The second in a UR investigative series looks at the murder of Randy Sherer & the economic abandonment of Minneapolis’ Northside in which it occurred.

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Part two of our investigative series The Case of Marvin Haynes takes a close look at the murder of Randy Sherer and the context of the economic abandonment of Minneapolis' Northside in which it occurred. This newsletter showcases short excerpts from part two. Stay tuned for our release this week of Part 3 - The Framing of Marvin Haynes, an article and a 30minute film. Unicorn Riot will also be covering a press conference demanding Marvin's release on Thursday at noon at the Hennepin County Government Center.

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The story of Marvin Haynes is also the story of Harry Sherer — a 55-year-old man who lived a few blocks from his family’s flower shop who everyone called by his nickname, Randy. Most days, Randy walked to the shop to sit and talk to his brother and sister, to tidy up and smoke cigarettes, eat McMuffins, greet customers.

On May 16, 2004, someone shot Randy in the midst of a botched robbery attempt. According to his sister and sole witness to his killing, the shooter said he was looking for cash he thought was hidden in the flower shop. The neighborhood rumor, possibly founded on some truth, was that the shop’s owner was involved in high stakes gambling and maybe even ran gambling operations out of the shop’s back rooms.

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In 1961, the elder Sherer moved the business across the river, opening a location at the corner of 33rd Avenue North and Lyndale Avenue North in the McKinley neighborhood on the Northside of Minneapolis. When one of his children, Jerry, was ready to go into business with him, they repainted the sign out front, calling the new store “Mannie’s and Jerry’s Flower Shop.”

What Mannie Sherer didn’t know when he moved his business just a few miles to the west, into Northside Minneapolis, was that he had settled in a neighborhood slated for abandonment and disinvestment by those in power.
The Northside of Minneapolis had long been a hub for marginalized people unwelcome elsewhere in the city. Beginning in the 1920s, racial housing covenants kept Black, Asian and sometimes Jewish people from owning land in most of the city, inscribing into deeds the restriction that the “premises shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent.” By the 1930s, the majority of deeds in the city of Minneapolis contained these racial housing covenants.

The covenants pushed the majority of Minneapolis’ Black population to the north — from the Camden neighborhood down to Near North — where such covenants were mostly nonexistent. In the mid-60s, when the pressures of segregation and violent policing in Minneapolis approached the breaking point, the Northside was the epicenter of the city’s movements for liberation.

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Read in full here ([link removed]) or click on image at top. This is the second in an ongoing Unicorn Riot investigative series into the case of Marvin Haynes, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 at the age of 17 for a murder he says he didn’t commit. As of this writing, he remains imprisoned at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater.

Bookmark the series landing page ([link removed]) after clicking on image below and keep an eye out for part three dropping this week!

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