MINNEAPOLIS _ A squad car slowed as it drove past the charred remains of the 3rd Precinct police headquarters.
Outside, neighborhood activist Alicia Smith's eyes traced the SUV's route along the busy thoroughfare, keeping tabs as it disappeared from view.
It was here, in South Minneapolis, that George Floyd took his final breath nearly three months ago. It was here that a white officer assigned to the precinct kneeled on the Black man's neck for nearly eight minutes while bystanders recorded video that would change the world.
Night after night, thousands of people packed into the streets near Smith's home. They held candlelight vigils and prayer circles. They cried together and they chanted. One night, the protesters surrounded the 3rd Precinct building and, before long, it was engulfed in flames.
"What we saw in May, in the year 2020, was the lynching of Mr. Floyd on clear video camera by officers from this precinct," Smith said on a recent evening outside the boarded-up structure, the metallic smell of melted iron still punctuating the air. "The cries of Mr. Floyd were the cries of Black people all around the country."
The 37-year-old, who has lived in Minneapolis much of her life, stopped for a moment, as if trying to process the past few months as a Black person in America.
The protests here have slowed, but the short-term pain, the long-standing memories and the immediate problems remain, and in some ways, have intensified.
Between the trauma of watching Floyd's final moments on video at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, witnessing COVID-19 disproportionately devastate Black Minnesotans, and knowing a tanking economy hits harder in her community, Smith feels like she and some of her neighbors are under attack day and night.
The sentiment is shared in Black neighborhoods nationwide as the latest chapter in America's racial reckoning plays out inside corporations and classrooms, on professional sports fields and at virtual political gatherings. Inequities in healthcare and distance learning for children have come to the forefront alongside calls to end police brutality in a movement that has left some to question if Black lives in this country truly do matter and are more than just a catchphrase.
"When I hear, 'Black lives matter,' for me, it's like, of course our lives matter _ there has never been doubt," Smith said. "When you hear those words now _ when white people hear and say those words _ it's like right now in 2020 ... with the protests and health crisis, I wonder do people really get it?"
So much of society _ of entrenched racism in systems of policing and healthcare and wealth _ still seems to do real harm to Black people, she says, emphasizing that many others in her community are feeling the same sort of heaviness.
"It can be exhausting," Smith said.
Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney who is representing the Floyd family and has over the years represented the families of dozens of unarmed Black men killed by police, has a term for it: "racial battle fatigue."
"Black folks are hurting right now. The pain is real," Crump said. "Coronavirus and police brutality. There is racial battle fatigue among us."
