How Black women shaped Tim Walz’s politics after the death of George Floyd
"In exclusive interviews dating to 2021, the Minnesota governor reflected on how he had tried — and sometimes failed — to pursue policies inspired by George Floyd’s death
From inside Minnesota’s executive mansion, Gov. Tim Walz could hear the grieving woman’s bellows.
Toshira Garraway’s voice quavered as she spoke to the hundreds gathered outside the residence in St. Paul. It was a sunny Monday in June 2020, just days after George Floyd had been murdered in Minneapolis. Protesters across the world had been shouting Floyd’s name, but Garraway and other speakers — almost all Black women — were invoking the names of men who hadn’t garnered as much attention after they died in encounters with Minnesota law enforcement. Hardel. Kobe. Justin.
The lifeless body of Justin Teigen, Garraway’s boyfriend, had been found in a recycling bin in 2009. Police had said they were chasing Tiegen and lost track of him when he hid in a dumpster, where he remained when the trash was compacted. Garraway was convinced police had killed him.
“They didn’t throw him in the river! They didn’t throw him in the woods!” Garraway shouted. “They threw him in the trash! That’s what they think of our people.”
“I could hear her pain,” Walz recalled in a 2021 interview with a Washington Post reporter. Walz, who is now the Democratic nominee for vice president, stepped outside the residence for a closer listen.
When Garraway heard that Walz had joined the crowd, she stepped away from the microphone to meet him. She asked for his cellphone number.
“I had been calling and writing the governor and attorney general for years,” she recalled telling him. “I want you to meet with our families.”
Follow Election 2024
At the most critical juncture in Walz’s tenure as governor, with the world pointing to his state as an example of gross injustice, he found insights and counsel from Garraway and a group of Black women who pleaded with him to do more to address systemic racism.
This story is based on years of interviews with Walz and those women, starting 11 months after Floyd’s death as part of research for a book on Floyd’s life and legacy. Walz’s last interview was in May, two months before he was selected as the running mate of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to be the Democratic nominee for president. During the discussions, Walz offered the most expansive, personal accounts he has ever provided about how Floyd’s murder changed his worldview — and about the women who helped shape it.
The women cried with him, prodded him, prayed with him. They admired his ability to listen without interrupting them, and appreciated the get-well cards he sent when they were sick. When it comes to supporting a Black woman who is already facing racist attacks in her bid for the presidency, they think Walz is ready.
But even more than his empathy, the women relished the opportunity to help Walz craft legislation that specifically addressed their concerns. That’s when the relationship became more difficult.
“He makes political calculations in terms of where he’s going to put his energy and spend down political capital, which any responsible person or elected official will do,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a former head of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. “But because of his nature, you always have in the back of your mind that he will go the extra mile. … That’s when you get disappointed.”
Beyond Walz’s reputation as a folksy liberal, likely to be on display when he speaks Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention, the women saw a politician trying to navigate uncertain terrain. The national zest for police reform would eventually slow, and Walz’s national profile would begin to soar. And now, some in the group say he has lost interest in them.
Walz declined to comment for this article, but a spokeswoman wrote that Walz “deeply values the friendships, what he’s been able to learn from them, and the reforms they worked together to pass. He continues to meet with them and looks forward to their continued work together to improve Minnesota.”
Garraway has not heard from Walz in more than a year. When friends started texting about his becoming Harris’s running mate, she didn’t fully know what to say.
“I don’t want to bash the man, but all I can do is speak from my heart, and I’m conflicted,” Garraway said. “I cannot say that empathy was not there. But, as time went on and this was no longer the headlining topic, we became less and less important. Our families are pushed to the side and, basically, ignored. It is painful and hurtful.”
Before Floyd’s death, Walz had been warned about the insidious threat of racism in Minnesota.
The prediction came from Valerie Castile, whose son Philando had been shot and killed at a traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul in 2016. “Mark my word, if it keeps on going in this direction, something really bad is going to happen,” Castile recalled telling him.
“That was back in 2017,” she said.
At the time, Walz was serving in Congress and preparing a bid for governor. She told him she had dedicated her life to finding a way to bring honor to her son’s name. She spoke about Philando’s generous spirit — the school cafeteria worker would dig into his own pocket to help a student who couldn’t afford lunch.
And then, Castile quizzed Walz on why he thought Black people disproportionately die at the hands of police.
“I’m going to be brutally honest with you,” Castile recalled telling him. “We know it’s a racist factor that’s the underlying problem within law enforcement.”
The two formed a tight bond, calling themselves “friends.” Walz said her honesty showed him how “the basic joys of life are always clouded by” racism, and illuminated “the day-to-day, year-after-year systemic issues and microaggressions that people endure.”
“It just permeates everything,” he told The Post.
Walz, who grew up in Nebraska and moved to rural Minnesota as an adult, said he knew he had a blind spot when it came to the Black experience, “being a middle-aged White guy [from] a town of 300 … with no people of color.” In Minnesota, where only 7 percent of the population is Black, politicians often note how easy it can be to miss the struggles of the African American community. So many of the state’s bragging points — its high incomes, its healthy residents, its high-performing students — disguise some of the country’s widest disparities in wealth, life expectancy and education between Blacks and Whites.
After Walz became governor in 2019, Black lawmakers and activists said, he and his wife engaged with Black communities immediately. Walz said that they were eager to learn — and that they were surprised by what they discovered.
During one event, a Black woman told him she had moved to Duluth from Arkansas. Compared with racism in the Deep South, she said, she found Minnesota’s to be “quieter — but meaner.”
On another occasion, Levy Armstrong, the former NAACP official, told him that state lawmakers had a history of “admiring the problem” — acknowledging that disparities existed but not working hard enough to eradicate them.
Then a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck in May 2020.
As video of the brutal incident spread, Walz reached out to Castile.
“What do you think they’re going to do?” she recalled Walz asking her.
“You better get ready,” Castile said. “They’re about to tear this motherf---er up.”
Castile was right. Although most of the protests were peaceful, large businesses were looted, windows were smashed and a police station was set aflame.
Not long afterward, the Floyd family asked Walz to remove the county attorney from the investigation of the killing. Walz agreed to assign Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general, who had a history of working against police brutality. Walz told The Post that he was thinking of Castile when he made the decision.
“She was adamant, and groups of folks who had talked to me even before George Floyd [died] believed that we needed to have an independent prosecutor’s office,” Walz said. “That there’s just too close a connection between the police and the county attorneys.”
A few weeks after Walz spoke with the Floyds, he met with Garraway and the other women on a Zoom call.
Garraway spoke again about her boyfriend, referring to his death as the “2009 version of Emmett Till.”
The police account of the events had always seemed fantastical to her. But in 2009, there were no body cameras or Black Lives Matter movement — and few people took her seriously. After three years, only one lawyer said he would be interested in taking the case. By then, it was too late — the state had a three-year statute of limitations for investigating officers.
Amity Dimock told Walz the story of her autistic son, Kobe Dimock-Heisler, who was killed in 2019 by police during a wellness check. Police said Kobe had lunged at them with a knife, but Amity said she believed the officers reacted so quickly because they were ill-equipped to deal with mental illness.
Del Shea Perry spoke of her son Hardel Sherrell, who died in a jail cell in 2018. Officers ignored Sherrell when he said he wasn’t feeling well. Security camera footage over eight days captured him falling hard off a bed, going limp and dying in a pool of his own waste, never receiving medical attention.
As the women recounted their pain, Walz’s eyes welled with tears. He told The Post that he, like many in the state, needed to do more soul-searching on why it was so easy to look past the trauma of racism that Castile assured him existed.
“This is a great state if you’re White, not so much if you’re not,” Walz later recalled thinking. “And that pains me, but it has to be said. And it’s the truth.”
After the conversations with the women, Walz said he went back to his staff and asked, “What can we do? What can we change?”
They encouraged the women to work with racial justice organizations to craft legislation, and by 2021, more than a dozen police reform bills had been introduced. Some followed national trends. They asked for the state legislature to limit the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants. They asked that the state allow police officers to be sued directly for actions taken in the line of duty, ending a practice known as “qualified immunity” that shielded them.
Other bills were directly inspired by the women’s stories. One would have ended the statute of limitations for wrongful-death suits related to police killings — potentially giving Garraway the chance to find out what had happened to Justin. Another would have referred 911 calls to mental health crisis teams when appropriate — which Dimock thought could have saved Kobe’s life. A third would have mandated wellness checks in jails — which could have led to an intervention for Hardel.
The women set out for the State Capitol to lobby lawmakers, but struggled to gain traction. About a year after Floyd’s death, conservatives were nervous that such measures might deplete the morale of police departments, which were losing officers.
“After Minneapolis started burning, the Republicans immediately went to blaming Governor Walz and Mayor [Jacob] Frey, and [saying] the Democrats will let the city burn down,” said Jeffrey Hayden, who was a Democratic state senator. Hayden said Republicans appeared hesitant to act, arguing that Floyd’s death had been “an isolated incident.”
The women said they found it difficult to find advocates even among rural Democrats, who they said would stare at them with blank faces. They asked the governor to leverage his authority, and he tried at first. He threatened to keep the legislative session open until lawmakers passed police reform, and he negotiated with Republicans, who were in control of the state’s House.
The legislature agreed to pass a bill in honor of Sharell, to make changes to police training and to limit the use of chokeholds. Walz used executive action to add $15 million for violence-prevention programs, and then required that police provide body-camera footage to families within five days of incidents involving a death. But the legislature rejected the toughest measures, such as strengthening civilian oversight of police departments and ending qualified immunity.
And the measure to lift the statute of limitations also failed, meaning there would be no chance to get to the truth of what happened to Garraway’s boyfriend.
On the last day of the session, Garraway and the other women held a news conference. She pleaded with her new friend, the governor, to try to do more.
“You listen to our stories. You watch us break down. You watch us cry,” she said. “How can you make a deal to say this is okay?”
A few months after the legislation failed, Walz put his disappointment plainly: “I feel like I failed Toshira.”
Walz told The Post back then that he had learned that White men like him wanted to probe the details while Black women like Garraway sought swift action because the lives of their families were at stake.
“This is a complex issue. It’s nuanced,” Walz said. “But in the midst of this are people who say, ‘I don’t have time for nuance.’”
He wondered if the country needed a truth and reconciliation commission — like the one in post-apartheid South Africa — that would allow people to truly listen to the stories of pain and exploitation he had heard.
After the 2021 legislative session, Walz said he felt the chance to have an honest conversation about racism in America — and then work to fix it — had probably passed him by. He worried that, between the pandemic, the protests and the unraveling of the great American reckoning on race, the country was not “healing.”
“I don’t know if we’ll get another shot at it,” Walz said. “I’m worried about this. … I’m worried [about what] I’m seeing at the national level. I’m seeing our democracy under threat, and I’m seeing the community here that’s losing faith.”
Back then, he also recognized how not addressing the problem would mar his political legacy.
“One way or another, I will be associated with this,” Walz said.
Valerie Castile had not lost faith.
After a jury in 2017 acquitted the police officer who killed Philando, she spent years seeking another route to honor her son’s legacy.
She started a foundation to clear the balances of grade-school students who couldn’t afford to pay for school meals, then began pushing the state legislature to make breakfast and lunch free for all students. In 2023, with a Democratic majority in all three chambers, the bill passed.
It became one of Walz’s signature pieces of legislation, and the photo of children hugging him after he signed the bill has become an indelible political image. Watching proudly in the back that day was Castile.
“Oh my God, we finally did it,” Castile remembered thinking. “Congratulations, Phil.”
After the police reform bills were rejected, Walz tried other routes to deal with racial disparities, at the behest of Democrats eager to avoid bills that could be deemed as anti-police.
Walz worked with lawmakers in 2023 to invest more than $70 million in workforce training for manufacturing and tech jobs. After the NAACP filed a lawsuit alleging that the child-welfare system disproportionately separated Black families, they approved proactive steps to keep families together. They passed laws barring discrimination based on hairstyles and establishing an office to investigate suspicious deaths of Black women that have become cold cases.
In May 2024, Walz told The Post that these policies have helped to close some of the state’s racial gaps. For example, the median household income for Black Minnesotans has jumped 70 percent since 2011, the seventh-fastest growth rate in the country, according to the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development.
“We’ve stopped admiring the problem,” Walz said in the interview. “We’ve learned not to do the Minnesota thing, which is to look at disparities, say ‘Oh that’s too bad,’ then go and eat pie.”
He also said he was wrong to wonder if the country might have missed its chance to eradicate racism.
“That was a part of my trauma speaking,” Walz said.
The women he met in 2020, though, still wonder if they will ever experience any relief from their trauma, a smidgen of which Castile felt when Walz signed the school meals bill. They accuse Walz of giving up on police reform too quickly. Perry, whose son died in the jail cell, continued trying to persuade Walz that they needed to do more work. In 2018, when Hardel Sherrell died, there were nine other deaths at county jails, state data shows. Last year, there were 20 deaths.
Her phone calls, though, were being returned much more infrequently. Perry’s advocacy didn’t even get a hearing during the last legislative session. When she met Walz earlier this year, he asked if she had been in touch with the Rev. Al Sharpton. Maybe some national attention would help, he suggested.
“Maybe he should call him,” Perry told The Post. “He knows him. I don’t. I’m a grieving mother.”
Still racked with pain, Garraway said there are bigger matters on her mind than Walz’s potential vice presidency.
When county prosecutors decided in June to drop their case against a state trooper who killed a Black man named Ricky Cobb II during a traffic stop, she called Walz to see if she could get answers from a man she thought she understood. Walz had supported dropping the charges, saying it would be impossible to prove that the officer used excessive force.
But after introducing Walz to so many grieving families, Garraway was desperate to know why he could side with the police in this case. She trusted his judgment. So after his big speech accepting the nomination and all the balloons and the pageantry of the Democratic convention, she hopes he’ll answer her calls again. She longs to hear his voice."
No comments:
Post a Comment