With the historic mayoral election, Chicago is on our minds. For Minneapolitans, it should always be in the back of our thoughts, because our city– in so many ways– sits on those broad shoulders.
Dominant perceptions of Chicago’s impact on Minneapolis are often inaccurate. Below are excerpts of Minneapolis Interview Project essays, in which people testify about coming from, going to, and gaining insight from institutions and movements in Chicago.
I grew up in a city that was Black and held me up. Not Black and un-oppressed but—in one of the most racially segregated cities in the North—Black and loving, Black and joyful, Black and happy. Most importantly I grew up experiencing love within my family—inherited and chosen. They were kind and treated themselves and others with dignity. That informs how I think about the world.
Being from the Southside, the Hyde Park area near Lake Michigan, and into the south suburbs, means I came from a community that experienced displacement. It also means, I grew up in a community where people looked like me. There were lots of cultures, but a shared sense of reality. We knew which streets to go down and which to avoid.
Elementary school, we moved further south in Chicago. More of my teachers and administrators were White and not from the area; not accessible to the kids. But there were some amazing programs.
The school was in a racially transforming neighborhood. White homeowners let their dogs loose on us when we walked home from school. My track skills came into use then. And I learned to climb trees. I learned strategy: how to stay safe and distract the dogs. We had to be skilled and flexible and work as a team to get home. They did this every day. And we’d be 20 kids deep, trying to get home, dealing with these dogs.
The South Shore and Chatham neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side are middle and working class and majority Black. That was my growing up experience. In 1970, when I was born, the Great Migration was coming to an end. Blacks were the majority of the city, but until Harold Washington (Mayor, 1983-87) they didn’t have political power.
In the 80s, Black people were trying to grab the American Dream, trying to make it — that Reagan, supply side nonsense. It didn’t work out for most people. There was a lot of unrest among young folks. Gangs and drug addiction were reaching their height. I found myself in the middle of that.
I did a post-doc at University of Chicago. The city looms large in sociological study — by the time I arrived there, I had read seminal studies of Black life in Chicago, but it was my first time actually being there. It was in Chicago that I began orienting myself toward community organizing for Black political power and activist scholarship.
My Dad grew up in Chicago. His family were Polish Jews. They lived in a Chicago neighborhood where everyone spoke Yiddish, My Dad didn’t learn English until he went to school. When I was little Grandma still lived on the South side in the Cabrini Green/ Division Street Projects. I spent summers with her, when there were very few white families left. Everyone’s doors were unlocked. People walked in an out of each other’s apartments.
In the evening Grandma would turn her place into a restaurant. People would come and pay whatever they could afford. She cooked brisket, chopped liver, and all the k foods: knishes, kneidlach, (matza balls) kugel, kreplach, and cabbage. She put schmaltz on everything, instead of butter. She always had Jewish baked goods, like mandlelbrot and sugar cookies.
I enrolled in an Urban Studies program in Chicago my junior year — Spring 1971. It was an amazing time to be in Chicago. The Black Stone Rangers, a Chicago street gang, had changed their name to the Black P Stone Nation and adopted 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, were rising up angry and organized….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 primary election for city offices was going on. The Daley machine was in full force. Every park 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 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.
My parents met in Chicago and became best friends in 3rd grade. After they married in 1941, they moved to a strong African American community on 92nd St — the far south side of Chicago. That is where I was born, December, 1945.
South Chicago had a strong southern atmosphere in those days. Our Black Lutheran Minister Dickinson came from out of Alabama. My first accent was southern. He used African American spirituals outside of the Lutheran hymnal: Let Us Break Bread Together and Were You There..
I had a tendency to wander, so the whole neighborhood had to watch out for me. My mother called me her Wandering Jew. Once she tried to put a leash on me. My Dad said no to that. We lived close to urban fields. Watching spiders spinning webs in high grass, following the movements of birds and insects; I would be totally transfixed. I think that is why my current practice of meditation feels so natural. I’d get so caught up in the sound and sights of the natural world. There was no boundary between me and it. That is when I first learned to hear voices.
The Illinois Central railroad ran right beyond the house. On the other side was a forest and a pond. I was told never to go there. My mother created a petition demanding a fence between us and the railroad tracks. She was my first model of activism.
Chicago is always in the eye of education experiments: privatization, military control, charter schools. My high school was a regular public school. The students came from five surrounding predominantly Black elementary schools. The campus was larger than most universities. There were 200 after-school activities. I played tennis, basketball, softball. We had to pay for books and things. It was better than any I have heard of in Minneapolis, though it was on the “watch list.” I had only two White teachers.
I loved my community. I had all these Black icons, artists, intellectuals and professionals who had not made that flight to the suburbs, who influenced me. Three blocks away lived Dr. Margaret Burroughs, who designed and curated the internationally renowned DuSable African-American History museum. To me she was just Ms. Burroughs, but when I grew older I realized what a gift she was. So while we had dangerous challenges we also had these folks who would look out for you. Anyone of them could tell you “its time to go inside.” We learned to listen to them pretty early on. They earned our respect.
My grandmother had an apartment building, occupied by my entire family. I learned that family were supposed to live together and chip in. Childcare was handled in the community. If there was a TV to be purchased we all got it together, including me. It was empowering, in a way. We were all involved in these big decisions. We were living in poverty, but it didn’t feel that way. It wasn’t a democracy, but as a kid I had an impact, a voice. It was a way of valuing, loving and caring for each other. Knowing how to be resilient. I try to instill that in my own kids. Perspective about value — not just material value. How we take care of each other, how we love each other. I learned that in Chicago with my family environment.
Stop and Frisk was just general practice in Chicago in the 1980s. The police were gearing up for what they called a “war against the gangs.” They started to treat us all as potential gang members. Everything we were doing as kids became suspect. The police they would stop us, pat us down. It was so common we came up with our own satire about it. I’d be coming home from school in my Catholic uniform and the police would stop me and ask me where the drugs were…
Chicago today has the reputation for extreme gun violence. I looked at the statistics. There were more shootings the year I was 21, then in the last five years combined, yet today the storytelling focuses on the violence. So, though there were more challenges when I was young, it didn’t seem like it. A rich alchemy of good and bad, love and hate. Extremes. That was Chicago.
In 2002 someone gave a presentation in my U of M poli-sci class about an AFL-CIO social justice organizing institute in Minneapolis—a three-day training. At the institute, a Hotel Worker Union in Chicago offered me a trial job.
My first months in the union movement, I was still pretty clueless. I knew it was good to fight for people to get raises, and that people need a place to file a grievance and I was helping them do that. That was the depth of my understanding.
Eight months in, I was part of a campaign to organize hotel housekeepers around workload issues. Even though they had a union and a contract their workload was too high. The primary demand was for less work — thirteen rooms a shift, instead of fifteen. Meeting women in their homes, one on one; I started to see how much fear people had, even though they had a union. I also saw the toll of their workload. Women would make dinner, fall asleep, get up and work. They were so tired from overwork.
The day we were ready to act, I was on the floor saying “lets go.” Everyone was scared and shaking– but that changed as we got into the elevator to ride down. They pumped each other up, realizing they had power together. When we got off the elevator they were ready. They went into the housekeeping office, made their demand — and no-one got fired.
In my neighborhood, children, girls and women, disappeared, like in Latin America; Black people missing on a regular basis. While I was in kindergarten, people dressed as clowns abducted children: organ harvesting. That year there were crossing guards on every corner. We had to have a buddy system. Everything was on lock down. We were taught to look people in the eye, because you were more likely to be taken if you were looking at the ground, if you were not confident.
My step-dad, who was White, walked me to school because of the clowns. Kids made fun of me for walking with a White man. I was one of the few kids who had someone walking them to school. I didn’t like it.
When I would go home to Chicago to visit in the late 1960,s I witnessed the — beginning of Black Arts Movement. I used to visit Ellis’s Bookstore, around 63rd and Stoney Island, on the south side of Chicago. It was near a popular movie and stage theater called the Tivoli — a cultural hub for African American Chicago. Restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, funeral homes, dentists. The bookstore was a product of the civil rights movement. I started to buy Black poetry there. There was a Black Poets collective Organization of Black American Culture (pronounced Obasi – Yoruba word for chieftain). They were mimeographing their own poetry, stapling it together and reading it in restaurants, bars and barbershops. Poetry coming from and going to the people.
Haki Madhubuti was a leader of that movement. He started Third World Press. We were listening to our own speech — finding it filled with poetry. Poetry was not only what they taught us in school which a lot of us were bored with. We didn’t want work in the straight jacket of western forms. One of our mentors, Gwendolyn Brooks, could step into the European sonnet form and rip it up and down the page. When she was invited to sit with OBAC poets, something bloomed. They changed each other.
I returned to Chicago in 1974, after breaking up with Aster. I was really disoriented but I was able to step into the Black Arts Movement, and meet people who were Chicagoans, but also other people from the African diaspora coming in and out of the city. I was exposed to the Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians — a Black Musician’s collective. I would hear them on Monday nights at a place called Transitions East. I think it was started by a man who just passed away — Phil Cohran. Later he was given a name by some Chinese Muslims –Kelan. Baba Phil — when he played with his group — it was hypnotic. He taught me how art, music and science were connected. Another man mentored me during that time. I called him Baba Ben Israel. He was a leader of the Hebrew Israelites. He read the Torah with a Pan-Africanist perspective. He was my spiritual mentor for several years until I moved back here.
I ended up in a writers group organized by Gwendolyn Brooks that was started in the 1940s. When Langston Hughes came to town he would stay with Gwendolyn’s family and meet up with them. One of my high school buddies wormed his way into it — had a girlfriend who was the daughter of group member. I was pretty insecure about my writing. They opened the door and were very affirming. I got to know Gwendolyn and her husband Henry — very kind and generous.
All I gathered in that experience in the Black arts movement I brought back to Minneapolis.
Student government at U of M had filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against intercollegiate athletics. We did an investigation of facilities and scholarships to bolster the lawsuit that had been filed in 1973-74, but didn’t get anywhere until the Office of Civil Rights–centered in Chicago–took the case. Then we won.
There is this perception that there has been this massive migration of people coming to Minneapolis from Chicago for welfare and services. When people first meet me I get that. When they get to know me the attitude changes. Hopefully it starts to change how much they rely on that false information that was given to them. They don’t even know where they got it from. They might not even know anybody who moved from Chicago but they think they know what that means. It’s amazing the way the imagination can take a narrative like that and run with it.
Chicago has influenced Minneapolis in many positive ways. You can see it when you go to hear music at the Dakota. The Minneapolis sound, Corn Bread Harris, and Jimmy Jam, were influenced by Chicago jazz, for example. Chicago has a huge Black middle class that Minneapolis doesn’t have. It would be great to have that here. We could recruit that talent.
___________________________
Anne Winkler-Morey, Ph.D. is a writer, historian, educator and activist based in Minneapolis. She is a scholar of social movements, nationalism and inequality in the US and Latin America. In 2011-12 she and her spouse biked the perimeter of the United States, with forays into Mexico and Canada, 12,000 miles. Her book about the trip: Wind: Bicycling America’s Political Divides is forthcoming. She has published excerpts on turtleroad.org
Her Minneapolis Interview Project (turtleroad.org) is aiming for 100 interviews: stories of people whose lives reflect on inequality and social justice in Minneapolis.
She also blogs on people’s history and social movements on turtleroad.org.