Photograph by Ackerman + Gruber
Jeremiah Ellison
City council member Jeremiah Ellison reps north Minneapolis, his childhood and current home.
City council member Jeremiah Ellison’s ward is in north Minneapolis, but on the first night of the George Floyd protests, he was on the city’s south side.
I’m interviewing him for MSPtv a week later, and he’s telling me about how, from right in the middle of the action on Lake Street, he frantically fielded calls with both the police chief and mayor, who assured him the police would be working toward de-escalation, even though what he saw right in front of him was police firing rubber bullets and mace at the protesters. At one point he left the scene to get supplies—jugs of milk and dry towels to combat the mace—and when he got back a teenage girl with blood streaming down her face ran right into him.
“She had been hit by one of those ‘non-lethal’ rounds,” Ellison says. “I sat her down and began wiping her face so that she could see until her friends could take her to a safer location.”
Before all this, Ellison grew up across town in the Fifth Ward—the one he now reps—on the corner of 17th and Bryant in a big house.
“I didn’t know anything about lot size growing up,” he says. “Now that I work at City Hall, I hear about lot size constantly, but back then it was just that house was really big and that yard was really big.”
Ellison’s parents are both high-profile civic leaders. His father, Keith, is a former member of Congress and Minnesota’s current attorney general. His mother, Kim, is the chair of the Minneapolis school board. Even still, upon graduating from the Blake School, Ellison didn’t pursue law or politics—he was committed to his growth as an artist.
He got his start painting murals at Juxtaposition Arts, the teen-staffed arts center on Broadway and Emerson. And after high school he moved to Miami for a couple of years because it was, he says, “the furthest place from Minneapolis in my teenaged mind.” But eventually he did come back to the north side to continue painting alongside painters like his mentor, indigenous multimedia and graffiti artist Bobby Wilson. It wasn’t until the killing of Jamar Clark by the Minneapolis Police Department in 2015 and the rise of Black Lives Matter that he gave a life in politics serious thought—running for and winning his city council seat in 2017.
Which brings us back to this moment. It’s been a week, and he’s still thinking about that girl with the blood streaming down her face outside of the Third Precinct.
“I had been seeing her and her friends the whole night,” he says. “She hadn’t thrown a water bottle. She hadn’t thrown a rock.” He shakes his head. “Even if she had, I don’t think she should’ve been hit in the forehead with artillery.”
“She hadn’t thrown a water bottle. She hadn’t thrown a rock.” He shakes his head. “Even if she had, I don’t think she should’ve been hit in the forehead with artillery.”
When you first saw the George Floyd video, did you imagine this was the trajectory things would take? Could it have gone differently?
I remember seeing it really late at night. It certainly took your breath away. It was really horrific to watch. I knew that people were going to protest. I think I started trying to wrap my mind around how to keep people safe from coronavirus as they protested. Do I think where we are now could’ve been prevented? I think it would’ve been tricky, but the answer is yes.
I know that the official story will be that the protests got violent, that people threw water bottles and then they threw rocks. That’s the story that’ll be told. But before anybody threw a water bottle at a police officer, there were videos on Twitter, by friends of mine who were at the march to the Third Precinct, showing cops spraying people with mace, completely unprovoked.
What were you supposed to be doing the week of May 25th?
Not that an event like this could ever be timed well, but we were in what was supposed to be a Ward Week. Four times a year, the city council doesn’t have any official meetings on the calendar. So, some council members use that week to take a break. Some use it to just have shorter days. And so, I think that a lot of council members were caught on our back foot. For my part, I’m afflicted with one of those I never really stop working attitudes. And so I was out, and I was available. And at that first night in the protests, seeing how volatile things were getting, I got some flashbacks to the Fourth Precinct protest from 2015. That was before I was on the council, but I spent basically every night there.
Photograph by Renee Jones Schneider/Minneapolis Star Tribune/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News
Jeremiah Ellison at Jamar Clark Protest
Ellison, an artist from the north side at the time, was front and center in the 2015 Jamar Clark protests.
The first time most of the public saw you was a photo of you being confronted by police in front of the Fourth Precinct. You had your hands up, and they had a rifle in your face.
At that time, I was just a muralist working in the neighborhood with a studio nearby, incensed that one of my neighbors had been killed by an employee of the city.
This protest, my hope was that, being a council member, I’d be in a better position to effect some kind of change. I felt like things were getting so volatile so early, much earlier than they got during the Fourth Precinct protests. The officers were lined up outside that building, helmets on, batons out, weapons drawn. They weren’t protecting anything. They were the draw. And I felt like, if there was a strategy to recede back into the building, yeah, some windows might get broken. Yeah, some things might get tagged. But it was evident to me that if we wanted to limit damage, I think that we needed to give up the precinct a lot earlier than we did.
“At that time, I was just a muralist working in the neighborhood with a studio nearby, incensed that one of my neighbors had been killed by an employee of the city.”
How did you feel when you saw the Third Precinct in flames?
I think that there’s a certain level of disbelief that washes over you because you’ve never seen anything like that occur. What made me definitively heartbroken was to see all of the community assets that had to burn in the process of the Third Precinct being taken over. I’m sure there are folks who are going to say, “You’re wrong. This was inevitable.” But I’ll never believe that the burning of the neighborhood was inevitable. It felt like the energy was really targeted at the Third Precinct, and if the Third Precinct went down earlier, without a bitter fight with protesters, I don’t think that you would have seen the neighborhood burning that way.
Governor Walz and Mayor Frey suggested it was outside agitators burning things. That feels somewhat convenient. From what you saw on the ground, was it?
I think two things can be true. I agree that it is a lot more complex than we have been willing to acknowledge. If you are Black in this city, if you’re indigenous in this city, if you’re an immigrant in this city, I think that there was a lot of righteous anger that, if not validated and accounted for, bubbled to the surface after you witnessed the brutal murder of George Floyd. Do I agree with some of the tactics that sprung out of what I think is, in some instances, really righteous anger? No. As an official, I don’t. I think we could’ve gotten here, maybe, a different way. But I’m not going to disparage people who feel like they are in a fight for their life. And when you’re dealing with people who feel like they’re in a fight for their life and your response to their anger—to their fear—is to fire a rubber bullet at their heads, well, then you’ve affirmed that they’re in a fight for their life. And you’re going to see them react accordingly.
You create that kind of chaos, of course there are going to be people who don’t care about justice for George Floyd, who then flock into the city looking to take advantage of a chaotic situation. And I believe that that’s happened also. I think that the narrative of who’s a good and a bad protestor—the narrative of who’s legitimately seeking justice and who’s not—is far more complicated than we’ve really given space for. But I think it’s important that we understand it, because if we dismiss the protests of people who are genuinely angry—who might not be resorting to peaceful protest like we wish they would—as illegitimate, we will not make the right changes.
The president keeps saying the supposed outside agitators are “antifa,” which isn’t even technically a real group of people. In Minneapolis, from what you saw, were the instigators “antifa”?
The big thing is that night after night we were seeing insignias and patches on people’s jackets and on their hats. A guy we caught the other day had the red X that has been circulating as a new age KKK signifier on his hat. I’m not seeing “antifa.” I’m not.
I mean, maybe we need antifa right now with all these weird white boys running around at night stashing Gatorade bottles full of gasoline in the grass. I don’t even know if a lot of the people who are afraid of these guys know what antifa stands for: anti-fascism.
But you know they’re pro-fascism. So, maybe they have legitimate reason to be scared of antifa, right? It’s so silly. We were out doing community patrol, and I had a police officer come up to me and say, “Hey, I heard you support antifa.” And I said, “Hey, look, man. Anybody who’s punching Nazis is good with me.” And he just was like, “Fair.”
What was your relationship like with the police growing up?
There’s a lieutenant at the Fourth Precinct who used to work off-duty at a movie theater. Me and my siblings and my dad were big film nerds, cinephiles, and went to the movies all the time. And I used to see Lieutenant Barnes at the movie theater, and he was always really nice. Until I was elected into office, that experience with Lieutenant Barnes was the only positive experience with police officers I’d ever had.
What were some of the negative experiences?
I must have been about 13. I was over at North High running high school track. And there was a day where a number of us had showed up to track practice early and the gate wasn’t unlocked, so we were waiting for our coaches to arrive, just lined up on the sidewalk sitting, leaning against the gate. And one of our runners was just waiting in his car. The police showed up and started questioning us. We all have spikes, and we’re literally sitting outside of a running track. And the police approached our friend in the car and told him to get out of the car. They said, “You look suspicious.” And we said, “Hey, he’s on our track team. He’s waiting for the coaches to arrive like the rest of us. He just happens to be a cool kid with a car, so he’s waiting in his car.” But they arrested him. They cuffed him. They put him in the back of their car and they left.
Did who your parents were cause police to leave you alone at all?
I think that we grew up with a certain level of privilege. The context of north Minneapolis was very real around us and was very real for pretty much all of my friends. And then, there was the little Ellison bubble on the corner of 17th and Bryant. Right? And that was real, too.
Prior to [my dad running for Congress], he was a defense attorney. He sued the police. He represented the family of Tycel Nelson, another person who was murdered by Minneapolis police. He represented them in their civil case and got a settlement from the city. So, we got that talk really early in my household. “You’re in a two-parent household, everybody here is educated, but this is a household where we defend people who maybe have a little less privilege than us.” We understood on an intellectual level that there was this element of racial oppression. That element of Pop being critical of people with power was always present in our house. And I think that being able to be critical of people in power and not just giving them the benefit of doubt has actually aided me in not giving myself the benefit of the doubt when I go to represent my neighbors.
Do you think that we can reform the culture of a department that is arresting kids waiting for track practice to start?
I think the short answer is no. This department is irredeemably out of step—to put it lightly—with the values of this city.
I think that they’re out of step with contemporary life, quite frankly. Reforms aren’t going to cut it. But if any one reform was going to actually get the job done, it would be that cops start receiving criminal consequences for criminal behavior. I think that if all we do is break this thing and then glue it back together, I think that that would be a dereliction of our duty as public servants. We have got to dramatically rethink how we’re keeping people safe in this city.
Do you feel more vital as a protester than you do as a city council person?
Certainly, in the past week I’ve felt more effective on the street, directly responding to my constituents. I’ve stood side by side a business owner as we tried to put out a fire in his business. I’ve been a paramedic and a firefighter and a police officer, and that has felt more effective than writing policy at City Hall. But I do think that, at some point, I’ve got to go write policy at City Hall. I’ve got to go manage the budget at City Hall.
Parts of the city have been destroyed. COVID has shrunk the tax base. The city could come out of this broke. Will we need to radically reshape its budget?
Whenever [the city] goes through financial hardship, we say, “Well, we can’t afford any of the stuff that works. We can’t afford to fund the Office of Violence Prevention. We can’t put as much money into affordable housing. But we’re scared of poor people coming in and stealing from our homes, so we’re going to double down on police.” I think we’ve got to say, “We’re not going to govern out of fear. We’re going to take a genuine inventory of what works through this difficult time.” We’ve got to figure out a way to continue building affordable housing and getting access to housing. We have to figure out how we support our small businesses who actually do pay people fairly, who actually do offer people benefits. And not just hope and pray that we’re going to get another big-box store in our neighborhood that’s going to provide 300 shit jobs. I think that we’ve got to double down on making sure that people have resources, even if it’s tight, and not just investing in those forces that suppress poor people further into the margins.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Originally published in theJuly 2020 issue.
