June 22, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Luke Mogelson’s “The Uprising,” a totally immersive account of the riots in Minneapolis protesting George Floyd’s death. It puts us squarely there at the intersection of Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue where Floyd was killed:

Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—“fight back,” “stay woke”—covered the street. Volunteers passed out food and water; there was barbecue, music, tailgating. A wide ring of flowers and candles circumscribed the intersection, delineating a kind of magic circle. Later that day, within the circle, a group of indigenous women would perform the Jingle Dress Dance—a healing ritual created by members of the Ojibwe tribe during the influenza pandemic of 1918.

It puts us there on the night Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station was torched:

Smoke billowed from the ground floor, and people were roaming the hazy second floor, tossing through the windows anything not bolted down: documents, folders, phones. A nearby post office was also ablaze. In the middle of the intersection, an upside-down mail truck burned. A second mail truck suddenly appeared and crashed head-on into the flaming steel. The driver jumped out, and people cheered. Cars spun doughnuts, motorcycles popped wheelies, fireworks and gunshots punctuated the mayhem; a liquor store had been broken into, then burned down, and alcohol circulated among the crowd. People in ski masks and bandannas wielded hammers and baseball bats.

It puts us there amongst a group of marchers as police close in on them, “firing stun grenades and rubber bullets”:

As the officers converged on us, Deondre Moore, a twenty-five-year-old African-American from Houston—George Floyd’s home town—held his arms high and pleaded, “Don’t shoot! Let us leave!” A few minutes later, a rubber bullet struck Moore squarely in the chest. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain. “I thought it was a real bullet,” he later told me. The protesters were commanded to lie on their stomachs with their hands behind their backs—the same position as the silhouette painted on the pavement outside the Cup Foods. As National Guard units arrived in armored Humvees, the state troopers began zip-tying people by their wrists and leading them away. The protesters were surrounded by more than a hundred officers, troopers, deputies, and soldiers—almost all of whom were white.

Note that “converged on us” (my emphasis); Mogelson is among the protesters. That’s what I admire about his reporting. He’s a participant-observer, as he was in his brilliant “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), one of the great reporting pieces of the last decade.

In “The Uprising,” Mogelson talks to some of the protesters, gets to know them, marches with them, shares their perspectives. One such person, Simone Hunter, figures centrally in the piece. Hunter, “a short nineteen-year-old with red-rinsed hair,” “a fixture at Thirty-eighth and Chicago since George Floyd was killed,” shows immense courage and spirit in clashes with the police. At one point, Mogelson writes,

Hunter seemed less frightened than other protesters. Producing a Sharpie pen from her bag of supplies, she started writing the phone number of a local bail fund on people’s forearms. A young police officer, crouching behind his riot shield, trained his rubber-bullet gun on her and held it there. He looked terrified.

Hunter’s outrage is palpable. Her comment, “It’s not just about George Floyd. It’s about all the unseen shit, where we don’t have the video,” radiates off the page.

“The Uprising” is an extraordinary report from the epicentre of the fight against police brutality and systemic racism – one of the year’s best pieces.