When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, my boyfriend and I went to a meeting at The Way on the northside. I hung on every word Spike Moss said. He spoke to my demographic: “All you white women need to talk to your husbands and dads and tell them to hire more Black men.” They handed out yard signs— white with black letters that read: “White Racism Must Go.” My boyfriend’s brother blacked out the word “white” to make it look like Racism Must Go—like those today who change Black Lives Matter to All lives Matter.

— Jane Burnett

Growing Up in St. Louis Park, MN

My parents moved from Northeast to Loring Park when I was born. My dad was going to the U of M on the GI bill. When he graduated, we moved into a new development in St. Louis Park, on the western edge of the metro area. Beyond our backyard was a farm. There were no sidewalks, just mud, young parents and a gazillion kids, so I always had someone to play with. The suburb had recently  stopped enforcing housing covenants restricting Jews and Blacks. Some of the first Jews in St. Louis Park   lived in our neighborhood. There were also a few Latinos with anglicized names and some Japanese American families.  I didn’t know about Japanese-American internment until I was in my 30s. Recently, on a trip to the Northwest, I went to the memorial site at Bainbridge Island, and an internment exhibit in Portland, Oregon, and found out that there had been a Military Intelligence Service Language School at Fort Snelling for young Japanese American men. Some young women came with them and went to Macalester, St Olaf, Carleton and then stayed after college. A small number settled in St Louis Park.

Though I had Latinx and Japanese American neighbors and classmates, I  perceived my world as all white. The teaching staff at the public school was white and Christian which, given the percentage of Jews in St. Louis Park, was out of whack. I did have one Jewish principal. I am trying to remember if I ever had a teacher of color.  I don’t think so.

In the mid-1950s I became aware of the civil rights movement, but not in an activist way. I saw it on the news. My parents watched the 6pm broadcast every night. Our history/ social studies classes didn’t cover civil rights or treaty rights. To their credit they did not lambast the Soviet Union — although that might be because year after year, we never seemed to get past WWII in our history courses.  One of my early elementary school teachers would read us Caldecott books, some which were about racism, slavery and civil rights. I learned more about history from those books.

I was in third grade when I learned about the Holocaust — in a Scholastic Reader story about a young Jewish woman, Hannah Senesh, who was “dropped behind enemy lines to rescue Jews from  being deported to Auschwitz.” That story started me going to the library to see what else I could find. I liked to read about Aryans who sheltered Jews and Quakers involved in the underground railroad. I thought I would do that, if I were in the same situation.  I was nine. I thought I had everything I needed to do the right thing. When, in college, I had the opportunity to do something much easier than ‘sheltering Anne Frank”— like get to know the few people of color in my college class — I didn’t do it. I think sometimes we relate to the starkest choices and we erase the everyday choices available to us.

 

Suburban/Urban Exchange in High School

In high school (1964-68) we had a domestic exchange program. For my first three years it was with a Chicago suburb, whiter and wealthier than ours. In senior year we voted to change it up —to exchange with inner city Detroit, Denver, Boston and North and South Minneapolis.

During that suburban/urban exchange, I met people from Minneapolis who are involved in our city’s politics today. A student from Central high school stayed at my boyfriend’s house. I remember talking to five students from Denver: a Black women, Black man, a Latina, a white man and white woman who had experienced integrated schools for years. After a party, a group of us were sitting around a table talking about race. The first time I ever did that. A Black student told me he could tell I was Scandinavian. It opened a part of my mind that hadn’t been opened before; realizing that group assessments were going both directions. Later that spring, when student council was voting on the budget, there was a backlash against the urban/suburban exchange. We had to battle to keep it —my first political organizing campaign.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that same spring. The next school day we were allowed to talk and process it. It was interesting to see the students who were the most upset. One student even had buttons to distribute. I took it upon myself to go around my neighborhood asking for donations, with no idea where I would send the contributions. People gave me a fair amount. In one house I woke up the dad. He yelled at me, then called me back and gave me more money than anyone else. My boyfriend and I went to a meeting at The Way on the North side. I don’t think I told my parents. I hung on every word Spike Moss said. He spoke to my demographic: “All you white women need to talk to your husbands and dads and tell them to hire more Black men.”

I went home to talk to my dad. He was a civil engineer working for a construction company. He said two things: “There aren’t enough qualified Black men”, and the “unions won’t let us.” (Later, at the Ford plant, I worked to change my own union’s discriminatory policies.) The Way handed out yard signs— white with black letters that read: “White racism must go.” My boyfriend’s brother blacked out the word “White” to make it look like “All racism must go”—All lives matter…

I was involved in a Lutheran youth group. Each year teenagers gave a sermon. They gave each of us a topic. Mine was race relations. Another youth wrote about needing a pool table. I ended my sermon: “What is more important a pool table or race relations? If you are Christians — Christ-like — for Christ’s sake, do something!” One congregant was crying when she came up to me after my sermon. She took my hand and said thank you. I didn’t know until many years later that her family was Latinx.

The editor of the national Lutheran magazine published my sermon. Someone from KTCA TV saw it and asked if I would be part of a youth panel talking about race relations. My boyfriend drove me to the KTCA studio. A young Black man from North Minneapolis I remember as Mousey Patterson — joined us. One panelist did not show up. They asked my boyfriend— who was white and Jewish — if he wanted to speak too. One of the things he said was “My grandparents are bigots.” When it was my turn, I said my parents weren’t doing anything to change race relations. All they cared about was themselves.

My parents had told everyone to listen in because their daughter was going to be on TV. They were so mad at me. So hurt. In many ways, my boyfriend and I were right, but we were so self-righteous.

The day I graduated from high school, my father woke me up early. He said, “Bobby Kennedy was killed. It is going to get so no good man will run for office.”

 

An Urban Education:  Chicago, 1971

I started college thinking there would be a revolution in the next five years. I didn’t know what that would mean, I just thought things were going to change. I enrolled in an Urban Studies program my junior year — Spring 1971. It was a course in growing up. We lived in our own apartments in Chicago. We had to hook up the gas and electricity, pay our bills, deal with landlords. None of us had lived alone or in cities.

We learned the history and power structure of Chicago. We’d have a presentation by an AFDC recipient in the morning and meet with the head of Chicago’s biggest bank in the afternoon. We learned about the corruption of the city — the patronage. It was an amazing time to be in Chicago. The Black Stone Rangers, a Chicago street gang, changed their name to the Black P Stone Nation adopting the political philosophy of Black Nationalists. People’s Clinics were popping up. Mexican, Puerto Rican and Appalachian youth (whose parents came to Chicago to dig the subways in the 1940s and 50s) created an organization Rising Up Angry. 

We saw the movie Battle of Algiers and heard first hand testimony from the Pakistani journalist Eqbal Ahmad, who was in Algiers during the revolution. We met members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, organizing Black auto workers in Detroit. We got to hear Fred Hampton’s brother, and other Black Panthers. It was an amazing education.

The 1971 city primary was going on when we were there. The Daley Democratic Party machine was in full force. Every bus stop  bench had Daley’s picture on it. I volunteered to work for a Black man — John Stevens — running for alderperson against the Daley candidate. They had rules about where you could stand at the polling place.On election day I was standing where I should, handing out literature. Two huge men from a city-owned parking lot on the corner told me to come talk to them. When I refused they came after me. One had a monkey wrench. I turned and walked away as fast as I could. A strange man was coming toward me. I whispered to him. “Pretend like you know me and walk with me.” They turned around then.

I went door to door for John Stevens at the Cabrini Green Projects. My mentors told me I shouldn’t go there, but I never had any trouble. Every apartment had the trio of photographs — John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.

My senior project at St. Olaf College was to design a J-term Urban Studies program.  They paid me to organize it the next year. I graduated in 1972.  I wanted to go back to Chicago.  I had been a folklore major at St.Olaf. I didn’t have any plans so I enrolled in journalism school at Northwestern University. While I was there, Richard and Vivian Rothstein from the Democratic Party called me and asked if I would be a city ward manager for the McGovern campaign.  I had no idea how to do that.They said they would help me, but I didn’t have the confidence. I said no.

I enrolled in a grad school in  Broadcast Journalism at Northwestern. They  tried to teach you to self censor. They saw the power struggle in the United States as between Democrats and Republicans. I didn’t. The department and I parted ways over the Vietnam War. I did a taped interview with a Veteran against the War who was organizing people-to-people aid. He talked about his experience in the villages — how they were suffering. The professor wouldn’t let me air it. He said “People don’t want to hear that crap.” That was a turning point for me.

Who gets to decide what is news?

 

Becoming an Advocate for Palestinian Rights

While I was in journalism school, Palestinians with the group Black September murdered 11 Israel athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972. Their demand was to free Palestinian prisoners in Israel. That became the moment that the word “Palestinian” was equated with the word “terrorist” in the U.S. media.

I was a Zionist at the time. I had grown up with Jewish classmates and neighbors, and felt that the creation of Israel was the only thing left to establish justice for Jews. I never questioned that. I believed all the propaganda — about an empty desert now occupied and in bloom; about Jews reaching out to unify with Palestinians. It was Jewish friends who went to Israel and came back and said — “It’s not what they told us,” that got me questioning. I had no reason to distrust them.  Until then I had compartmentalized how I looked at justice.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982) catapulted me into half a decade of organizing around Palestinians rights. I read a letter to the editor by a Palestinian-American who said: “Would someone please tell me why we are able to turn our backs on this? It is an act of terrorism.”

I telephoned the writer — Noha Ismail, to express support. A group of Israeli teenagers was coming to sing “Israeli folk songs” at Lake Harriet bandshell. We organized a silent vigil. Among us, there were Palestinian Muslims and Christians. One man had lost family members in the massacre. We sat on the benches holding pictures of massacred children and signs that said: “These kids will never sing and dance again.” There were 30 of us.

(I kind of wanted to hear the Israeli folk songs. I was a folklore major. I knew those songs. I had been singing them since I was 13-14. But they sang the soundtrack to Fiddler on the Roof and Exodus.)

In 1986 Muslims in the Twin Cities purchased a school building in Fridley for an Islamic Center. There was pushback. At a forum in support of the Center, I was asked to speak as an “American” — even though the other speakers were all U.S. citizens. A teenage Muslim American boy — homecoming king at one of the area high schools — also spoke.

Through that work, I met people who were doing organizing in Israel. That is how I learned about how important water is. Israel was able to dig deeper wells, diverting and water from Palestinian farms to Israeli golf courses, farms and cities.

One of our campaigns was to try to get the news media to stop using the words “Palestinian” and “terrorist” interchangeably, and to use Palestinian sources in their reporting.

In 1985, Eqbal Ahmad and Noam Chomsky had initiated a national effort to push the U.S. peace and justice movement to Break the Silence on Palestine. I led the organizing for a conference at the Luther Seminary in St. Paul and invited Eqbal Ahmad to keynote. He said we needed to fight for: 1. Right of return. 2. Acknowledgement and apology for the removal of people from their homeland. 3. Reparations.  4. A two-state solution. He said “Israel needs to acknowledge that in this particular case, the Palestinians are the wronged party.”

In the mid 1980s, it was agreed among most foreign policy experts that the Middle East was the most likely flashpoint for nuclear war.

 

“Organizing the Working Class” at the Ford Plant in St. Paul

In late 1977-78, I was involved in a Marxist-Leninist group. There was a trend among predominantly white and college-educated activists to go into the factories to “organize the working class.” (I hope readers hear my sarcasm).

I got hired at the Ford Plant and joined a group of workers in UAW local 879 who had formed a “Unity Caucus” using the namesake of Socialist labor activists, led by Victor and Walter Ruther who organized auto workers in Flint, and Detroit, Michigan in the 1930s. Our local had the 1930s Unity Caucus goals posted on the walls. Some of those goals are still radical:  like health care for all, and full employment by shortening the work week.

Our work week in the late 1970s was 58 hours. Ten-hour week days and eight-hour Saturdays. We got overtime pay so we were making a ton of money. I was able to buy a house in South Minneapolis. I owe my home to the UAW. But I was so tired all the time. All I did was sleep, drive to work, eat and buy groceries. I worked the third shift. We got off at 4am.

Our first fight was for convenient meeting times for night-shift workers whose shift started at 6pm. Before we won, they had to come in four hours before our shift started to attend a union meeting.

We had our caucus meetings at the Poppin Fresh Pie shop –later Baker’s Square — across the street from the plant. We published a newsletter and put out lots of leaflets. We would hand them out before work at the plant door. We had a half hour lunch break and we accumulated six minutes of break time for every hour we worked, taken in two breaks of 20 and 40 minutes.

My station was farthest from the cafeteria. It would take almost my entire lunch period to walk there and back. I spent my break time walking down the line, talking to people.

I worked in the chassis department — the headlight wire-loom job. To put in the tiny lights for the blinkers, I wore cotton gloves, a new pair every night because they got shredded from the wires. I had to work fast and pick up tiny parts.

If you worked 90 days you were in. On my 87th day they moved me to a job for a much larger person, wrenching the truck from underneath. I weighed 120 pounds. They put me there because they knew I couldn’t do it. They wanted to fire me. The guys I worked with told management I was too small.

A guy working next to me told me to take a dive so I did.  He caught me and said that I had fainted. They sent me to their quack doctor whose job it was to make sure the company avoided lawsuits and workers compensation claims. He diagnosed me with a syndrome. They couldn’t fire me if there was a medical reason why I couldn’t do the job. So then I was in, protected by the union.

Then I really started organizing. People came to me during their breaks. The workers were mostly men. Veterans had preference in hiring at Ford. White vets first, then veterans of color, then white women, then Black and Latina women.

When Ford was hiring, seniority would be assigned by the minute you signed your contract.

We pushed for an affirmative action policy called super seniority, to change seniority so that people of color would not be the first to be laid off. This was a demand being introduced by progressive UAW locals across the country. We never got that.

We organized for a lottery for getting into the skilled trades — painters, pipe fitters, electricians. Those jobs were easier, better paid, and all white. They only worked when equipment broke down. Otherwise they sat in the break room and played cards. Guys got into the trades based on favoritism and family connections. They made more in eight hours than we made in ten. We wanted equal chance for everyone to go through that training. It was a long battle. We had to talk about racism and sexism. We won it. We were the first UAW local who had the skilled trades lottery in our contract.

We also fought for and won a health and safety rep, who was paid a union wage to let us know about the chemicals we were handling, to enforce our right to refuse to handle poisons, to enforce effective masks and ventilations systems. We made ergonomics an issue and chiropractic services a benefit.

Most of all, we fought for the right to organize — to conduct union business while at work. We brought a suit to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), against Ford for targeting Unity Caucus members for organizing.  I was a plaintiff in the suit.

They did everything they could to silence me. After Christmas break I came back and found my work station surrounded by storage shelves. They wanted to hide me so other workers could not reach me to talk about their grievances.

They put me on a heavy “punishment” job, by myself. The person I replaced used to play for the Vikings. He was so strong. I injured my back trying to do the job but ended up walking off because the foreman wanted me to work faster.  The guy who put me in that position— his name was Bill Brandt. I wish I had knocked him out with my wrench. He wouldn’t have expected it.

My doctor put me on medical leave. While I was gone, the plant shut down for maintenance. When they did that, you had to be ready to go back to work when called. I was in Boston when the certified call-back letter came. Even though I was on medical leave, when I got back, they fired me.

But we won the NLRB suit. They determined that Ford had violated our rights: interrogating workers because they filed grievances, disciplining people for exercising their union rights. They had to rehire people, pay for time lost, and expunge discipline records. They also had to post a notice at the time clocks notifying all workers that they had violated the law.

Though I was named in the suit I did not get my job back. The referee who decided against me argued that because I was a college graduate, I should have understood the consequences of leaving town. And the factory doctor testified against me. The judge said “Why would a doctor lie?”

My caucus kept organizing. Because I was married to another caucus member I was still involved. And I still bugged them. Once I brought him his lunch and I heard over the loud-speaker,”Burnett is here.” That still makes me smile.

Our work had a lasting impact. By 1984 we had been organizing at the plant for over eight years. The Unity Caucus swept the union elections. We also organized on the plant floor for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. For years the only time they closed the doors for a non-holiday, was on the first day of deer season and the fishing opener. February 1984, so many people left to caucus for Jesse Jackson in the presidential primary, they had to shut the plant down for precinct caucus night.

 

A Collective For Change On The Hill: the Fight for Racial Justice at St. Olaf College, 2017 to Present.

When I attended St. Olaf College — a Norwegian Lutheran school in Northfield—(1968-72), it was overwhelmingly white and Christian. They had begun trying to recruit Black students during the mid-late 1960s, without much thought given to how the college’s culture would affect students of color or how its white students and faculty would interact with them.

In May 2017 an anti-racist movement of discussion, protest and demands was organized at St Olaf, focused on institutional racism and campus climate for students of color, Indigenous and international students. The impetus was a series of racist notes posted throughout campus targeting Black students, but the movement quickly broadened its focus. The student leadership, the Collective for Change on the Hill, presented insightful demands, including more funding for race and ethnic studies, more faculty of color, and a class on race that would be a requirement for first year students, among other things.  

They solicited support from alumni. I went down to Northfield to attend a large public gathering of students and alumni.  The students wanted to discuss how to implement their anti-racist demands. The college president wanted to focus on the hate notes and catching the perpetrators, thinking that would solve the problem.

It was the most joyous gathering I have ever been part of at St. Olaf. There were some parents, a few alumni, and hundreds of students. We talked in small groups.

After several hours, the President and his administrative team came in, looking extremely uncomfortable.  Several of them are alumni. It showed me the college had not prepared us to understand and address racism.  That should be the focus of a St. Olaf education.

I have never seen better organizing than what I saw from students in the Collective on the Hill. I was just awed by it. It was clear to me that they had learned from people from various movements and networks. These young people make me really hopeful.