It’s 8 a.m. As usual, Marcia Howard is at George Floyd Square for the morning meeting.
A group of eight neighbors has gathered at the People’s Way, a one-time Speedway gas station where they sip coffee on benches around empty gas pumps, as Howard delivers updates. Labor unions are planning rallies for May Day; a neighbor needs help moving bins out of her house; and the group will be repainting the long list of names of people around the country who were killed by police. The list, known as the Mourning Passage, is painted down the middle of Chicago Avenue S.
Weather and wear take a toll on the Mourning Passage, so it needs to be renewed every year. “And the one thing that we’re determined is that those names shall remain, at least as long as we are occupying GFS,” Howard said.
Five years after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd at this intersection, the barricades and the protests that drew thousands of people are gone. But a small group of people still comes together twice a day at the former gas station.
They provide updates on protests and conversations with city officials. They discuss mutual aid plans to help neighbors who need housing or clothing. They organize neighborhood cleanups, help neighbors move, plant flowers and provide vegetable seedlings to neighbors. And they continue to advocate for the remaining demands that protesters developed in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, including ending qualified immunity for police officers, reopening investigations into the deaths of other people killed by police, and support for housing and local businesses.
Howard, a neighborhood high school teacher-turned-organizer, facilitates the meetings. But the group has no leader, and Howard resists any attempt to paint her as one. “I’m just Ms. Howard the teacher,” she said. “We just have a commitment to making sure that we’re here for the pursuit of justice and the protection of this community, and we’re not willing to trade one for the other.”
Since Floyd’s murder, Howard, who’s now the president of the Minneapolis teachers union, has been thrust into activism in a way she never had before.
In spring 2020, Howard was a 10th-grade English teacher at Roosevelt High School, teaching online from her front porch in the early days of the COVID pandemic. At the time, she recalls, she was social distancing and running a “cottage core” Instagram account, perfecting a gluten- and dairy-free tart and trying to capture the perfect photo of lilacs.
“Before the lynching of George Floyd, my social media was just me exercising or wearing A-line skirts and kitten heels, and my experiments in cooking and home decor,” Howard recalled.
Howard, 51, grew up in Chicago and Little Rock. She joined the Marine Corps at 17 during the Persian Gulf War “to see the world,” she recalled. “I saw South Carolina and North Carolina.” She met her first husband, a Minnesotan, through the Marine Corps and at 21 moved to Minnesota with him. She enrolled in the University of Minnesota to study English and landed a teaching job at Roosevelt High School when she graduated. She and her husband bought a house about two miles from the high school, a block from the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue.
“I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood that I taught in,” she said. “I wanted to be able to see the students that I teach at the grocery store, on the street, in church. I believe in community schools.”
On Memorial Day 2020, she heard a “hullabaloo” from the corner. Then she saw a Snapchat video from her former student, Darnella Frazier.
Frazier, then a junior in high school, had taken her young cousin on a snack run to the corner store when she saw a police officer kneeling on a Black man’s neck in the street. She took out her cell phone and started filming, ultimately capturing images of the murder of George Floyd. The video she released on her personal social media quickly went viral.
Howard recalled feeling a “dulled disappointment” that police had killed a Black man yet again. “It’s the blunt edge of outrage of being the Black person,” she said. “It’s not sharp, but then it got honed with the press of flesh, with the scrape against tears.”
Floyd could have been her brother, father, or uncle, she said.
“People don’t understand when you kill just any old Black person, that’s what that means,” she said. “It could have been anybody, which means that could have been me.”
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As people started to gather at the site of Floyd’s death, Howard handed out masks to people walking past. By the end of the day Tuesday — the day after Floyd’s murder — she wanted to join her neighbors at the corner. “My fear of COVID was subsumed by my need to be with my people who were calling for justice,” she said.
As protests escalated, Howard told her students they had passed her class. She encouraged them to practice social distancing and seek justice. She made herself available for students who wanted to talk. But she knew she could not expect her students to focus on English class.
“The city was embroiled in this protest, and to think that we would be focusing on symbolism of ‘The Color Purple’ at that point was just insane,” she said.
Initially, Howard’s role was that of citizen journalist. Still wearing her A-line skirts and kitten heels, she shot images of the intersection, using them to pose a counternarrative to what she was hearing in mainstream media. When a rumor spread that the block was burning down, she panned the intersection with her camera to show a peaceful scene with no conflagration. When reports surfaced that gunshots had been fired, she asked the crowd whether they had heard gunshots. The crowd responded with a chorus of “No.”
“What we learned in that moment, with repercussions being felt today in 2025, is that the power of citizen journalism had the effect of nullifying corporate commercial media,” Howard said.
One night, Howard was walking home from the intersection where hundreds of people were gathering. As she left, she noticed a woman chastising a drunk young man for making too much noise in front of the home of a sleeping baby. It reminded Howard of her role at Roosevelt: the school dance chaperone gently chiding teen couples to “leave room for the Lord.”
That night from her house, Howard heard protests, revelry, police sirens, and “wails of despair” lasting through the night. She thought of the woman she’d seen asking the drunk man to quiet down for the baby.
“I thought to myself, ‘It’s hundreds of people outside, and I just saw that one sister that was the helper, the grown-up. And I can’t leave her to be the only one,’” Howard said. “I just committed that I would not leave any sister or brother out there alone to protect our neighborhood and protect our people. And that has been my commitment, not just that week, not just that year. It’s been for five years.”
After a week of protest that included the burning of the Third Precinct police station two and a half miles away, the National Guard cleared other parts of the city. But the occupation at George Floyd Square continued. The neighbors occupying the square asked residents and local business owners what justice would look like to them, eventually distilling a list of 24 demands: the conditions under which they would leave.
“I never left this block. I didn’t leave this block, frankly, for like, two years,” Howard said. “My protest is sitting my Black ass in one spot, not moving. I come from the South, and I come from sit-ins.”
But through the first summer, the weight of the occupation took a toll on her. As neighbors of varying ages, ethnicities, education levels and abilities came together to dream of a better world, Howard attempted to organize them for the long haul. But other people, whom Howard called “chaos agents,” came to cause problems at the square — like bringing alcohol for the purpose of giving it to “chemically vulnerable” people. Meanwhile, community members like Howard had assumed responsibility for providing basic public services to the neighborhood.
“We truly were an autonomous zone as the city was in distress,” Howard recalled. “We had no mail service, we had no ambulance service, we had no police service for quite a while.” Volunteers from the neighborhood — including Howard — intervened during domestic violence incidents. On one occasion, emergency personnel responding to a shooting showed up in riot gear. In the first two weeks, armored vehicles drove down the street, and Black Hawk helicopters flew overhead, a traumatic experience for Howard and her current husband, an Army veteran.
Howard had trained in the Marine Corps with military equipment to fight an enemy. “To see the apparatus of war on a residential street turned against citizens was the most surreal thing I have ever seen in my life,” she said. “It really showed me then that my people, then, are the enemy.”
Howard couldn’t eat or sleep. Since she was awake anyway, she volunteered for overnight shifts at George Floyd Square. She described a state of “hypervigilance” that caused her blood pressure to rise and eventually led her to suffer a stroke.
Howard decided to take the next year off from school, using accrued medical leave from more than two decades in Minneapolis Public Schools. After that leave ran out, her union paid her to be a community organizer at the square.
From George Floyd Square to a teacher strike
Howard sees a connection between her experiences in George Floyd Square and becoming president of her union. She leads the teacher chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators.
“My time at George Floyd Square really revealed to me how all of these struggles are interconnected, and how social justice, medical justice, financial, educational, all of these are connected,” she said.
During Minneapolis’ 2022 educator strike, Howard, who had by then returned to the classroom, found herself playing a leadership role. Greta Callahan, who was then the union president, asked her to lead strike lines and rallies while Callahan was negotiating with district officials. Howard did not know Callahan at the time, but Callahan had been committed to standing with her at George Floyd Square.
“I emphasized we had already marched for Jamar Clark, for Philando Castile,” Howard remembers telling the union. “We had marched for brown kids in cages and for Black lives. And it is part and parcel of the same fight that we march for public education.”
During the union elections that spring, Callahan asked Howard to run as her vice president, and they won. Two years later, when Callahan gave up her union leadership slot for an ultimately successful school board run, Howard ran for president.
“I was seeing the machinations in the square, and how it was replicated in our district,” she said. “All of it was to keep status quo, to keep people who should have been inheritors of educational justice — of the bounty, the abundance of the city — from getting it.”
Still, Howard is clear that she does not see her union leadership as a stepping stone to a career in activism — and that ultimately, she belongs in the classroom.
“Teaching is all I want to do, and all I ever wanted to do,” she said. “I am myself, my authentic self, the most when I am in front of other people’s children, because the act of teaching allows me, as an incredibly self-conscious person, to not give a crap about myself. Facilitating other people’s discovery is the best feeling in the world.”
Though she felt guilty about temporarily stepping away from the classroom, she took comfort in the support she received from her students.
“What has helped me smooth over some sharp guilty feelings is the knowledge that many of my students understood that being at George Floyd Square was education as well,” she said.
‘This is a beginning’
Five years later, the 24 demands remain, written in spray paint on pieces of plywood outside the People’s Way. Until those demands are met, Howard said, she will gather at the square morning and evening.
“I am waiting for a world beyond traditional policing,” Howard said. “There will always be a need for community safety, but policing as it exists in most cities is inherently structured in a way that is detrimental to Black and brown bodies and a cohesiveness to community.”
Lately, Howard has noticed something in the air. Neighbors are getting more active in the group chats again, planning potlucks, reactivating connections forged at George Floyd Square. “Every single executive order, every single indignity, every single outrageous activity that’s coming out from out East is a test of middle-class, frankly, white values,” Howard said. “We sense it in our bones that we’re at the beginning of a storm coming.”
In these dynamics, Howard sees “the dying gasp of racial capitalism.”
That means a culture based in dominance, exclusion, and superiority is fighting to survive, and something new is on the horizon, she said.
“I can’t wait for it to evolve where we’re something else,” she said. “And this is a beta test. This is a beginning. This is George Floyd Square, where we’re building the world beyond the world we live in every single day, at eight in the morning and seven at night since May 25, 2020. And we ain’t moving until we get something that looks like justice.”
