The racial justice movement after George Floyd

An interview with BLM Minnesota’s Trahern Crews

There has been a great deal of change in the racial justice movement in Minnesota in the past decade, following the murder of George Floyd three years ago.

Trahern Crews, who founded Black Lives Matter Minnesota (BLM MN) in the mid-2010s, said he started receiving calls “from people who didn’t really protest” the day after Floyd’s murder. He immediately began organizing, starting with a protest at 38^th and Chicago, the site of the killing, which later became known as George Floyd Square (GFS).

Crews called the massive scale of the George Floyd protests “hard to manage.” While the group had previously made national headlines with protests after the police slaying of Marcus Golden in 2015, Crews estimates somewhere between 15 to 26 million people participated nationwide in the protests following Floyd’s death.

“Even today, there’s messages still coming up from 2020 that we’re just now able to respond to,” Crews said. “Nothing could prepare you for something of that magnitude.”

Crews said that public support has increased for BLM since the protests, remaining above 50 percent and peaking at around 75 percent. He also noted that a Pew Research poll placed the BLM national organization at the top of the list of organizations that Black Americans saw as helping them most in recent years. He believes that BLM MN has “created an appetite for social justice in Minnesota.”

Toshira Garraway Allen, who works closely with Crews, also said support has risen for the racial justice movement since the murder of Floyd. 

“Since the uprise and the killing of George Floyd, I feel that our fellow community members are listening more and have begun to believe our families and community a little bit more when we say that we have been brutalized and hurt by law enforcement,” Garraway Allen said. “The politicians and people sitting in seats of authority still have a lot of work to do with building relationships with our community and impacted families.”

Three years on, Crews said tactics have changed. Many who were active in the protest movement have switched their venue from the streets to the legislative chamber. Black Lives Matter MN activists have also broadened their focus on what issues they fight for.

“I think the focus isn’t just police brutality. Now, it’s police brutality and economic justice, and also dealing with what’s happening inside the jails and prisons too,” Crews said.

He said there have been some successes, although he believes a lot of things still need to change on a legislative level. Some of the changes pushed for by BLM MN that were implemented included a permanent reparations commission in St. Paul, the banning of no-knock warrants in Minneapolis, and the Hardel Sherrell Act, which created dedicated standards for physical and mental health care and death investigations in Minnesota prisons.

Crews called Minneapolis’s consent decree, a court-enforceable order that will require institutional changes to take place in the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), one of the most important changes that the racial justice movement has won.

Black Lives Matter MN is still fighting for other changes. The group wants to see St. Paul’s reparations commission scaled to the state level. The group also wants to see an end to qualified immunity and require police officers to carry professional insurance. Crews said the current primary goals of the group are “to act on police brutality and the legacy of slavery.

“We’re glad we’re pushing the needle on these issues, but we want to see more changes happen,” Crews said. “Especially when we have progressive governments like we do here in Minnesota with the governor, the House, and the Senate being controlled by the DFL.”

Crews criticized recent moves by Democrats—at both the state and federal level—to give more money to law enforcement. He said the extra money spent on law enforcement in Minnesota in 2023 should have been spent on closing the racial wealth gap instead.

“In 2020, the Democrats rode into office off the BLM movement and off the energy from Black Lives Matter,” Crews said. “In 2024 going forward, we want to see some serious changes as it pertains to police brutality.”

“There has to be an acknowledgment of the hurt and harm that has been done at the hands of law enforcement here in the state of Minnesota,” Garraway Allen said. “People in our community are hurting and traumatized by what happened to George Floyd and to many other human beings before and after George Floyd.”