Directly south of downtown, the Phillips neighborhood has been one of the most contested and misunderstood neighborhoods in Minneapolis for sixty years. Named for Franklin and Harriet Phillips, an early Minneapolis family, the neighborhood was solidly middle-class through the 1940s, then experienced rapid disinvestment beginning in the 1950s as white residents left for the suburbs and federal urban renewal policies demolished housing and disrupted communities. Phillips became the landing point for multiple waves of people with few other options: African American families moving north during the Great Migration, Native American families drawn to the city after the federal Indian relocation policies of the 1950s, and later immigrant and refugee communities from Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Latin America.
The American Indian Movement was founded in Minneapolis in 1968, partly in this neighborhood, in response to police harassment of Native American residents. The AIM's founding in Minneapolis was part of a broader urban Native rights movement that also produced the American Indian OIC and the Heart of the Earth Survival School. Phillips is now one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Minnesota, with businesses, community organizations, and institutions representing dozens of cultures operating within a few blocks.