It’s as if the Plymouth Ave riots did not end in 1967 and the George Floyd protests did not start in 2020. It’s as if Minneapolis did not move forward in space-time, just around and back.
Like many entities over North, the Northside Residents Redevelopment Council (NRRC) does a great job of documenting and celebrating North Minneapolis’ rich history and longtime residents. Across the bottom of Page 4 and 5 in the NRRC’s October 2024 brochure, a black-and-white image of a store front with the header “I Reminisce…” caught my attention. I went on to read a brief yet beautiful reflection written by community member Valerie Watson titled “A Simpler Time” … until the Plymouth Ave riots, that is.
What Miss Watson described was beautiful: a Northside where White Jewish residents and Black residents lived harmoniously, local kids walked to local schools, and local businesses made good food and other essential resources easily accessible.
What was otherwise a heartwarming anecdote took a turn with the penultimate sentence: “As the neighborhood composition changed and the riots on Plymouth Avenue on July 21, 1967 [sic], the businesses that hadn’t already closed left and Plymouth Avenue has never been the same.”
What happened on Plymouth Avenue?
How The 1967 Plymouth Avenue Riots Shaped Today’s North Minneapolis
MNopedia, an online encyclopedia curated by the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), describes the events Miss Watson referred to as “Civil Unrest on Plymouth Ave.” As editor of ATC MSP and a transplant to the Northside, this was my first exposure to the Plymouth Ave riots of 1967 in my five years as a Northside resident and two decades as a Twin Cities local. The more I read about the riots, the more my visualization of the events bled into my lived experience of North Minneapolis from the murder of George Floyd to the time of this publication.
As anti-Jewish sentiment died down after World War II, Jewish Northsiders began seeing more socioeconomic opportunities than their Black neighbors. Coinciding with the peak of the US Civil Rights Movement, Black Northsiders in the 1960s grew tried of empty promises from local politicians to help them out of the race-based traps they had been ensnared in for decades.
Growing frustration with a lack of solutions to injustices such as racial housing covenants and police brutality resulted in Black Northsiders violently protesting discrimination by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and local Jewish business owners. Between July 19 and 21, 1967, riots on Plymouth Avenue resulted in 18 fires, 36 arrests (including Black children and at least four White people), and three shootings. For a week starting on July 20, between 150 and 200 National Guard troops were stationed on Plymouth Avenue at all times in round-the-clock shifts. Surprisingly, no fatalities from the three-day period were recorded.
Miss Watson’s brief story plus a little reading about the Plymouth Ave riots makes for a seamless blend between memories of sepia-filtered Civil Rights Era videos, Instagram Reels of burning buildings around Minneapolis, and armed National Guard members at the Penn and Broadway Ave intersection shortly before the Derek Chauvin verdict was announced in April of 2021.
It’s as if the Plymouth Ave riots did not end in 1967 and the George Floyd protests did not start in 2020. It’s as if Minneapolis did not move forward in space-time, just around and back.
While Miss Watson saw Jewish-owned businesses leave the Northside after the Plymouth Ave riots, I saw Walgreen’s and Aldi leave as they quickly became surrounded by vacant commercial properties.
The North Minneapolis food desert of 2025 is a far cry from the North Minneapolis described in the NRRC anecdote pre-1967. Harmony between Jewish and Black Minnesotans has also vanished as Jewish Northsiders post-WWII quickly became residents of nearby St. Louis Park (SLP), a suburb that allowed Jewish property ownership despite sustained anti-Jewish sentiment from other residents. SLP had a notable Jewish community by the 1950s while the first Black family in SLP, the Lewis family, arrived in 1952 and were promptly forced out of the city in the same year due to racist threats.
The violent summer of 1967 was not the real story, just an exclamation point to the story that was already written — the planned starvation of Black people in North Minneapolis.
***
Nearly 60 years after the Plymouth Ave riots, North Minneapolis is on the verge of no longer being Black. Left barren, the community is being eaten up by commercial developments (e.g. Upper Harbor Terminal) and upwardly-mobile young adults looking for the next trendy neighborhood. Current Black residents have had plenty to say about it for a long time, but it does not seem to matter. It has never seemed to matter.
To those bothered by this quiet recycling of history, maybe there is comfort in seeing the pattern. Maybe there is despair. Like movie reboots and short-form video content, maybe we just enjoy loops. But there were SLP residents and leaders that stood up for the Lewis family. And there were Jewish Northsiders who protested with their Black neighbors in that hot 1967 summer. And just about every Minnesotan, American, and human with an internet connection believed something needed to change after watching George Floyd’s murder and surviving COVID-19. Honest and collective reflection on the lack of change thus far seems to be a good first step.
