On the third Saturday of most months, the parking lot of the Liberian Community Center off Brooklyn Boulevard fills with the smell of fish frying in red palm oil and the bass of music that traveled four thousand miles to get here. Inside the shops nearby, the freezers are stacked with croaker and the shelves with fufu flour, cassava leaf, and toborgee. A woman fresh off a double shift at a nursing home loads her cart, switching between English and Liberian Kreyol with the cashier. The Liberians in Brooklyn Park, on the northwest edge of the Twin Cities, make up the largest population of Liberians anywhere outside Liberia itself.
They did not arrive by accident, and they did not arrive quietly. They came fleeing one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars, to a country their ancestors had once helped imagine. What they built in the snow is a story of survival, of two decades spent in legal limbo, and of a community that quite literally keeps Minnesota’s care system standing.
Brooklyn Park: The Place
Brooklyn Park sits on the west bank of the Mississippi River, due north of Minneapolis in Hennepin County, spread across roughly 26 square miles. It is Minnesota’s sixth-largest city, home to about 86,000 people, with Highway 252 running along its eastern edge, Highway 610 across the north, and Interstates 94 and 694 anchoring the south. The housing is mostly postwar and post-2000 suburban: ranch homes, split-levels, and newer subdivisions that filled in former farmland north of 85th Avenue. Brooklyn Center, its smaller sibling immediately to the south, shares both the Liberian community and the Shingle Creek corridor that runs between them.
How Brooklyn Park Became Liberian Minnesota
Before the Liberians
For more than a century, Brooklyn Park was farm country. Settlers arrived in 1852, the township organized in 1858, and the place stayed rural long after its neighbors filled in. It incorporated as a village only in 1954 and became a city in 1969. The Eidem Homestead, a working farm preserved from the early 1900s, still sits within city limits as a reminder of what the land used to be.
As late as 1990, Brooklyn Park was overwhelmingly white, a quiet bedroom suburb of market gardens turning slowly into cul-de-sacs. The transformation that followed was fast. By recent counts a majority of residents are people of color, with Black residents making up close to a third of the city. Few American suburbs have changed their face so completely in thirty years, and the Liberians were at the center of that change.
The Liberians Arrive
The thread that pulled them here was old and unlikely. Liberia was founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, which financed the resettlement of freed Black Americans on the West African coast. They named their capital Monrovia after President James Monroe and declared an independent republic in 1847, the first in Africa, under Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a man born free in Virginia. For more than a century, Liberia modeled its flag, its constitution, and its capitol on the United States. When Liberians later looked for refuge, America was not a foreign idea. It was, in a strange way, the country their nation had been built to resemble.
That bond was tested by catastrophe. Civil war broke out in 1989 and ground on, with one interruption, until 2003, killing an estimated 250,000 people and scattering families across refugee camps in Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Guinea. Minnesota, with its established refugee resettlement infrastructure and a small Liberian student presence dating to the early 1970s, became a landing point. The other major American magnet for Liberian refugees formed two thousand miles east, in the Liberian enclave of Park Hill on Staten Island. More than 800 Liberian refugees were resettled in Minnesota during the 1990s, with another wave arriving around 1999 and 2000 as fresh fighting erupted.
Then chain migration did the rest. The first arrivals sponsored relatives, told cousins about the jobs, and explained which suburbs had cheap apartments and decent schools. Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center, with their affordable rents along Brooklyn Boulevard, became the gravitational center. Newcomers landed where family already lived, and the community thickened block by block.
Brooklyn Park at Its Peak
By the 2010s, the numbers had climbed into the tens of thousands. Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office has estimated roughly 30,000 Liberians in Minnesota, and the International Institute of Minnesota has cited figures as high as 35,000, with the overwhelming majority in the Twin Cities and a clear concentration in the two Brooklyn suburbs. Smaller clusters formed in Robbinsdale, Richfield, and the Logan Park neighborhood of Northeast Minneapolis. The Liberians joined a metro area already remaking itself through African migration, alongside the Somalis of Cedar-Riverside and the large Oromo community of Minneapolis, though each settled its own corner of the Twin Cities and built its own institutions.
The community organized early and built institutions that outlasted the first generation. The Organization of Liberians in Minnesota, founded in 1973 as a student group and re-formed in 1978 after an early split, became the connective tissue: immigration help, burial funds, employment aid, and citizenship classes. Churches followed, then restaurants, then grocery stores stocked with the exact ingredients of home. A suburb that had been farmland within living memory now had a Liberian mayor’s race, a Liberian council member, and a Brooklyn Boulevard you could shop end to end in Liberian English.
The Change
The hardest chapter was not arrival but the decades of uncertainty that followed. Most Liberians who fled the war were never given a path to citizenship. They lived under Temporary Protected Status, first granted in 1991, and later Deferred Enforced Departure, granted in 2007, programs that let them work and stay but carried an expiration date and the constant threat of removal. Renewal came year by year, administration by administration, for people who had now spent two decades raising American children and caring for American elders.
In 2018 the threat became real. The Trump administration announced it would end Deferred Enforced Departure for roughly 3,600 Liberians, with a hard expiration date. Brooklyn Park’s churches and community groups mobilized, organizing trips to Washington and rallies at the State Capitol, while Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith pushed for a permanent fix for the state with the most Liberians to lose.
The relief, when it finally came, arrived in an unlikely vehicle. On December 20, 2019, the Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness provision was signed into law as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020. It offered eligible Liberians who had been continuously present since November 20, 2014, the chance to become lawful permanent residents and, eventually, citizens. Roseline Sackor, who had come during the Ebola crisis and worked as a home health aide in Brooklyn Park while raising two children, applied in the summer of 2020 and held her family’s green cards by that November. After three decades of temporary status, many neighbors did not believe the relief was real until the cards arrived in the mail.
The Landmarks of Liberian Brooklyn Park
Ebenezer Community Church (9200 West Broadway Avenue, Brooklyn Park) began on September 9, 2000, when four people met in a Brooklyn Park apartment for Bible study, led by Reverend Francis Tabla and his wife Christine, both shaped by the war they had escaped. The congregation grew past 800, moved four times, and bought 4.3 acres on West Broadway. It dedicated the first phase of its building in May 2016 and the full 34,000 square foot campus, costing upward of ten million dollars, in September 2021. It is widely described as the first predominantly Liberian immigrant congregation from Africa to construct its own church in the United States.
The Liberian Community Center (7001 78th Avenue North, in the Brooklyn Park area) is home to the Organization of Liberians in Minnesota, the community’s anchor since the 1970s. Its first president, Patrick Flomo, was an aviation student, and the group took its current shape in 1978 after eight hours of negotiation merged two rival student associations into one. During the pandemic, the organization ran a Brooklyn Park training pilot funded with city dollars that moved dozens of laid-off residents into certified nursing assistant jobs, a small program that captured the whole community’s economic story in miniature. As its director put it, for every one person trained, three people get to eat.
Waterside Market on Brooklyn Boulevard takes its name from the great sprawling market in the heart of Monrovia. It stocks plantain chips, fufu flour, palm oil, and frozen fish, the staples of a Liberian kitchen, and an attached Waterside African Kitchen ladles out Liberian stews, roasted fish, and goat meat soup. For families spread across a dozen suburbs, it is one of the places you restock the pantry of home.
MaMa Ti’s African Kitchen (7632 Brooklyn Boulevard, Brooklyn Park), run by Jerome Butler, is where the uninitiated come to taste Liberian food for the first time. The menu runs to pepper soup with plantain-flour fufu, stewed cassava leaves, potato greens fried in palm oil, kitily torborgee, oxtail, and house-made ginger beer. Butler likes to watch first-timers’ faces the moment the food lands.
EZ Stop Food Market (7641 Zane Avenue North, just off Brooklyn Boulevard) rounds out the corridor, a tidy grocery of frozen jute leaves, cow feet, fresh okra, red palm oil, and bitter balls. It is the kind of small shop where the owner knows every regular by name and the aisles double as a community bulletin board.
Where the Brooklyn Park Liberians Came From
Most came from Monrovia and the coastal counties hit hardest by the fighting, often by way of refugee camps in neighboring countries. They carry the country’s ethnic and linguistic range with them, from Bassa and Kpelle to the Americo-Liberian families descended from the original settlers, but in Minnesota they tend to move and worship and shop as one Liberian community.
The economic spine of that community is healthcare. Thousands of Liberian immigrants, many of them women, work in Minnesota’s care industry as certified nursing assistants, home health aides, and registered nurses in the hospitals and long-term care facilities that ring the Twin Cities. The work is hard and undersung, and it became dangerous during the pandemic, when Liberian aides kept showing up to nursing homes that had run short of protective gear. The phrase repeated across the community, that Liberians keep Minnesota’s nursing homes running, is less a slogan than a description of fact.
Brooklyn Park Today
The political arrival has been real. In November 2018, Wynfred Russell, who came to the United States in 2005 as a refugee student on a scholarship and went on to work as a public health researcher at the University of Minnesota, won a seat on the Brooklyn Park City Council. He was sworn in the following January as the city’s first Liberian American and first Black council member. He ran for mayor in 2022 and lost to Hollies Winston, who became Brooklyn Park’s first Black mayor in the same election, and whose own roots run not to Liberia but to a Mississippi sharecropper grandfather. A suburb that was almost entirely white in 1990 now contests its top offices among Black candidates of many origins.
Every July 26, the community marks Liberian Independence Day, the anniversary of the 1847 republic, with barbecue, music, and a black-tie ball. In 2025, organizers staged what they called the first Liberian Independence Day parade in Minnesota history, stepping off along Shingle Creek Parkway in Brooklyn Center and ending at Centennial Park, with seventy vendors and the colors of a country half a world away flying over a Minnesota suburb.
The second generation is now grown, raised on snow and fufu in equal measure, moving from rental apartments into owned homes and from the nursing-home floor into nursing degrees and city council chambers. The bond that began in 1822, when freed Americans sailed to found a republic, has folded back on itself: their descendants came home to the country that made theirs, and made a piece of it their own.
If your family’s story passed through Brooklyn Park, through a refugee camp, a nursing-home night shift, or a church built brick by brick in the snow, it deserves to be remembered with the same care.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Liberians settle in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota?
Liberians first came to Minnesota as refugees from the civil war that began in 1989, drawn by the state’s refugee resettlement programs and a small Liberian student community dating to the 1970s. Once the first families settled in the affordable suburbs of Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center, chain migration did the rest, as relatives sponsored relatives and newcomers landed where family already lived.
Is Brooklyn Park still a Liberian community today?
Yes. The Liberians in Brooklyn Park remain the largest Liberian population outside Liberia, anchored by churches, restaurants, and grocery stores along Brooklyn Boulevard. The community has grown into local politics, electing the city’s first Liberian-born council member, and its second generation is now buying homes and entering the professions.
What are the most famous Liberian landmarks in Brooklyn Park?
Ebenezer Community Church on West Broadway Avenue is often called the first Liberian immigrant congregation from Africa to build its own church in the United States. Along Brooklyn Boulevard, Waterside Market, named for Monrovia’s main market, and MaMa Ti’s African Kitchen are cornerstones of Liberian life in the city.
Where did the Brooklyn Park Liberians come from?
Most came from Monrovia and Liberia’s coastal counties, fleeing the civil war that raged from 1989 to 2003, frequently after years in refugee camps in Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Guinea. Liberia itself was founded in 1822 by freed Black Americans, a history that made the United States a natural destination.
When did Liberians first arrive in Minnesota?
A small number of Liberian students were in Minnesota by the early 1970s, but the major migration began in the 1990s as refugees fleeing the civil war. More than 800 were resettled during that decade, with another wave around 1999 and 2000. As families grew and saved through the 2000s, the Liberians in Brooklyn Park became the largest Liberian community in the United States, by some estimates 30,000 or more across Minnesota.