Jeanelle Austin booked a one-way ticket to Minneapolis five years ago.
George Floyd had just been murdered by Minneapolis police officers a few blocks from where she grew up.
Austin was living in Texas at the time, and a family member had sent her the viral video bystander Darnella Frazier recorded of Floyd’s death, which showed him pinned stomach-down in the street begging for his life as angry bystanders shouted at four police officers to show mercy. Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee pressed down on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as officer Thomas Lane held down his legs and officer J. Alexander Kueng knelt on his back. Officer Tou Thao stood watch nearby, keeping the bystanders, which included an off-duty Minneapolis firefighter, at bay.
“I did a group chat to key friends, organizers across the country, and said, ‘What is Minneapolis going to need? Because this is about to pop off,’” Austin recalled in a recent interview.
Austin had led community organizing and activism efforts in the past, and created a list of what local organizers and churches could do to prepare for fallout from Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020.
“I sent that to my family, and they said, ‘Jeanelle, this is your wheelhouse, this is what you do. Will you come home and just do this here? The community, our community needs you,’” Austin said, recalling a conversation she had with family members before she decided to fly to Minneapolis.
She said no. She was burnt out. Her father had just passed away the year before. The pandemic had upended the world.
Her family asked again, so she booked a flight, thinking she’d be gone for a week or two. She filled a duffel bag full of protest supplies she bought at Home Depot.
When she got off the plane in Minneapolis, she was greeted by National Guard officers armed with rifles. The governor had just issued a citywide curfew starting at 8 p.m. in response to unexpected protests punctuated with the looting and arson of several businesses, and tense confrontations between police and protestors. Austin’s sister picked her up from the airport anyway.
“The sky was orange. It smelled like a campfire,” Austin said. “”Having lived in Los Angeles and having lived through forest fires, it was a familiar smell and a familiar sight, but in the wrong place.”
Austin started going to protests and marches. She went prepared with supplies, which she passed out to fellow protestors. She wore goggles to protect herself from tear gas and rubber bullets. Snacks to keep energy levels up.
Then a semi-truck barrelled into the path of protestors on the I-35W bridge, where Austin and her sister had gathered. At one point, her sister fell as they ran for safety. Austin feared her sister would be trampled and killed.
“That was a traumatic day, and I decided the next morning, which was Monday, June 1, that I would tend to the memorial as my form of protest, because I needed a way to heal,” Austin said.
From then on, Austin cared for the memorial each morning where Floyd took his last breath — the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in south Minneapolis. She picked up trash, straightened flowers and developed a “keen eye” to determine what items were offerings people had left behind.
‘Divine intervention’ leads to Floyd family
Austin worked under two main guidelines as she tended to George Floyd Square: everything is somebody’s offering, and people are more important than the memorial itself.
The memorial continued to grow as days and weeks passed. Austin wondered about the memorial’s future, so she reached out to Floyd’s aunt, Angela Harrelson, his closest living relative in the Twin Cities metro area. Floyd, 46, grew up in Texas, and moved to Minnesota several years before his death.
Harrelson said it was “divine intervention” that led her to connect with Austin. The initial Facebook message Austin sent to Harrelson landed in the spam folder. But something compelled Harrelson to check that folder.
Harrelson was intrigued that community members were preserving the memorial.
“I’m thinking, ‘What are they preserving?’ I just should go. I need to go see what they’re doing,’” she said.
Harrelson visited the Pillsbury House and Theatre, where Rise and Remember still stores offerings. In addition to artwork and protest signs, offerings left at the memorial include teddy bears, crystals, crucifixes and photographs.
Harrelson was in awe of what she saw, and how tenderly community members were caring for the offerings. She said they held offerings as if they were made of glass. The memorial’s caretakers call items left at George Floyd Square offerings, because they consider the space sacred.
Austin asked Harrelson what she wanted to do about all of the offerings: Did Floyd’s family want to keep them, donate them to museums or start their own nonprofit?
Floyd’s family decided on the latter, and Rise and Remember was born in 2020. Harrelson said it was important to keep all the artifacts together. The community started preserving the memorial; Harrelson feels it’s important that the effort continues to be led by the community.
“They’ve cared for the offerings, they’ve watched over the offerings, they have protected the offerings,” she said. “So why not start here and let’s build upon and see what we can do, and use it as a way to continue to tell the story and to fight against the resistance towards bettering equality.”
The nonprofit was originally called the George Floyd Global Memorial, but was renamed in 2024 to Rise and Remember after the festival the group organizes each year for the anniversary of Floyd’s murder. Harrelson co-chairs the group’s board, along with Paris Stevens, Floyd’s cousin. Harrelson, Stevens and Austin are all co-founders of Rise and Remember.
Harrelson said it was a difficult starting a nonprofit amid court proceedings for the officers charged with killing her nephew, and while grieving the loss of a loved one.
“It was very overwhelming, but at the same time, it was giving me purpose, and it all kind of melted together in the purpose for this fight against racism,” she said.
The organization preserves all the offerings left at the square, which Austin says are extensions of people’s voices in the fight against racial injustice.
“There’s something powerful in the memorial offerings, in that people offer what they truly believe to be right, true and just in a moment of urgency — the first thing that came to their minds, their heart, is what they offered, whether it be a protest sign, whether it be a piece of art, and it’s full of love, it’s full of energy, it’s full of power,” she said. “George Floyd Square, all of it is an offering.”
The offerings are part of history and it’s essential that they be preserved, Harrleson said, otherwise that history will be erased and forgotten.
“These are all the offerings that tell the story that happened, when they started in 2020 and beyond, and we’ve got to continue to preserve those stories,” she said.
Conserving the memorial
Later in 2020, Austin met Maggie Hill-Kipling, who had moved about a block away from George Floyd Square about a month before Floyd was killed.
Hill-Kipling is an arts conservator, but in 2020, she was feeling burnt out from the craft. She decided to pursue a degree in public health instead. Then Floyd was killed, and the memorial was growing with art near her home. She met Austin through a neighbor, and began to help preserve offerings left at the square.
The work renewed her passion for art conservation, and instilled a sense of purpose and community.
“I was just like, ‘This is a service. I have a thing that I can do that is useful in this, in this movement, in this time,’” Hill-Kipling said. “And I was just so grateful to have something worth something.”
Austin said they leave offerings at the memorial for as long as possible. Items are only removed when it’s no longer safe for them to remain at the site.
The summer of 2020 was particularly wet, with lots of rain. A focus for the group was preserving artwork that had been damaged by rain, and preventing mold from destroying them. Minnesota’s harsh seasons can make art conservation more difficult.
It’s essential, Austin and Hill-Kipling said, to save everything from the memorial.
“It is representative of what has happened throughout this country for decades and decades and hundreds of years, really,” Hill-Kipling said. “And it can’t be forgotten. It can’t be paved over. It can’t have a statue put up, and then everybody kind of forgets about it.”
Hill-Kipling now runs her own art conservation company, Twin Cities Art Care. She also helps Rise and Remember with art conservation when needed. As the years go by, that happens less frequently.
“They have all the expertise now,” she said of Rise and Remember.
Over the years, some people have said that the city needs to move forward. Austin and some community members want to turn George Floyd Square back into a pedestrian-only space to preserve the memorial and the sacredness of the space.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and some city leaders want the square to remain open to vehicle traffic. The City Council voted earlier this year to table that plan so city staff could further research a pedestrian mall. Frey vetoed that vote, which the council later overrode. The square’s future remains up in the air pending a city study on the pedestrian mall.
Frey and some community members have said that the city needs to move forward with a plan for the square now. Austin and other community members say they don’t feel that urgency, and want the city to take the time to get it right.
“That narrative about moving on is rooted in a racialized narrative that does not actually bring us closer to racial equity and racial justice,” she said. “That narrative gets us closer to erasure of story, erasure of history, erasure of accountability, than it gets us closer to equity and justice. And people have bought into that narrative.”
Pilgrimages
People from across the world visit George Floyd Square to pay their respects and learn more about what happened. Rise and Remember started informally facilitating visits to the square in 2020, and later created an official pilgrimage program.
Kia Bible is a pilgrimage leader for Rise and Remember, and said it’s frustrating to see some people treat the square like a tourist destination or photo opportunity. She said it’s triggering to see reporters come with their cameras to use the square as a backdrop and quickly leave. She said the pilgrimages, which she started leading in 2022, are a meaningful way for people to reflect on why they’re visiting the space, and learn more about the history of George Floyd Square and the offerings.
The pilgrimages are led by guides who are community members and have been involved in the fight for racial justice. The guides are entrepreneurs within the community, and Rise and Remember supports them with training and resources for their own businesses.
“It also allowed for us an opportunity, as the people who have been boots on the ground and seeing everything from before to the middle to now, because it ain’t the end, to navigate that with pride and confidence and do it collectively as a community,” Bible said of the pilgrimages.
The pilgrimage journeys don’t have a set cost, but Rise and Remember suggests that participants donate to the organization to keep the service running. Inquiries can be made at Rise and Remember’s website.
Bible also co-founded 612 MASH, a nonprofit that began in 2020 to provide medical care to participants in protests that followed Floyd’s murder. She treated people who had been severely tear gassed, and protestors whose skin was torn apart by rubber bullets fired by Minneapolis police.
Skills she gained as a mother, such as how to patch up a wound and how to help someone hydrate after becoming overheated, shot her into a leadership position in her community.
“I was just a regular, average Joe community member that just took the initiative, and little did I know my community was looking at me as a leader,” she said. “And that for me was extremely hard, and still even now is extremely hard.”
Plans for the future
Rise and Remember works out of a room at Pillsbury House and Theatre, a few blocks away from the square, which is filled with stacks of artwork. Protest signs made of cardboard and large colorful art pieces are piled together on metal carts.
Thousands of items have accumulated over the past five years. Harrelson said the group hopes to have its own museum one day.
The organization plans to create what it believes would be the country’s first art conservation center that focuses on protest art. Austin also hopes to create a space for more young Black people to enter the field of cultural heritage preservation.
Rise and Remember has also applied to own the developmental rights for the People’s Way, a former Speedway gas station across the street from where Floyd was murdered. The city is set to decide soon who will receive the rights to develop the site.
Rise and Remember wants to turn the space into a memorial garden, which Austin believes could be built fairly quickly, to give community members a peaceful place to reflect and connect with the Earth.
“We should put it to use, but put it to use for the community and not for politics, and Rise and Remember understands that,” Bible said.
Today, Austin lives in her childhood home a few blocks away from the square. Her brother purchased the house next door, and is a founding member of the band, Brass Solidarity, which plays music in the square weekly.
Growing up, she never thought she would put down roots in Minnesota. But she hasn’t looked back after buying that one-way ticket five years ago. She can’t know for sure what the future will hold, and tries to focus on the present.
The work isn’t easy, but it’s filled Austin with a sense of purpose.
“Five years later, I still believe everything that I believed then, and everything that I was about then, I’m still about now,” she said. “That hasn’t changed, and I just feel more than anything reinvigorated for the work that I do.”
