It’s 2:45 p.m. on an unseasonably balmy Tuesday in December, and Minneapolis City Hall is eerily quiet. There’s no municipal bustle—only empty halls and the click of my boot heels on marble steps. Among the only two people I see outside, in a still-desolate, mid-pandemic stretch of downtown, is a protester wielding a drum, wearing a vest scrawled with BLM and NLM .
The world watched in horror at Darnella Frazier’s cell phone video of Floyd’s murder; only Frey watched as the mayor of the city where it happened. The night Frey first saw it, he walked alone from his town house in the arty, on-the-rise Northeast neighborhood, across the Third Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi River, and circled this office until 6 a.m., when the press woke up and he could roundly condemn Chauvin and the other officers involved.
Frey made the U.S. national team and went on to the Pan American Games marathon in Rio de Janeiro , coming in fourth place. He fell short at the 2008 Olympic trials, but, that same year, he won the Austin marathon: Photos show Frey’s mouth agape in a roar, and his hands thrust skyward, as he crossed the finish line. The son of modern ballet dancers, Frey comes from a family of extraordinary physical feats.
“I think he’s just great,” fawns John, a jumpsuit-clad Uber driver who picks me up in a Cadillac SUV, “and so cute, too.” Frey, indeed, became an object of internet thirst in 2020, especially after he drew President Donald Trump’s ire for suggesting Minneapolis might be reimbursed for an estimated $500,000 security bill from a Trump rally.
His reelection suggests the city is mostly behind him, but his second term remains fraught. “We’re ready for him to step up,” says Beevas, who craves bold leadership more than “just trying to keep up with what we’re throwing at him.” A grandmotherly cashier at the biggest Target I’ve ever seen sums Frey up thusly: “I don’t think he’s a bad guy. He has good intentions. It’s just a really impossible situation.
Frey insists he and his fellow urban leaders are “all in for the work.” At the same time, “as other mayors have said, it is heavy, and it’s hard.... I think some people want to see a ‘burn it down and build it up,’ ” he adds. “As mayors, we don’t have the luxury of tossing out all the good with the bad.
Clarke tries to maintain a sense of dark humor about it all—“I’ve gotten really good at getting rid of graffiti,” she laughs dryly. She looks back fondly at “reading about my husband as a national sex symbol” , quipping: “Those were the days.” But Clarke’s eyes also grow glassy, then brim with tears. “I wish people could see what I see,” she says, her voice choking up. “Everybody with any courage would’ve done exactly what he did.
Can you do a follow up and ask why he keeps allowing the MPD to murder black men? It happened again here, yesterday.
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