After the death of George Floyd, the discussion that sprung up about systemic racism led many businesses and nonprofit organizations to reexamine their policies and practices. One by one, announcements were made denouncing the death of Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, and vowing to address various aspects of racism.

The Great Northern Greenway Task Force has been pushing to finish the trail since 2017, continuing efforts started by the Minneapolis Riverfront Partnership and many other volunteers and organizations over the past 20 years.

Five candidates are vying for an at-large seat on the board of the Minneapolis Public Schools. Two of them will advance to the November election. Ahead of the Aug. 11 primary, the Northeaster asked the following questions of each of them:

Two weeks ago, seemingly overnight, dozens of tents appeared near the Broadway and Jefferson Street corner of Logan Park. An informal check of Northeast parks on July 18 found five to six tents in Marshall Terrace and Edgewater parks, and one to three tents in Gluek, Beltrami and Boom Island parks. Logan Park has the largest encampment, with 22 tents, that number remaining steady for the last two weeks. It’s not certain where residents of the other Northeast parks came from; several of the Logan residents came from a large encampment at Powderhorn Park.

Protesters were gearing up to march from the homeless camp that recently sprang up in Logan Park to Mayor Jacob Frey’s condo a couple miles away. A list of demands was scrawled in the pages of a raggedy notebook, and the crowd planned to shout them up to Frey’s window, calling him out for inaction on campaign promises he made to combat homelessness in Minneapolis.

Movie theaters have provided an escape ever since John P. Harris and Harry Davis opened a five-cents-admission movie theater in a Pittsburgh storefront in 1905 and named it the Nickelodeon. COVID-19 has robbed us of our movie-theater escape this summer (although a few theaters, locally the Heights, are reopening), but if you were a Northeast kid in the 1950s or ’60s, Saturday afternoons would find you at the Ritz, the Heights or the Hollywood.

A request to display a mural depicting Philando Castile on the south wall of the St. Anthony Village Community Center was denied by the City Council at its July 14 meeting. The vote was 4 to 1; Council Member Bernard Walker was the dissenting vote.

A City of St. Anthony snowplow barred northbound traffic on Silver Lake Road July 6 as a large crowd gathered in front of City Hall to mark the fourth year since the 2016 killing of Philando Castile by former St. Anthony Police officer Jeronimo Yanez.

To help keep voters safer during the COVID-19 pandemic, 50 polling places in Minneapolis are moving for the 2020 primary and general election. Changes will help protect people living in residential facilities and provide more space to keep voters a safe distance from elections staff and each other. Two polling places have changed in Columbia Heights.

Seven people are running for two seats on Columbia Heights City Council. Come the August 11 primary, voters will narrow the field to four. The candidates met at City Hall July 14 for a forum broadcast over local cable channels and Facebook Live, due to COVID-19. The League of Women Voters presided over the forum. For brevity here, the questions are distilled to subjects.