The moving memorial to the man whose murder sparked Black Lives Matter

"Are you a tourist or a visitor?"

It's a fair ask. Standing near the memorial site in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020, sparking the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, I'm unsure how to pay the proper respect to my surroundings. I'm wondering if it would be OK to take a photo, when a man in a yellow shirt asks me that leading question.

This is Marquise Bowie, a member of Agape, a community organisation which liaises between locals and city authorities. When he's not busy with other tasks, he hangs out at the memorial – officially renamed George Floyd Square by the city in May 2022 – to talk to visitors.

The idea is to help newcomers engage with the tragic event which happened here, and the long history of similar unjust deaths in the US and elsewhere. The George Floyd Global Memorial, the caretaker organisation for the square and its surrounds, offers what it calls "pilgrimage journeys" of the site in return for a donation. Bowie asks me and my Minneapolis friend, writer Doug Mack, if we'd like to take the pilgrimage. So we do.

There's a lot to the memorial, which centres on the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue and is heralded by metal sculptures of raised fists at each approach. Once we're joined by two women visiting from California, Bowie leads our small group to a mural which depicts historic black activists such as Malcolm X, Angela Davis and Marcus Garvey, with a second featuring footballer Colin Kaepernick. Nearby is another mural I recognise from news coverage, of George Floyd on a blue background with the words "I can breathe now" lettered beneath.

The area in front of Cup Foods, where Floyd died, is the focal point of the square. Spilling from the shopfront into the roadway is a profusion of flowers and paintings, many of the latter including messages. Across the street is a closed service station, covered by portraits and placards bearing the long list of demands made by the protesters during the crisis. As with all our stops on this pilgrimage, our guide takes time to explain the background to what we're looking at, in this case the stories behind specific demands.

As we walk north along Chicago Avenue, a new aspect of the neighbourhood comes into view. Marquise points out small businesses owned by locals, including two barbecue-style restaurants. He sees part of his role as encouraging visitors to frequent these places, as another way of supporting the community.

Reminders of tragedy are never far away, however. Down the middle of the street, a long list of painted names remembers the dead, as does our final stop: Say Their Names Cemetery. Set back from the corner of 37th Street and Chicago Avenue, this sunken park has become a symbolic cemetery, dotted with replica headstones bearing the names of more than 100 black people who lost their lives to racist violence. Some I recognise from news reports of recent years, and some – like Emmett Till – from historical accounts.