Minneapolis
Based on Wikipedia: Minneapolis
In the summer of 2020, a seventeen-year-old named Darnella Frazier pulled out her phone on a Minneapolis street corner and recorded something that would change the world. George Floyd, a Black man, was dying beneath the knee of a white police officer named Derek Chauvin, who pressed down on Floyd's neck and back for more than nine minutes. Frazier's video contradicted everything the police department initially claimed. Within days, Minneapolis was burning. Protesters overran and torched a police station. The New York Times reported that "over three nights, a five-mile stretch of Minneapolis sustained extraordinary damage." And from that footage, shot on an ordinary smartphone by a teenager, international rebellions erupted across the globe.
This is Minneapolis: a city of profound contradictions, where progressive politics coexist with some of the starkest racial disparities in America, where natural beauty masks a troubled history, and where the same falls that once powered the world's flour mills now stand as a monument to both industrial triumph and Indigenous displacement.
The Sacred Confluence
Long before Minneapolis existed as a city, the Dakota people had a name for the place where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet: Bdóte. In their creation stories, this confluence is where they emerged into the world. Unlike nearly every other Indigenous nation in North America, the Dakota have no migration traditions. They claim no other homeland. They simply came from here.
The Dakota shared this region with the Ojibwe, also known as the Chippewa, who arrived after the 1700s. Archaeological evidence confirms Dakota presence since at least 1000 A.D. For centuries, they lived around what they called Owámniyomni—a thundering waterfall that would later determine the fate of an entire city.
In 1680, a French cleric named Louis Hennepin became probably the first European to see Owámniyomni. He promptly renamed it the Falls of St. Anthony of Padua, after his patron saint. This act of renaming was a harbinger of everything to come.
Sixty Years of Dispossession
The story of how the United States seized all Dakota land and expelled them from their homeland spans just sixty years—a single lifetime in which an entire civilization was dismantled.
It began with Zebulon Pike in 1805. Pike negotiated a treaty purchasing a nine-square-mile strip of land along the Mississippi south of Saint Anthony Falls. This parcel, by grim coincidence, encompassed the sacred place of Dakota origin. The agreement stipulated that the U.S. would build a military fort and trading post, while the Dakota would retain their usufructuary rights—meaning they could still hunt, fish, and gather there.
In 1819, the U.S. Army constructed Fort Snelling. Its stated purpose was to redirect Native American trade away from British-Canadian traders and to prevent war between the Dakota and Ojibwe. But its deeper function was establishing American control over the region.
What followed was a grinding series of treaties. Under relentless pressure from U.S. officials, the Dakota ceded their land first to the east of the Mississippi, then to the west. Dakota leaders twice refused to sign subsequent treaties until they were paid what they were owed from previous ones. The federal government, for its part, rarely honored the terms of any agreement.
Then came the summer of 1862.
The Civil War had begun, and the annuity payments the U.S. owed the Dakota by treaty—money due in June—were late. The delay caused acute hunger. Facing starvation, a faction of the Dakota declared war in August and killed settlers.
The U.S. military response was led by Henry Sibley, a man with no prior military experience, commanding raw recruits and volunteer mounted troops from Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The war lasted six weeks in the Minnesota River valley. When it ended, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged after a trial so hasty it can only be called a kangaroo court. The army then force-marched 1,700 non-hostile Dakota—men, women, children, and elders—150 miles to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Residents of Minneapolis reportedly threatened more than once to attack the camp.
In 1863, the United States "abrogated and annulled" all treaties with the Dakota. Governor Alexander Ramsey called for their extermination. Most Dakota were exiled from Minnesota entirely.
The Mill City Rises
Even as the Dakota were being expelled, speculators were already staking claims. Franklin Steele grabbed the east bank of Saint Anthony Falls. John H. Stevens built a home on the west bank. And someone had to name the new settlement rising on Indigenous land.
Residents had divergent ideas. Charles Hoag proposed something clever: combining the Dakota word for water—mni—with the Greek word for city—polis. The hybrid stuck.
Minneapolis. Many Lakes Town in Greek-Dakota fusion. The city today still carries the Dakota name, though in their language it's Bde Óta Othúŋwe.
In 1856, the territorial legislature authorized Minneapolis as a town on the river's west bank. It incorporated as a city in 1867 and merged with St. Anthony across the river in 1872. But what truly built Minneapolis was power—specifically, the power of Saint Anthony Falls, the only natural waterfall on the entire Mississippi River.
Two industries rose nearly simultaneously: lumber and flour. Both depended on the falls' energy. And for about fifty years each, Minneapolis dominated both.
By 1884, Minneapolis flour milling had the highest value in the world. By 1899, no lumber market on Earth outsold Minneapolis. The city earned the nickname "Mill City." The occupational hazards were so severe that six companies manufactured artificial limbs.
Catastrophe and Commerce
The late nineteenth century brought disasters that tested the young city's resilience.
In 1869, the Eastman tunnel beneath the river began leaking—a serious threat to the falls themselves. Twice, fire destroyed the entire row of sawmills on the east bank. Then came the explosion at the Washburn A mill. Flour dust, when suspended in air, is explosively combustible. The blast killed eighteen people and demolished approximately half the city's milling capacity in an instant.
In 1893, fire spread from Nicollet Island to Boom Island to northeast Minneapolis, destroying twenty blocks and killing two people.
Yet the city rebuilt, again and again.
The lumber industry drew largely on lumbermen emigrating from Maine, where forests were depleting. They found Minnesota's northern woods abundant. Waterways transported logs even after railroads developed—the Mississippi carried logs to St. Louis until the early twentieth century. The white pine milled in Minneapolis built cities across the treeless prairies: Miles City, Montana; Bismarck, North Dakota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Omaha, Nebraska; Wichita, Kansas.
But the forests weren't infinite. Lumbering's decline began around 1900. Sawmills in the city, including the Weyerhauser mill, closed by 1919. Some lumbermen moved on to Douglas fir in the Pacific Northwest. Minnesota's white pine was simply gone.
Flour Power
The flour industry lasted longer and grew even larger.
In 1877, Cadwallader C. Washburn co-founded Washburn-Crosby, the company that would eventually become General Mills. Washburn and his partner John Crosby sent an Austrian civil engineer named William de la Barre to Hungary on a mission of industrial espionage. De la Barre returned with innovations that revolutionized milling.
Across the river, C. A. Pillsbury Company hired away Washburn-Crosby employees and adopted the new methods. Competition drove both companies to greater heights.
Meanwhile, wheat farming expanded westward across the Great Plains—from Minnesota to the Dakotas to Montana. New rail lines connected these farmers to Minneapolis mills, and the relationship fed on itself. The hard red spring wheat grown in Minnesota made exceptional flour. "Minnesota patent flour" was recognized at the time as the best bread flour in the world.
By 1900, fourteen percent of all American grain was milled in Minneapolis. About a third of that was shipped overseas. Production peaked at 18.5 million barrels in 1916.
But nothing lasts forever. Decades of soil exhaustion depleted the wheat fields. Stem rust—a fungal disease—ravaged crops. Changes in freight tariffs made it cheaper to mill flour elsewhere. In the 1920s, both Washburn-Crosby and Pillsbury developed new milling centers in Buffalo, New York, and Kansas City, Missouri, though they kept their headquarters in Minneapolis.
Today, the falls are a national historic district. The upper St. Anthony lock and dam has been permanently closed to traffic. And in 2026, in accordance with a 2020 act of Congress, ownership of five acres of federal land around the falls will transfer to a Dakota-led nonprofit called Owámniyomni Okhódayapi. The sacred site is, slowly, returning to its original stewards.
The Modern City Emerges
After the milling era waned, Minneapolis reinvented itself. Around 1900, the city began attracting skilled workers who leveraged expertise from the University of Minnesota. Innovation became the new industry.
In 1923, Munsingwear became the world's largest manufacturer of underwear—not glamorous, but profitable. Frederick McKinley Jones invented mobile refrigeration in Minneapolis and, with an associate, founded Thermo King in 1938. That company's technology would transform how food moves around the world. In 1949, Medtronic was founded in a Minneapolis garage, eventually becoming a medical device giant.
Minneapolis-Honeywell built a south Minneapolis campus where their expertise in control systems earned them military contracts for the Norden bombsight and the C-1 autopilot—technologies that helped win World War II.
In 1957, Control Data began in downtown Minneapolis. Their CDC 1604 computer replaced vacuum tubes with transistors, a technological leap that helped launch the computing revolution. Control Data became hugely successful, and in a notable act of corporate citizenship, opened a facility in economically depressed north Minneapolis, bringing jobs to a community that desperately needed them.
Even the internet has Minneapolis roots. In 1991, a University of Minnesota computing group released Gopher, an early protocol for organizing and distributing information online. For a few years, it was the way people navigated the nascent internet. Then, three years later, the World Wide Web superseded it.
A Century of Struggle
The twentieth century in Minneapolis was not simply a story of innovation and progress. It was also a time of bigotry, corruption, and malfeasance.
It began with four decades of corruption. A man known as Doc Ames—initially regarded as a kindly physician—became mayor, made his brother police chief, ran the city into crime, and tried to flee town in 1902. The Ku Klux Klan was a force in the city from 1921 to 1923. The gangster Kid Cann engaged in bribery and intimidation from the 1920s through the 1940s. After Minnesota passed a eugenics law in 1925, the proprietors of Eitel Hospital sterilized people at Faribault State Hospital.
From the end of World War I until 1950, antisemitism was so pervasive that writer Carey McWilliams called Minneapolis "the antisemitic capital of the United States." Starting in 1936, a fascist hate group known as the Silver Shirts held meetings in the city.
Yet out of this darkness came moments of transformation.
The Minneapolis Truckers' Strike
In the summer of 1934, during the depths of the Great Depression, something remarkable happened.
The Citizens' Alliance, an association of employers, refused to negotiate with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The truck drivers' union responded with strikes in May and again in July and August. Charles Rumford Walker, who chronicled the events, said the Minneapolis teamsters succeeded in part due to the "military precision of the strike machine."
The workers won. And their victory had consequences far beyond Minneapolis. It contributed directly to the federal labor protections enacted in 1935 and 1938—laws that established the right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. Workers across America owe something to those Minneapolis truck drivers.
Hubert Humphrey's Minneapolis
In the 1940s, a young mayor named Hubert Humphrey—who would later become vice president of the United States—worked to rescue Minneapolis from its reputation for bigotry. Under his leadership, the city established the country's first municipal fair employment practices and created a human-relations council that interceded on behalf of minorities.
But Humphrey's reforms, however groundbreaking, failed to improve the lives of Black residents in meaningful ways.
In 1966 and 1967—years of significant turmoil across the United States—suppressed anger among Minneapolis's Black population erupted in two disturbances on Plymouth Avenue. Historian Iric Nathanson describes young Black people confronting police, arson causing property damage, and "random gunshots" causing minor injuries. Compared to the devastation in Detroit and Newark that summer, it was, Nathanson says, "a relatively minor incident."
A coalition reached a peaceful outcome. But once again, Black poverty and unemployment remained unsolved.
The voter backlash was swift. Charles Stenvig, a law-and-order candidate, became mayor in 1969 and governed for almost a decade.
Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Between 1958 and 1963, Minneapolis demolished what was called "skid row." Gone were thirty-five acres containing more than two hundred buildings—roughly forty percent of downtown. The Gateway District and its significant architecture, including the Metropolitan Building, were razed in the name of progress.
In 1967, Interstate 35W opened, displacing Black and Mexican neighborhoods in south Minneapolis. The highway, like so many built during that era across America, carved through communities of color while leaving white neighborhoods intact.
But the displaced didn't simply disappear. In 1968, relocated Native Americans founded the American Indian Movement, known as AIM, in Minneapolis. AIM's Heart of the Earth Survival School taught Native American traditions to children as an alternative to public and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. It operated for nearly twenty years.
That same era produced an unlikely milestone. A same-sex Minneapolis couple appealed their case for a marriage license all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—and lost. But they managed to obtain a license and marry in 1971, forty years before Minnesota legalized same-sex marriage. Their union was a small crack in a wall that would eventually crumble.
A City of Lakes and Contradictions
Minneapolis calls itself the "City of Lakes," and the name is earned. Thirteen lakes lie within city limits, along with wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks, and waterfalls. The city sits on an artesian aquifer beneath flat terrain. Its public park system is connected by the Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway, a fifty-mile loop of parkways, trails, and green spaces.
The metropolitan area—Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and the surrounding communities collectively known as the Twin Cities—is home to 3.69 million people. Minneapolis proper had a population of 429,954 as of the 2020 census, making it Minnesota's most populous city.
The climate is extreme. Winters are cold and snowy. Summers are hot and humid. This is not a place for the faint of heart.
The city's cultural institutions are formidable. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Guthrie Theater anchor a thriving arts scene. Four professional sports teams play downtown. The musician Prince—who grew up in Minneapolis—performed at the First Avenue nightclub, immortalized in his film Purple Rain. The University of Minnesota's main campus sits within city limits.
Residents adhere to more than fifty religions. Immigration helped curb the city's mid-twentieth century population decline. But that diversity has come with challenges. After September 11, 2001, the city's large Somali population was targeted with discrimination. Their hawalas—traditional money transfer networks that also function as informal banks—were shut down despite serving legitimate purposes.
The Reckoning
Despite its well-regarded quality of life, Minneapolis has stark disparities among its residents. By some measures, the gap between white and Black residents in income, education, and health outcomes is among the worst in the nation. This disparity is, arguably, the most critical issue confronting the city in the twenty-first century.
The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 forced Minneapolis—and the world—to confront these inequities. Chauvin was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. The Minneapolis Police Department faced calls for abolition or radical restructuring. Three nights of destruction gave way to years of ongoing unrest and difficult conversations about racial justice.
Minneapolis is governed by a mayor-council system. The political landscape is dominated by the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, known as the DFL, a unique state affiliate of the national Democratic Party that merged with the Farmer-Labor Party in 1944. Jacob Frey has served as mayor since 2018, navigating the city through one of the most turbulent periods in its history.
What Minneapolis Means
Minneapolis is a city built on water and power—the literal power of Saint Anthony Falls, and the political and economic power that flowed from it. It is a city that ground flour for the world while grinding down the Indigenous people who had lived there for millennia. It is a city that welcomed immigrants while enforcing segregation. It is a city of labor victories and racial violence, of artistic achievement and police brutality.
The falls still flow, though tamed now by locks and dams. The mills are silent, converted to museums and apartments. The Dakota are returning, slowly, to the sacred confluence where their stories say they emerged.
Minneapolis is not a simple place. It has never been a simple place. Perhaps that complexity—that willingness to contain contradictions—is what makes it, for better and worse, so thoroughly American.