“All the different mixed cultures, the different foods — and it’s got a nice school system,” he said.
Mr. DeWalt said he liked that white people stand next to black people to fight for police reform, and that when he lost his wallet in Walmart, a white man who returned it would not accept the money that Mr. DeWalt offered as a thank you.
Yet the city was also the backdrop to a horrific scene on Memorial Day, of a white police officer pressing his knee against the neck of George Floyd, a black man, for nearly nine minutes. Furious demonstrations rippled beyond Minneapolis to scores of cities across the country. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was charged with third-degree murder.
“The things that are great about it are great,” Betsy Hodges, a former mayor of Minneapolis, said of the city. “And it is also a city that has deep challenges, especially regarding race.” In 2016, Ms. Hodges, who is white, devoted her State of the City address to the troubling dualities of the place.
The current mayor, Jacob Frey, took office in 2018 vowing to repair ties between the police and the community after two fatal police shootings. Within a day of the death of Mr. Floyd, Mr. Frey, a civil rights lawyer, quickly denounced the officers involved. “Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” he said. “I believe what I saw and what I saw is wrong on every level.”
Mr. Frey has also laid out plans to address Minneapolis’s lack of affordable housing, a byproduct of its growth: Since the 1990s, Minnesota has attracted a surge of immigrants from Somalia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Laos and Mexico. Minneapolis is about 60 percent white, 20 percent black, 10 percent Latino and six percent Asian, according to census data.
The legacy of policies discriminating against people of color has lingered.
“The racism has been around for a very, very long time," said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “You can see it in the redlining of neighborhoods, the education system, the transportation system and, obviously, policing.”