It was partly why Marc Lundquist and his wife made the short trip over to see the site.

“We originally came up for a getaway that we had to wait several months with COVID. Of course, once we were here (in Minneapolis), we wanted to go to 38th and Chicago to pay our respects and witness it,” he said.

Lundquist teaches 8th and 9th grade history at Eau Claire Regis and he took the time to capture his own images of the intersection. To him, this site could well be on the way of joining other noted locations tied to the Civil Rights movement.

“You can go back to Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama with the bus boycotts, Emmett Till, the young man who was murdered in Mississippi, the bombing in Birmingham, ‘I Have a Dream’ - these are all historic, huge events that people remember. This could be one of them,” he said. “People might remember someday what happened at 38th and Chicago. They might remember the name of George Floyd and that finally something changed.”

To many, the change may have seemed dramatic in the days since George Floyd’s death. Protest marches have clogged the nation’s streets from coast to coast, including in the Chippewa Valley. Looters have taken advantage of the anger by destroying businesses. Vigils have been held to reflect on the mood of the nation.

Yet, the vigil at E. 38th and Chicago has gone well beyond the cards and flowers which hundreds of people have left there.

“I think people need to go beyond seeing this on a screen and be in this space, because when you walk out and see the spot where he died, when you see the memorials that have been built over this last week, when you breathe the same air that he was breathing as he was fighting for air, that does something to you,” Pastor Edrin Williams said.

This intersection is now where a nation is wondering which way society will turn.