Sheletta: I have a dream for 38th and Chicago

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of material from 11 contributing columnists, along with other commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

I’m a successful business owner because I’m a hustler. Every day I wake up searching for new partnerships to help me grow my media empire. Folks call me the hardest working woman in Minnesota.

So I’m baffled when someone sees a good deal but does nothing to close on it, leaving money on the table and ignoring the potential windfall right in front of them.

And it leads me to ask, how in the whole hell did the city of Minneapolis fumble the bag and not seize the opportunity sitting at the corner of 38th and Chicago?

Our leaders can’t be timid when we need them to be tenacious because millions of dollars that should be flowing into that south Minneapolis neighborhood are flying away like birds heading south to escape the frigid Minnesota winter.

Right now, when visitors go to the site, all they can do now is pray, take a selfie and leave. There’s no reason to stay longer than 10 minutes and no reason to spend $10.

Why has George Floyd Square not been transformed into a memorial of that moment in time when it became the birthplace of the modern-day civil rights movement? It’s already a destination.

People want to see for themselves the place they’ve seen through cellphone video captured by a courageous Minneapolis teenager. This is the place that sparked protests around the world, a shift in the axis of the earth so profound that both Mitt Romney and Flava Flav marched for the same cause.

Five years later, sadly, George Floyd Square looks like it did when Floyd was still alive. Ain’t much changed since the day he screamed for his momma while he lay dying with Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck. There’s nothing to buy, see or learn from.

Like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream for America, I have a dream for George Floyd Square.

Envision it: Buses of schoolchildren, scholars and families interested in learning more would walk through Cup Foods, frozen in time from May 25, 2020, with a statue of Mr. Floyd inside at the register.

They could cross the street to visit a new onsite museum to learn what happened that fateful day and the movement it inspired. They could gain context about Minnesota’s history of redlining and discrimination while learning about our homegrown civil rights heroes: Nellie Stone Johnson, Josie Johnson, Roy Wilkins and Mahmoud El-Kati.

They would view art interpreting George Floyd’s murder in a gallery named after Gordon Parks. They could visit a bookstore and pick up a copy of “A Walk to the Store,” the children’s book I coauthored with Judeah Reynolds, the little girl wearing the “LOVE” shirt who watched Floyd die, then stop for refreshments at a cafe.

Can’t you just see it? Small businesses hiring nearby residents to pour coffee, stock shelves and ring up purchases. From janitors and parking lot attendants to tour guides and curators, new jobs will create prosperity across generations and income levels. The whole neighborhood taken from blight to light by wise city planning and infrastructure.

Music lovers, already coming to hear the Minneapolis Sound at Paisley Park, First Avenue or The Dakota, could add a pit stop to learn more about our city.

But it doesn’t look like it’ll happen because Minneapolis City Council members’ feet are as frozen as a Minnesota lake. They put a city redesign plan on ice, tabling that development despite years of community engagement work with residents and existing businesses eager to see the area revitalized.

At this rate, the former police officer in prison for murdering Floyd will be out of jail and reporting to his parole officer before the council gets the guts to make something happen here.

When people hear me pumping up the positives and possibilities of this project, they challenge me. “Should we really be profiting off the death of a Black man?” they ask.

To which I always clap back, “Have you been to the Lorraine Motel?”

Since they’re trying to remove our stories from textbooks, let me explain the significance of the Lorraine Motel. It’s where King stayed when he visited Memphis to support striking sanitation workers in 1968. Today, a wreath hangs on the balcony in front Room 306, the exact place where King was standing when an assassin’s bullet ended his life.

His room has been preserved as he left it, to be observed through the doorway.

The former motel has been converted to a National Civil Rights Museum, attracting a quarter million visitors a year. In addition to exhibits and galleries, this landmark hosts speakers and events that teach —not just in February, but every day of the year.

Tourists drawn to Memphis to make a pilgrimage to the site also visit the Stax Museum of American Soul Music or Beale Street, taking in the sights and sounds of this Tennessee town.

Throughout the Deep South, communities are preserving places where the historic and sometimes horrific moments of the Civil Rights Movement played out. Tourists want to see exactly where the lunch counter sit-ins, church bombings, marches and lynchings happened.

We learn from pain.

George Floyd Square is a painful part of our city’s history. But if enhanced with infrastructure, it can be transformed into a thriving community. It can become a place where we acknowledge what’s gone wrong in our city and how we’ve learned from it. We can give people a place to reflect in a meaningful way as we all move forward, together.

It appears the council folks have roots in Missouri, which means I need to show them what executing an ambitious plan looks like. I’m inviting them and the mayor to join me on a little field trip down the Mississippi River to Memphis. Let’s talk to the tourism bureau there and hear about the benefits of the Lorraine Motel and the millions of dollars it pours into that city every year.

Otherwise, we will mark the ten-year anniversary of what happened in George Floyd Square with locals still shooting dice behind the Cup Foods, a busted up broken-down gas station across the street that doesn’t have gas and a roundabout that is about as functional as a divorced couple on Valentine’s Day.

As my dearly departed grandmother, Mary A. Smith, used to say if someone was taking too long to use the restroom, “Pee or get off the pot.”

The urgency is real and the folks in charge need to stop being too damn scared to decide what to do with 38th and Chicago. If the city of Minneapolis doesn’t step up and set up a memorial for George Floyd like what Memphis did to honor King, they need to get out of the way and let someone else get it done.

Because the way they’re erasing our stories from the history books, in another five years, nobody will even know who George Floyd was or the significance of his death.