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GEORGE FLOYD’S JOURNEY FROM HOUSTON TO MINNEAPOLIS TELLS AN
IMPORTANT STORY  
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Sarah Lahm
May 23, 2025
The Progressive
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_ George Floyd's life was stolen from him, and his murder matters
because of that. But the trajectory that took him from one formerly
vibrant Black community to another then to an untimely death belongs
to a larger story of systemic racial injustice. _

The George Floyd mural outside Cup Foods in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
June 2020, Lorie Shull (CC BY 2.0)

 

Five years ago this week, George Floyd was murdered
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Minneapolis street corner, suffocated under the knee of former
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin
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That street corner, now part of an intersection known as George Floyd
Square
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is part of a neighborhood known as a historic African American
district—yet this detail is often forgotten in the retelling of
Floyd’s murder and the nationwide uprising that ensued.

That neighborhood, known as Central, is more than a thousand miles
from his childhood home in Houston’s Third Ward, but the two areas
are linked by a common history of disinvestment, overpolicing, and
criminalization in historically Black communities. The impact of
police bias and brutality in Floyd’s life began long before May 25,
2020.  “From the day George Floyd moved to Texas as a child to the
day he was killed in Minneapolis,” wrote
[[link removed]] _Washington
Post_ reporter Arelis R. Hernández in the aftermath of his death,
“the police were omnipresent in his life.” 

Floyd grew up in a public housing complex in Houston’s historically
African American Third Ward, where his neighborhood was beset by such
constant overpolicing that residents often took plea deals for any
number of minor violations, knowing they likely wouldn’t win in
court no matter the details of the case. In the years following his
return to Houston after attending South Florida Community College on a
football scholarship, Floyd was incarcerated several times while
struggling with addiction and mental health issues. In 2014, he moved
to Minnesota at the suggestion of a close friend, seeking a fresh
start and a chance at rehabilitation.

Floyd’s Third Ward neighborhood in Houston was once known
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its glittering avenues filled with Black-owned businesses, and became
famous as a hub of Black culture, art, and civil rights protests. But
by the time Floyd lived there in the 1980s and 1990s, over-policing,
disinvestment, and crack cocaine had destroyed many residents’
livelihoods. Today, the Third Ward’s Black population is rapidly
declining amid the neighborhood’s gentrification. 

To Floyd and other men he knew from Houston, Minneapolis represented
hope. Addiction recovery services were more plentiful in Minnesota,
and many of Floyd’s neighborhood contacts had made the journey north
seeking new opportunities for growth and healing. Floyd appeared to
have initially adapted well to the change, first attending
a ninety-day treatment program
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North Minneapolis in 2017, and then finding work as a bouncer.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, while living in South Minneapolis’
historically Black and disinvested Central neighborhood, Floyd lost
his job. On May 25, 2020, at a corner store called Cup Foods, Floyd
allegedly tried to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. He
was killed by Chauvin minutes later, in a neighborhood plagued by the
same forms of systemic injustice as the one he fled years earlier.

Like Houston’s Third Ward, South Minneapolis’ Central neighborhood
has a rich history
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by Black people who had faced discrimination elsewhere. Prior to the
1960s, Central was a flourishing district for a majority
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the city’s Black population, who had been pushed into
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others by racial housing covenants and other redlining tactics.
Pillars of this community include St. Peter’s AME Church
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holds services today, and the once-glorious Central High School that
counted Prince
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its graduating ranks but was demolished in 1989. 

But much like the Third Ward, Central’s vibrancy was systematically
dismantled in the last decades of the twentieth century, owing in part
to the construction of  35W
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highway that connects Texas and Minnesota and runs directly through
the heart of South Minneapolis. 

Local historians have documented
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35W on Central in particular, as well as its connection to other parts
of Minneapolis. Many of the Black residents who were previously
shuttled into the area after being unable to purchase houses elsewhere
due to redlining and racial housing covenants
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the state via eminent domain
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to make way for the new highway. Others found themselves suddenly cut
off from friends and neighbors in other parts of Minneapolis, and the
area’s businesses suffered.

_Minnesota Star Tribune_ reporter Eric Roper documented some of this
history in his 2024 podcast, _Ghost of A Chance_
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home across the highway from Central in 2020, Roper discovered that
the house had been purchased by a Black couple named Harry and
Clementine Robinson in the 1920s, just as redlining was taking hold in
Minneapolis. He traced the couple’s journey to Minnesota from other
states as they pursued opportunities denied to them elsewhere.

After Harry passed away in 1959, Clementine ended up in a small home
in Central, without much in the way of resources—despite her
groundbreaking career as a beautician with both white and Black
clients. She was buried in an unmarked grave six years later, although
the publicity from Roper’s podcast has resulted in a fundraising
campaign
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honor her with a headstone.

Despite decades of disinvestment, Central remains a rich and historic
neighborhood with a closer look. Visitors to the area should consider
driving along the Tilsenbilt Homes Historic District
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stretches along Fourth Street just west of George Floyd Square. This
district is home to Minneapolis’s first privately funded,
interracial housing development, and many of the sturdy ranch-style
homes still stand. The project came together in the 1950s through the
efforts of Archie Givens, Sr.
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a well-known Black realtor and advocate for affordable housing, and a
Ukrainian immigrant named Edward Tilsen.

Black residents then received mortgages for the Tilsenbilt homes from
the Federal Housing Authority, which was interested in promoting
racially integrated housing developments at the time. Just a few years
later, however, 35W bulldozed part of the neighborhood and cut it off
from the whiter, wealthier areas of South Minneapolis.
Statistics show
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to this day, Central is 35 percent white while the King Field
neighborhood just across 35W is nearly 80 percent white. 

George Floyd was one man whose life was stolen from him, and his
murder matters because of that. But the trajectory that took him from
one formerly vibrant Black community to another, and then to an
untimely death in South Minneapolis, where he had hoped to make a
better life for himself, also belongs to a larger story of systemic
racial injustice throughout the country. He indeed changed the world,
as Cadex Herrera’s richly colored mural
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George Floyd Square announces, in large part by humanizing the very
dehumanizing practice of police brutality. But our work is not done
yet. As we grapple with the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll
back
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accountability measures that took hold after Floyd’s murder,
however, it is clear that our work is not done yet.

_Sarah Lahm is a Minneapolis-based writer and researcher. Her work has
appeared in outlets such as The Progressive, where she writes the
Midwest Dispatch column and contributes pieces to the Public Schools
Advocate project._

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
nonviolence and freedom of speech. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we
publish on national politics, culture, and events including U.S.
foreign policy; we also focus on issues of particular importance to
the heartland. Two flagship projects of The
Progressive include Public School Shakedown
[[link removed]], which covers efforts
to resist the privatization of public education, and The Progressive
Media Project [[link removed]], aiming to diversify our
nation’s op-ed pages. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization_. 

* George Floyd
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* Houston
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* Minneapolis
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* Black Lives Matter
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* Systemic racism
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