Minneapolis’s Progressive Image Burns in Its Streets
The last time that Minneapolis burned like this was July 1967. For three nights, dozens of buildings and businesses along Plymouth Avenue, a commercial strip on the city’s predominantly African-American North Side, were vandalized, looted and torched. Accounts differ as to what sparked the violence then. But there was no doubt about the source of the tinder. Black residents of Minneapolis had faced decades of discriminatory policing, racist housing policies and difficult employment conditions. Only the arrival of 600 National Guard troops stopped the violence.
Fifty-three years later, the death of George Floyd and the riotous aftermath is a brutal reminder to Minneapolis that it was only quelled, never extinguished. The range of grievances and frustrations — the ever-accumulating tinder — has only grown. Saturday morning, as I drove a two-mile stretch of Lake Street, the heart of the unrest, the...