MINNEAPOLIS — At the corner of East 38th and Chicago, the Minnesota Timberwolves are not front of mind.
The people who come here, 10 minutes or so from downtown, where the city’s NBA team is in the midst of a renaissance, don’t bring up Anthony Edwards or the unceasing comparisons of him to Michael Jordan. They don’t seem to care much about Rudy Gobert winning his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award, or Naz Reid getting his first Sixth Man of the Year award. They have come, this day — from Michigan and Oregon and Colorado and California and New York and Ghana — to see the spot where George Floyd was murdered, in front of the Cup Foods store, and how they reconcile what that means to them.
They are, all of them, quiet, contemplative, nervous. Black, White, Latino, male and female, on foot or bikes; it doesn’t matter. They don’t know where to stand or where they should walk or what they should say. Knowing what happened here, they seem not to want to trespass on the grounds.
An Asian woman has brought flowers. She is crying.
“Would you like a hug?” asks Bridgett Floyd, George Floyd’s younger sister, in town last weekend. They embrace.
East 38th and Chicago is in the heart of what people in this neighborhood call “The Free State of George Floyd,”…
