Kenda Zellner-Smith hauled up a corrugated metal door to reveal hundreds of wooden boards covered with graffiti, each telling a story of the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing by a US police officer.
The 28-year-old has collected and archived the panels that once protected businesses from rioting in Minneapolis, aiming to preserve the legacy of the 2020 murder that shocked the United States.
Five years on, Zellner-Smith said the boards — kept in a storage unit by an industrial site two miles (three kilometers) from where Floyd died — still evoke powerful emotions.
They range from blank plywood with text reading “I can’t breathe” — the final words Floyd said as Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck — to colorful murals depicting rainbows and love hearts.
“Every time I look at them there’s something different I notice,” she told AFP. “They reignite an energy or a fire that was felt years ago during the uprising.”
Then a university graduate in Minneapolis, Zellner-Smith was among millions of Americans who joined the Black Lives Matter rallies in 2020 that swept US cities.
The threat of vandalism saw many businesses protect themselves with wooden boards — which became canvases for protesters’ slogans and drawings demanding justice.
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