Unrest devastates landmark street of diversity

Along the sprawling Minneapolis street where more than a century of migrants have found their Midwestern footholds, a new history can be traced.

There's the smoldering police station torched early Thursday morning by protesters enraged by the death of George Floyd while in custody.

There's the Well Fargo bank branch a couple of blocks away that mobs stormed through the next night, leaving behind a carpet of shattered glass and strewn paperwork.

For residents, for businesspeople, for artists, the Lake Street corridor has long been a symbol of the city's complex history, a block-by-block study in immigration, economic revitalization and persistent inequality.

Suad Hassan and her family own a few businesses on Lake Street, including a grocery store and a childcare center. Large, colorful murals on either side of the childcare center depict faces of Somali women surrounded by multilingual words painted in graffiti style, like "amor", "family" and the Arabic word for civilization. Now, the windows are boarded up, with messages like "black owned - solidarity" written across.

Each night, Hassan and her family have stood outside the center and store, pleading with mobs to leave their businesses alone. She said their presence, along with the colorful murals have spared them.

The 35-year-old was born in Somalia, but her family fled to Kenya to escape war when she was a child. They arrived in the U.S. when Hassan was about 7 or 8 years old. She says she remembers the war, going to school and hearing gunshots, witnessing fires spring up "left and right."

"When I saw the fire two nights ago, it was like a trauma that was triggered again for me. I had put that away in my life a long, long time ago ... I told my mom, 'this is a war zone'."