Siblings reflect on 5 years of serving George Floyd Square and south Minneapolis
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Listen to a nearly half-hour conversation with the siblings by clicking the play button above.
The murder of George Floyd resonated across the world. Undoubtedly, however, the sharpest impact was felt closest to the epicenter, the neighborhood around 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis where then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, killing him.
There, residents became witnesses to and leaders of a global movement for Black lives.
In the aftermath of May 25, 2020, activists transformed the intersection into a memorial and ongoing site of protest now called George Floyd Square. A closed Speedway gas station was re-christened the People’s Way. A wooden raised fist was erected at a makeshift roundabout. Cardboard and plastic headstones were planted nearby to honor other Black people killed by police.
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The area became a pilgrimage destination and a space for radical organizing — home to daily meetings for neighbors, weekly jam sessions, mutual aid and annual festivities to honor its origins.
Sustaining that work has not been easy, amid controversy around the square’s future.
MPR News re-connected with three people — siblings — who have been organizing around George Floyd Square since its start.
Jeanelle Austin is lead caretaker for the memorial at George Floyd Square and the executive director of the nonprofit preserving offerings left there, called Rise and Remember.
Theodore “Butchy” Austin is a musician who helped start activist band Brass Solidarity and has led mutual aid efforts around 38th & Chicago.
Jeanette Rupert is an ICU nurse, minister and co-founder of the community medicine nonprofit, 612 MASH, short for Minneapolis All Shall Heal, an effort to provide medical care and education in the neighborhood.
They’re just a few in a large family that has lived in the neighborhood for decades and are each giving back in different ways. They told MPR News more about what drives their family’s involvement and how the events of 2020 continue to impact their lives.
Bringing their gifts to the square
Butchy credits their family’s activism to an upbringing in church. They grew up attending Evangelist Crusaders Church on 43rd Street and Fourth Avenue. Their parents, Reverend Judy Austin and the late Pastor Ted Austin, modeled serving their community in addition to full-time work.
And it was their mother that called on them to rise to the occasion in May 2020.
Jeanette said the day after George Floyd was killed, she and most of her six siblings gathered at their childhood home in south Minneapolis near 38th and Chicago, the house her parents had built decades prior and where their family still lives, to figure out what to do.
That day, she recalls feeling paralyzed. It was surreal. Helicopters were swirling overhead and hundreds of people were flocking to their neighborhood.
Their mom then offered a message of hope: “You guys were raised for such a time as this. You give your gifts to the community. Each and every one of you have unique gifts, and I want to encourage you, this is not the time to sit here in sorrow, but to stand up and to serve your community in ways that's going to be comforting and healing,” recounted Jeanette.
Later, one sister told Jeanette to consider volunteering at a medical tent that had popped up at the intersection. Others texted Jeanelle, who had experience in community organizing and protest and was living in Texas at the time, to come back home to help. Their younger siblings helped gather groceries and other needed items for people in need.
After their father passed away in 2019, Butchy moved next door to the family home with his wife and four kids. He had extra time to volunteer because his work in corporate sales slowed down and became remote as result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He didn’t necessarily think he had a gift but was inspired to serve anyway by a Scripture in the Book of James encouraging Christians to care for “orphans and widows in their distress.”
He went to the square with a cooler of beverages to pass out. He carried his trumpet strapped over his shoulder, though he hadn’t really played in over a decade and didn’t know what he’d do with it. That was until Jeanette suggested he learn a song to play at a rally. His first experience went well and encouraged him to continue performing publicly. Eventually, he met other musicians interested in street band activism and they formed Brass Solidarity in 2021.
The band has played together every Monday without pause since and has grown to include about 100 members of all skill levels.
“We didn’t have a purpose outside of we just wanted to bring healing and joy to a community that was impacted by the murder of George Floyd and grow in our values, grow in our purpose, grow in our mission and use our sound as more of a sonic occupation going forward,” said Butchy.
“We turned nobody away,” he added. “We just opened it up to whoever wants to align with our mission and our values around dismantling white supremacy, empowering BIPOC communities, bringing joy, bringing healing, bringing love, using music to do that.”
He still feels “imposter syndrome” sometimes because he isn’t a more skilled musician but hearing from others about the impact of Brass Solidarity, he’s embracing not being perfect.
Likewise, Jeanette said she learned to feel comfortable being in the public eye as a nurse, something she previously wasn’t open about either. She also says she grew in her ministry, coming to support families of victims of police violence, and picked up the nickname “Reverend Nurse.”
Jeanelle had bought a one-way ticket home, expecting a short stay, but after weeks of cleaning and helping out at the square, she moved back to Minneapolis in 2020 and fully committed to serving there.
5 years in George Floyd Square
“We haven’t forgotten. We’re still kicking. We’re still going. We don’t get as much media attention, but we got to keep it going,” said Butchy.
In the last five years, COVID-19 restrictions have eased. The city has re-opened 38th & Chicago to vehicle traffic. The wave towards racial justice and diversity initiatives has reversed under the second Trump administration. But activists at George Floyd Square still stand behind their 24 demands created in 2020 and hope to see them all one day met.
“People have this desire to go back to normal, but I live in a community where there’s no such thing as normal anymore,” Butchy said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to thrive and still demand justice and still take care of people.”
They spoke to the challenges of continuing to organize around the space over the years.
For one, people still have different ideas of what should happen at the intersection and beyond for justice in the murder of George Floyd.
Butchy said Brass Solidarity wasn’t very well received when it first started with their weekly “sonic occupation,” though people have since warmed up to it.
“A lot of Black people, we have different ideas of liberation and you have to be able to hold space for that,” said Jeanelle. “People wanted all of the energy of the social movement to move in the direction of their idea of liberation and so that created friction, that created tension.”
She said that the way media descended on Minneapolis and resources poured into the area from around the world in 2020 brewed distrust and resentment for some.
“People are wondering, ‘well, how come these resources aren’t coming to me?’ and you’re just navigating just layers and layers of trauma,” she said.
“So it’s not just the trauma of the lynching of a Black body in your neighborhood, it’s the trauma of systemic racism that has perpetually already existed in your neighborhood.”
Jeanelle also said George Floyd Square is meant to center Black people and protest, but these days most volunteers and visitors are white, so some Black people feel tokenized when they're there. Other Black people have told her it’s too hard to show up to the site of a traumatic event.
Over 80 percent of Minnesotans are white “and I can’t control that. I can’t control white people showing up,” she said.
“That’s always been a challenge for us,” she said. “How do we create spaces that are for Black healing, that are for the Black community, that are for Black love and culture, without having the white gaze and without having it be consumed by whiteness?”
Trauma in protest
Community organizing has also been a stressor for each sibling and their families.
Jeanelle was already burnt out from protesting for Black lives when Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in May 2020.
She attended her first march in 2012 for 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot by a neighborhood watchman in Florida, and had continued to march for other Black people killed in high-profile cases: Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Reginald Thomas Jr., Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
Austin started organizing her own protests while working at a theological seminary in Pasadena, Calif. From there, she began to network with other activists and learn the work of community organizing. But activism would eventually drain her so much that in 2018, she would quit her job, move to Texas and just sleep for six months.
She recalled protests in California and in Minneapolis where she watched in terror as people drove their vehicles straight into a crowd of demonstrators.
She started a racial justice leadership company in 2019 to research how activism could be sustainable, and on returning to Minneapolis, she chose to become a memorial caretaker as her form of protest to avoid further burnout. But she said it was only this year that she decided to focus on her own health, resetting to move forward in a balanced way.
“I haven’t really had hobbies in like five years,” she said.
She’s been running on fumes. She said the annual Rise & Remember Festival consumes most of her energy. She also runs a summer internship program to get more Black and brown youth into the cultural heritage preservation industry.
She sees herself as among “stewards of the collective memory” and said it comes with a weight.
“You endure people’s grief coming out sideways, people’s trauma coming out sideways. All the trauma anniversaries that take place. All the frustration that people have around economics and capitalism and money and power,” said Jeanelle. “And it’s hard. It’s worrisome, trying to encourage people who are ready to throw in the towel, but you’re like, not yet.”
Butchy said it’s only in the last six months that he’s become intentional about therapy and acknowledging he’s not OK. He said years of being immersed in the rhetoric, pain and anger of other activists had strained his relationships with his children and his wife.
He realized he had been distancing himself from white friends and relatives, even though they had been good allies.
“I developed some unhealthy and toxic ideas and perceptions around white people and I let stuff fester to the point where it became less about supporting the Black community and more about my frustration with white people and associating their whiteness with my pain and my depression,” said Butchy. “I regret not getting healing in that sooner or not being aware that there need to be boundaries as far as how deep into my activism I got.”
Jeanette said being so involved came at the cost of time, peace of mind and self-care for her. She also received backlash from people at her church who disagreed with her ministry on the streets. She credits her ability to juggle so much to support from her husband.
A turning point in her community involvement was when her daughter experienced an emergency in 2023. Jeanette then decided to step back from 612 MASH and other volunteer work to focus on her children.
“It was important for me that my family is healthy and whole,” she said. “We as activists have to remember that we have to take care of ourselves, and our ministry is first to our family before we serve everyone else.”
Their visions for the future
Despite the challenges and pain the past five years have brought, the siblings still have a sense of optimism for the future.
Jeanelle is hoping to hire more staff for Rise and Remember soon — right now she is the nonprofit’s sole full-time employee. Organizers also have a bid out to acquire the People’s Way, the former gas station at 38th & Chicago turned community space that the city currently owns.
Jeanette, despite stepping back from some roles, still responds to calls from people seeking medical help and continues to support families whose relatives were killed by police.
However, now she said her work is “more heightened and more focused.” She has pivoted to working more with educational institutions with hopes of ensuring large-scale change towards health equity and has doubled down on faith leadership.
In March, after years of both serving in youth ministry, she and her husband also started a church in their living room focused on meeting people where they’re at, not tied to traditional physical space.
“I honestly believe that the pandemic, that’s where I truly as an individual grew. That my calling is to help people heal, not just naturally as my license as a nurse, but also as a minister, to help people heal mind, body, soul and spirit,” she said.
Butchy said he’s met and connected with more people in the last five years than he had in the 15 or 20 years prior, building a strong network around 38th & Chicago.
“A lot of us knew each other, but we didn't bond in a way that we were forced to bond in the wake of the uprising, in the wake of having military tanks rolling down your street and Black Hawk helicopters circling your home or media converging on your property, and white supremacists and other antagonists and instigators threatening your community,” said Butchy.
“Community is really unique and it's really strong here,” said Jeanette, speaking about her family’s neighborhood. “I mean, you need a cup of sugar? Trust me, five, six people will be like, ‘I got you.’ If your tire breaks down, you can reach out and somebody will show up.”
Each sibling talked about the power of community — in transforming the narrative of danger or disunity around 38th & Chicago, in supporting each other, in working towards justice together, though it still feels like a lofty goal.
“You inch towards what looks like justice and then you find that there's another killing or another Black body on the ground,” said Jeanette. “What does justice look like? Because I feel like that ‘one step forward, two steps back.’”
“The baseline work is just bringing imagination back to our people, getting people to be able to dream again,” said Jeanelle.
But, more so in these years than ever, they have appreciated drawing support and inspiration from family.
“It's a blessing to be in close proximity to each other and be able to process with each other our highs and our lows as we navigate this work of racial justice, racial healing, community,” said Butchy.
