I had drawn up a set of twelve demands to be presented to the Principal. The idea was to organize students into a political block and, with support from our parents and neighborhood institutions, stage a walkout and a boycott of classes until our demands were met—a direct political action.
I was inspired by the work of student activists at the University of Minnesota such as John Wright, the reading I had been doing in association with the Black Panther Party, especially the writings of Franz Fanon, and the educational work of Mahmoud El-Kati, who had started teaching at Macalester College. College students at the U of MN and Macalester were successfully demanding Black Studies. We needed that at Washburn High School.
— Ronald Judy
Table of Contents
The Judys, Minnesota Roots
I was born in 1954 to Ronald and Ida Judy. My father’s family has roots in Minnesota going back to 1883. My Grandpa, Ronald Ambrose Judy, was born in Minneapolis in 1910. All his siblings were born here as well—his sister Corinne in 1898, his brothers Kenneth Franklin and John Llewellyn in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Grandpa was close to his older brother Kenneth, and would take me to visit him and his wife Grace when they lived at 37th and Fifth Avenue. Uncle Kenneth gave me my first bicycle in 1958, a Western Flyer, and introduced me to Shasta cherry cola. He was a Pullman Porter, a union man and friend of Nelson Peery. He died in 2004 just a month shy of his 101st birthday. Grandpa’s mother, Grace Kane, was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1882. She came to Minneapolis as an infant with her parents, Benjamin Franklin Kane Jr., and Ofelia Jennie Carter Kane in 1883. Benjamin was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of a black father and white mother around 1859, and Ofelia in Illinois around 1856. Her mother, Margret Carter, was white, and her father Anishinaabe (Ojibwa). Grace and her five siblings grew up in South Minneapolis. Grandpa’s father, John Ambrose Judy, followed his brother, Isaac, to Minnesota around 1890. He was born in Missouri. Grandpa claimed he was Native American, and the Judy family name appears in the Dawes Commission list of Choctaw freedmen. Grandpa was rather close to Grace’s youngest brother, Fred Kane, who lived in Crow Wing County where he had a house on Pelican Lake. Grandpa kept a bullet trailer-home on his Uncle Fred’s property, and we spent a couple of weeks on many summers up there fishing and hiking. He was a great hunter, up until his death in 1992, and belonged to a group of black hunters from South Minneapolis; I think they formed some sort of club or association.
The Boswells, Black Yankees and the Long Civil Rights Struggle
My father’s maternal grandfather and grandmother, Noah and Marie Boswell came to Minneapolis from Pennsylvania in 1910 and bought their home at 3521 4th Avenue a couple years later. Both were of black Yankee families, his from Pennsylvania and Vermont, hers from New York. At that time, Noah worked as a Pullman Porter on the railroad. Noah and Marie had two children, Ruth, my grandmother, and her brother Paul, both of whom were born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Minneapolis. After establishing themselves in Minneapolis over the course of 15 years, the Boswells relocated back in Mechanicsburg Pennsylvania, where they opened and ran a restaurant until 1933 or so. They kept the house in Minneapolis during that time and would spend part of the summer there. In 1933, Noah and Marie separated, with her and their now adult children moving back to the house in Minneapolis. At some point, Marie opened a restaurant on Lake Street. Grand-Marie, as we called her, played a major role in my early childhood, until her death in 1970.
As I said, the Boswells were black Yankees. Ardent advocates of education and racial uplift, they were active members of the NAACP and very involved in black civic institutions. Among my most vivid memories of her was sitting with her and other members of the W.E. B. Du Bois reading circle in Minneapolis—an impressive gathering of Minneapolis black women of stature, including Cecil Newman’s first wife, Willa Coleman—while they discussed the issues of the day in light of DuBois’s writings. It was as a child sitting on the edge of those gatherings that I first became acquainted with Du Bois, the NAACP, and the mission of racial uplift —for Grand-Marie, it was a call to duty—and concomitantly cultural pride. I spent a great deal of time with Grand-Marie, who never tired of telling me stories about the Harlem Renaissance and the accomplishments of black intellectuals and artists. She knew Langston Hughes personally through her son Paul who had befriended him when they were at Lincoln University together, and had an autographed first-edition copy of The Dream Keeper, in which Hughes inscribed: “To Mrs. Marie P. Boswell, whose hospitality helped make my trip to the Twin Cities so pleasant a one, Sincerely, Langston Hughes,” signed, New York, October 30, 1935. She would read to me from this volume, which I inherited when she died and still have it to this day. She also gave me my first copy of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk—the 1961 Fawcett World Library edition, with an introduction by Saunders Redding—for my birthday in 1967. Both my grandma Ruth and her brother Paul were fully steeped in this tradition of black learning and thought. Grandma Ruth attended Wilberforce College. During the Second World War, she worked in the secretarial pool at the Department of the Navy in Washington DC while Grand-Marie raised dad. After the war, she worked as an instructor at the University of Minnesota Nurses College until her retirement in 1972. Her brother Paul, graduated from the HBCU, Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania and then the University of Minnesota Medical school. He did his residency in Chicago at Provident Hospital, and eventually was a senior attending physician at Michael Reese Hospital. Uncle Paul served in the Illinois House of Representatives as a Republican from 1965-66. He was very active in the Civil Rights movement, and during his single term as a state legislator, he authored a significant bill prohibiting racial discrimination in housing. Uncle Paul was a close friend of John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines. Up until his death in 1982, he ran a pro bono medical office on Chicago’s Southside, where he attended to patients once a week. His wife, Arnita Young Boswell, was Whitney Young Jr.’s sister, and directed the women’s division of Martin Luther King’s 1966 Chicago civil rights demonstration. Aunt Arnita was a professor of social work at the University of Chicago, and the first national director for Project Head Start. In a very real sense, these people provided me with my first introduction to black political and cultural thought.
The Mansons, Baseball, Rabo Encendido and Radical Thought
My mother’s parents, Floyd and Myrtle Manson, emigrated here from Mississippi in 1940. Her father, whom we called Grandad, was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans. His mother, Gertrude Allen, was a free woman of color, a Creole. His father, Eduardo—he went by Edward— was born in San Luis de Santiago de Cuba. Edward’s people were among the free blacks who agitated against the Spanish before 1898. We were always told that was why he and his mother, Mari, were expelled and settled in New Orleans. Grandad’s mother died when he was six or so, and he was raised by his father and grandmother in a Spanish-speaking home.
Grandad was a quiet man who, like uncle Kenneth, had been a member of the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters. I don’t know what rail-line he worked, but I still have a photograph of him in his Pullman uniform with Woody Guthrie, circa 1940. He was also a Garveyite, a Prince Hall Shriner, and fanatical about baseball. He used to talk about when Ray Dandridge and Willie Mays played for the American Association team the Minneapolis Millers, when the team was a farm team for the New York Giants. He thought it important that I know about historic games, such as when the Millers played in the 1959 Junior World Series and lost to the Havana Sugar Kings 4 games to 3. He got me into collecting baseball cards and tracking stats. He and I would sit for endless hours listening to Twins games on his little red and white transistor radio. He was a particularly big fan of Tony Oliva and Zoilo Versalles. When he gave me my first mitt, it was an infielders’ glove so I could learn to play shortstop like Versalles.
My brother and I spent every Saturday with Grandad doing yard work or shoveling snow, from 1966 until his death in 1973. During this time, I was studying Spanish at Ramsey and Washburn, and Grandad started speaking to me all day in Spanish while we were doing yardwork, or whenever he got me alone, which he did a lot in the last four years of his life. This was to encourage me in my Spanish language studies by foregrounding my Cuban heritage. I was more interested in the foods he prepared, which were a combination of various Cuban dishes, such as rabo encendido, which I love to this day, and moros y cristianos; as well as New Orleans Creole foods, such as smothered chicken, and red beans and rice. Every Mardi Gras we had filé gumbo.
Grandad also talked a lot about the radical black tradition, which for him meant people such as David Walker, Alexander Crummell, as well as Garvey and A. J. Rogers. Grandad was also a friend of Nelson Peery. He had a stash of all the issues of Brownies Book magazine published from 1920 to 1921 in his attic, which I would marvel at and read. His wife Myrtle, whom we called Granny, was from Jackson, Mississippi. Her people were what we used to call octoroons and quadroons. She loved to party and used to spend quite some time at Cassius’s Dreamland Café on 38th and 4th Avenue, which was opened by Anthony Cassius in 1937.
Southside Reminiscences Made the Streets Come Alive with History
Everybody knew Cassius. Before opening Dreamland, he was a union organizer, and formed the all-black Local 614, for hotel workers and restaurant employees because the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union was a closed shop that would not accept blacks. He then helped form the state’s first multiracial union, Local 665 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union. He sold Dreamland to his nephew, Wyatt C. Pierro, in 1947 so that he could open and manage the Cassius Club Café restaurant and bar downtown, which was an integrated establishment. That in itself, is a whole other story about Minneapolis racial politics. The City Council did not want to grant Cassius a liquor license, using all sorts of duplicitous tactics, such as accusing him of being a communist. He prevailed, however, and became the first black in Minneapolis to be granted a liquor license, finally opening his downtown Club Café at 318 S. 3rd Avenue in 1949. That struggle was also a factor in his selling Dreamland to Pierro in ‘47.
Wyatt’s son, Arthur, was one of my uncle Floyd’s—mom’s brother—best childhood friends. Every Christmas day, he’d come around to visit Granny and Grandad’s before Christmas lunch, and he, Uncle Floyd, and my father, would gather in the parlor recounting all the goings on at Dreamland when they were youths. By the time I was eight, I was old enough to start paying close attention to these recurrent annual recitations. Uncle Arthur, as we called him, would invariably ask my father, (who graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in engineering and had worked at Honeywell,) about John Nelson who also worked there. Apparently, Uncle Arthur was a big fan of the Prince Rogers Trio—Prince Rogers was Nelson’s stage name—which played regularly at Dreamland when his father managed it. There would be much musing about what the Southside music scene was like then, as well as what had happened to it after the Dreamland closed in 1955 and Del’s Orchid Club, then Brigg’s Café occupied the spot. The Trio’s drummer, Roy Kay Sr., would come up in those same conversations along these same lines of a talented musician who had now become known mostly through his day job, which in Kay’s case was as the go-to man in the downtown J.C. Penney’s mens department.
After a few more scotches, this would always lead to extensive and colorful stories about the relationships and adventures of black folk in Minneapolis in the 1940s and 50s—tales about the movement back and forth between the 38th Street Southside and the Plymouth Avenue Northside communities, as well as who would “sneak” across the Lake Street Bridge over into St. Paul because, as my uncle Floyd would put it, the girls over there were supposed to be prettier. These stories enthralled us kids, as much as they exasperated the women of the family, who would deftly bring the sessions to an end by reminding a now happily inebriated Arthur that he still needed to make his Christmas-day visit to his mother’s. Those stories contributed substantially to our sense, as children, of the continuity of our community. They made the streets and buildings of Southside Minneapolis come alive with history.
The Southside Community Moves South of 42nd
My family story was in no way unique; in fact, it was rather commonplace. You’ll find similar histories among the Boudreaux, Lawson, Johnson, Davis, Mays, and Kipper families; the list goes on. The black community has always been polygenous. When my parents were coming of age in the 1940’s and 50’s, the Southside black community was found mostly in the Bryant neighborhood, from Lake Street on the north, to 42nd Street on the south, with Chicago Avenue marking its eastern boundary, and Nicollet Avenue its western. In terms of class, it was economically diverse with a sizable professional class living in close proximity with working-class folks. Most folks owned their own homes. It included among its residents Dr. William Brown, and Lena O. Smith the first female black lawyer in the state, as well as a founder of the Minneapolis St. Paul Urban League, and the first woman president of the NAACP Minneapolis chapter. The 38th street corridor, from Chicago to Nicollet was the business district, the epicenter of which was the intersection of 38th Street and 4th Avenue. After returning from the war, Grandpa Judy owned a service station, R J Superservice, on 38thStreet, from 1948 to 1950. The 38th street corridor was still a vital business district well into the 1970s. I remember many visits to the Young Brother’s barbershop to get my hair cut when I was a child, where I listened to my elders discuss and argue the topics of the day. As a teenager I would frequent Crown Records to buy the latest R&B and Soul music records.
Minneapolis used restrictive housing covenants to keep black families out of certain neighborhoods. What this meant with respect to the Southside, was that there were virtually no blacks south of 42nd Street before 1956. The famous exception being Arthur and Edith Lee who moved into 4600 Columbus Avenue in 1931. The harassment that they suffered was a clear indication, however, of how determined the white people were to maintain segregation, and they left in 1933. A significant wave of blacks started moving south of 42nd Street in the late 1950s however, due in large measure to the collaboration between the black realtor, Archie Givens, and the homebuilder, Edward Tilsen, who constructed a series of affordable homes for blacks along a corridor from 42nd to 46th Streets on 3rd, 4th, and 5th Avenues. In 1956, my father and mother moved into one of those Tilsenbilt homes on the 4200 block of 4th Avenue. That same year, my father built a house for his mother and grandmother at 326 East 45th street. Other families that started moving south of 42nd at that time were the Boudreaux’s who were at the corner of 42nd Street and 4th Avenue, and the Wilsons at 43rd Street and 3rdAvenue. The Kippers moved to the 4500 block of Oakland in 1957. This was effectively an extension of the older black Southside community, given that so many of those who started moving south of 42nd, such as the Bowman, McMoore, Webster, Mays, and Kay families, had grown up in the Bryant neighborhood. Regina High School had not been built, when the movement south began, but eventually the neighborhood would come to be called the Regina-Field neighborhood.
There was still a peculiar sort of segregation within the Regina-Field neighborhood; so that by the mid 1960’s, while the black population came to approximately 18 percent, with the white a constant 60, those blacks were mainly concentrated along the 42nd to 46th Street corridor sandwiched between 2nd and Oakland Avenues. Because this was an extension of the old neighborhood north of 42nd Street, the overall Southside black community came to encompass both the Bryant and the Regina-Field neighborhoods, stretching from Lake Street to 46th. By 1970, it had reached 50th as the nearly absolute southern boundary. Many of those who lived south of 42nd were professionals. There were doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers like my father, but also musicians, such as Percy Hughes, and bankers such as John Warder who was president of the First Plymouth National Bank. My family lived throughout the full span of the Southside community between 1957 and 1963. In 1958, we moved to the 3400 block of 3rd Avenue so I could attend Warrington Elementary school, which was three block up on 37th and 3rd. We were there for three years before moving to the 3900 block of Park Avenue so my sister, brother, and I could attend Bancroft. We were there for a little more than a year though, before moving to Denver, Colorado—where my father worked on the Titan rocket program at Martin Marietta Aerospace—from which we returned in 1963 when we settled into the house at 326, East 45th Street, where my family lived until 2018 when my sister sold the house.
Rich Black Civil Society
I tell you all of this to give as clear as possible a sense of the complexity and history of the long-standing black community of the Minneapolis Southside, how close knit we were. But also, to provide a historical context for the thinking and action we took at Washburn high school in 1972 and 73. The Southside black community had a rich civil society that fostered a healthy sense of cultural pride through institutions such as St. Thomas Episcopal Church, the second of two black Episcopal congregations in Minnesota, was established in 1889 and moved into its building at 4400 4th Avenue in 1903. It was the oldest black church on the Southside. St. Peter’s AME church was founded eight years earlier in 1880, but did not move to its current location at 41st and 4th Ave, until 1952. The Greater Sabathani Baptist Church was not established at 38th and 3rd Ave, until 1962. All three of these religious institutions were important centers of community activity, from the social to the political, and were very much engaged in the cultural formation of the neighborhood youth. There were also important profane institutions of civil society.
In 1955, members of St. Peter’s, Grandpa Judy among them, established the Nacirema—the palindrome of “American”— at 3939 4th Ave. This was a private social club for blacks, with Cassius as its president until his death in 1982. At one time it had over 600 members, making it one of the largest black private social clubs in the country. I remember as a child in the late 50’s and early 60’s attending Halloween and Christmas parties there. In the 1970’s, the Nacirema was part of a local gigging circuit—which included the Cozy Bar on the Northside, the Flame, and Fox Trap—for black bands who had difficulty getting booked at white establishments. I heard Bobby Lye play there in the 70s. Wee Willie Walker would occasionally perform at the club, as did Flyte Tyme, the band founded by David Eiland featuring Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis; Prince would be there, of course, usually in the crowd and occasionally on stage. Jimmy, who was the great bluesman Cornbread Harris’s son, went to school at Washburn for a moment. My brother Michael, used to hang out with him, and also Alexander O’Neal, after the latter moved to Minneapolis from Mississippi.
In 1966, the Greater Sabathani congregation established the Sabathani Community Center at the Fifth Avenue Congregational Church on 32nd and 5th Avenue, which moved to 31st and 1st Avenue in 1972 before finally settling at its current location in the old Bryant Jr. High School building on 38th and 3rd in 1979. The Center, which by then had officially broken off from the church, was a mainstay of community activism throughout the seventies, housing such things as the Afro-American Cultural Arts Center directed by Van Byers, which had a museum of African art, established by Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba Aiken, who were on faculty there at the time. Like the much older Phyllis Wheatley on the Northside (founded in 1924), and the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in Saint Paul (founded in 1929), the Sabathani Community Center provided community support services, as well as recreational and educational activities.
The Way and the 1966 and 1967 Uprisings in North Minneapolis
Sabathani Community Center was started the same year as its Northside counterpart, The Way. Both were organic organizations started by members of their respective communities—Kay Williams at Sabathani, and Syl Davis at The Way. Davis was often characterized in the local press as “militant” because of his dedication to empowering black youth in the wake of the summer 1966 riot on Plymouth Avenue on the Near Northside.
You have to understand that the period from 1966 to 1973 was a moment of tremendous transition. It was the period during which black power, meaning self-determination and pride, was carrying us from being Negroes and colored people to black. Just two months after the Plymouth Avenue Riots, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California. The Way, in particular, was a part of that. Unlike Phyllis Wheatley—which was initially a settlement house established and directed by the white Council on Social Agencies (CSA) and the Women’s Cooperative Alliance (WCA) for blacks—The Way was a community-based organic institution, created and run nearly exclusively by members of the local community. Indeed, in a very real sense, the young people of the Northside community owned The Way, giving it a pronouncedly black power orientation. In that respect, it really did lead the way in popular education, with Mahmoud El-Kati teaching courses in African American history. There were also public classes in Native American, Hebrew, and Third World histories; something that was unheard of in the public schools of greater Minneapolis at that time.
In 1967, during The Way’s first year of operation, a riot broke out again on Plymouth Ave. The spark this time was police brutality and classical Minneapolis paternalistic segregation. For most of my youth the Aquatennial Torchlight Parade had the black marching bands bringing up the rear. Everybody knew this, so by the time they showed up, most the whites had begun dispersing so it would be a largely black crowd. Invariably, the police would start harassing us, attacking and arresting people. The news media like to say that the riot was sparked by an altercation between two teenage black girls that the police tried to break up by slamming them to the ground and swarming on them. When a black teenage bystander asked them why they were being so rough, they assaulted him. As I said, the police assaulting folks during the Torchlight Parade was a regular thing. In any event, what began as a peaceful protest organized the next day at The Way by the Northside community demanding police accountability, turned into a melee when the police arrived and started assaulting people, including a pregnant woman who subsequently had a miscarriage. Skirmishes with the police broke out and the violence escalated to looting and arson up and down Plymouth, lasting an additional two days. In response, mayor Naftalin asked governor Harold LeVander to deploy the National Guard. LeVander sent around 200 troops to patrol Plymouth Avenue. He also deployed additional Guardsmen in South Minneapolis between Lake Street and 38th Street, where there had been no significant civil unrest—although we were as affected by police brutality. He also did so in Saint Paul. In other words, wherever there was a black neighborhood, LeVander sent in the Guardsmen. There were Minneapolis city officials who tried to blame The Way for the 1967 riots. They impaneled an all-white grand jury, which recommended The Way and its staff be investigated for inciting the disturbances. This was the beginning of the narrative of The Way as a hotbed of violent black radicalism. In fact, it was a center of black pride, culture, and education.
Like the Way, the Southside Sabathani Community Center was established by the local community; and like The Way, it sought to provide a venue where the community youth could give expression to their understanding of the world and benefit from organized learning. Its focus was less on political empowerment than intellectual development and aesthetic experimentation across all the arts, from music and dance, to the plastic arts, video, and literature, mostly poetry. Pursuant with that agenda, Sabathani Community Center established the Afro-American Cultural Arts Center in 1969, which offered public classes in African American literature, as well as African dance and drumming, but also classes in general music, photography, and video arts. The education I was getting at home was reinforced by institutions such as these, which exposed me to the full range of black intellectual traditions, from history, literature, and philosophy, both at home—our house had a great library of literature about Africa and African literature. Another important place of learning and literature was Challenge Books up on 38th and Nicollet, which was the only black-owned bookstore in Minneapolis at that time. Its owner, Clarence Carter, was one of my neighbors and an important figure in the Southside community. I spent a lot of time and money in his bookstore.
As I said, the period from 1966 to 1973, was one of tremendous black pride and revolutionary activity. Some of us embraced a romantic version of Marxism. Others joined, or aligned ourselves with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, as well as the black power movement. One of my best friends was an older boy named James Lawson. We called him “Da-Well” because he was so quiet and deep. Lawson had gone to Des Moines, Iowa, in the Spring of 1970 and joined the Black Panther Party. When he came back, he started talking to some of us about forming a branch of the Party in Minneapolis. Da Well had me giving out the Black Panther papers and trying to organize reading groups. The Methodist Church on Oakland Ave owned a building on 48th and 4th Ave which is now a private house. Then there was a beauty salon, a grocery store, and a vacant unit. I got the pastor of the church to let me run a teen center out of that empty space. We set up a pool table. I told him we would have cultural programs there. I used that space to organize reading groups where we studied the Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, and Mao Zedong. Fanon is still prominent in my life.
Going to Ramsey and Washburn
Again, my point here is to provide a sort of tableau of the intellectual and political culture of the Southside community in which I was formed and carried with me as a student at Ramsey Jr. High School and Washburn Senior High School. Quite frankly, this was a world that most white Minneapolitans, such as those who were teaching us at Ramsey and Washburn, were simply unaware of. They certainly were incapable of recognizing the type of self-confident and intellectually curious minds it fostered. We were not welcomed at either school, and it was very up-front. By and large, the attitude towards us was either outright hostility—classmates who explicitly expressed the view that we were an unwanted foreign element that endangered the quality of their neighborhood school—or it was condescendingly paternalistic as though the white people were doing a service of charity toward us. I suppose from their perspective, they were because the neighborhoods that fed into Ramsey and Washburn still had restricted covenants. So, they thought they were doing a big thing letting us attend there. That condescendingly paternalistic attitude, however, just like the one of outright hostile, was predicated on the premise of their superior entitlement to this public space, and that we were somehow a foreign encroachment, with which they had to come to terms. At that time, this sense of superior entitlement was couched in the language of maintaining the integrity of neighborhood schools against busing, which was a euphemistic expression of the segregationist position, given that the neighborhoods in question were racially restricted.
Because I was in the chess and debate clubs at both Ramsey and Washburn, and was on the varsity football and track teams, I had a fair share of white friends. I remember many arguments outside of class with my white classmates discussing history. I would tell them about the ancient empires of Ghana, Songhay, Mali, and Zimbabwe. They would call me a liar to my face, insisting that the Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan representation of Africa, popularized by the Hollywood films starring Johnny Weissmuller, was true. It was of no matter to them that Burroughs, who grew up in the sundown town of Oak Park, Illinois, was the son of a Confederate Major, and perpetuated racist representations in his work. And if I told them that Garrett Morgan invented the three-position traffic light, they just laughed in my face. These kids of affluence and privilege—Ramsey and Washburn were two of the premier schools in the district—were remarkably ignorant of the world immediately around them only a mile away. The thing is, the response from teachers was not a far remove from these white students. I got in a lot of trouble in various classes for being disruptive by talking about Frederik Douglass, or Benjamin Banneker, or insisting that Arna Bontemps was one of the greatest short story writers of his generation. It wasn’t because I would disrespectfully interrupt the class—I never did—but when called on, I would offer corrections to the representations of black people found in our textbooks. What got me in trouble was that I was challenging the teacher’s knowledge. More accurately, I exposed their ignorance. Don’t get me wrong, I was as much into Aristotle and Kant as I was into Alexander Crummell and W.E.B. Du Bois. What I wanted was a well-rounded critical education. I wanted to be intellectually challenged in the way I was at home, or at the Afro-American Cultural Arts Center, or, for that matter, at Eddie’s Barbershop. This is important because the chief grievance we had as students, against both Ramsey and Washburn, was that black students were not being taught, being passed on without proper instruction. The other grievance was that the administration and teachers turned a blind eye to the daily harassment, often violent, we received from certain groups of white students, largely the athletes. Whenever there was an eruption, resulting by and large from our fighting back, the school administration reported to the press that it was black students assaulting whites, which the press happily reported without even a minimal effort at verification. Our self-confidence was misconstrued as arrogance, and our self-defense as assault.
Demanding Change at Washburn High School, 1972-73
Perhaps the event I am most associated with is what became known, thanks to the Minneapolis Star and the Minneapolis Tribune, as the Washburn High School Race Riots. The way the press covered those events gave the impression that there were just groups of wayward black students roaming the halls assaulting white students, and disrupting class without cause or reason. In point of fact, what happened transpired because of the two grievance I’ve just mentioned.
By the time I attended Washburn from autumn 1969 to spring 1973, there were 95 black students in an overall population of around 1800. High school was difficult. There was a daily struggle on two fronts. One was in the classroom, where teachers generally either disregarded black students or espoused material that was remarkably supremist. Let me be clear. I don’t mean to suggest that the teachers were themselves card-carrying white supremacists, but the curriculum and most of the instructional material simply presumed that the world was white, that civilization was white, that knowledge was white, and that we, along with all the other people of color world-wide, were beneficiaries of white largess. There was no need for any individual teacher to personally espouse white supremacy, it was ingrained in the institution, it was the through line of the curriculum. There was really no way to challenge this without appearing disruptive, and there was no way of accepting it without being made to feel inadequate. The other front was during lunch, in the hallways, outside on the campus, or going home. The harassment from certain groups of aggressive white students was constant, and no amount of complaining to teachers or administrative staff brought any relief. Our only recourse was to defend ourselves and make it less worthwhile for white students to bother us. These were the tensions, spanning years, that led to the so-called “Washburn Riots.”
There were two disturbances. The first was in February of 1972, and the second in February of 1973. Two incidents led to the February 1972 disturbance. A young man who suffered from polio as a child was beaten severely by a group of white kids from the hockey team, and then they beat up a young lady. These incidents were behind the melee of fisticuffs that broke out on February 7 in the school lunchroom, and then spilled out into the halls and throughout the school, with kids pouring out of their classrooms.
Organizing before the “riots.” Twelve Demands and a Direct-action Plan
Once again, the crisis was longstanding and daily for us black students. The tension was so bad and the situation so dire that months before the violence that became the so-called riot, I had drawn up a set of twelve demands to be presented to Principal Anderson. The idea was to organize students into a political block and, with support from our parents and neighborhood institutions, stage a walkout, and a boycott of classes until our demands were met— a direct political action. I was inspired by the work of student activists at the University of Minnesota, such as John Wright, as well as the reading I had been doing in association with the Black Panther Party, especially the writings of Fanon and the Party newspaper. I was also inspired by the educational work of Mahmoud El-Kati, who by then had started teaching at Macalester College. I and my friend Howard Scroggins, would go over to the Macalester Black Student Association — named “Anyanya” after the southern Sudanese separatist rebel army —where Mahmoud held reading sessions. Those college students at the University of Minnesota and Macalester were successfully demanding black studies programs. I looked at what they were doing and thought we needed that at Washburn.
Becoming the Spokesman for the Black Students
It is almost impossible to organize without a crisis. My fellow black students rebuffed my efforts, thinking that there was no way we could get the administration to agree to twelve demands, among which were the hiring of a black assistant principal, more black teachers, the elimination of blatantly racist textbook material, sensitivity training for teachers and staff, as well as the implementation of a black studies curriculum. When the riot broke out, however, the black students became mobilized. A group of them came and got me from English class. They had broken into my locker and had gotten out the demands they had ignored before and told me, “Judy, tell the administration why we are upset.”
That was how I came to be the spokesman for the black students, and that is when we began to organize ourselves into a coherent political block. This resulted in a series of meetings with principal Carl Anderson, who agreed to pass our demands onto the Minneapolis School Board, which was itself embroiled in a struggle over busing, that is to say, over integration.
Accusations of Outside Agitation
We presented our demands, supported by our parents, to the School Board on February 8. They agreed to study the demands and issue a report on February 29. In the interim, principal Anderson organized a large meeting of the entire school community, including teachers and parents, where we were supposed to have the opportunity to present our ongoing concerns to the community at large. It quickly devolved, however, into another paternalistic affair in which we students were to be silenced so that the adults could talk.
I vividly recall one teacher, who taught philosophy, standing up and saying he knew the leadership of these black students and there was no way they had conceived these demands on their own. There had to be Communists outsiders instigating them. That was a frequent charge in those days of the Cold War, predicated on black’s presumed intellectual limitation, but also the myth held dear by white Minnesotans that blacks in Minnesota were happy, due to the generous opportunities extended to them here. There could be no home-grown racial tensions, only those prompted by outside agitation. Of course, there were blacks who were Communist, such as Nelson Peery. And, in all honesty, I had read the Communist Manifesto, along with Mao’s Little Red Book, and was, at that very time, working my way through the first volume of Marx’s Capital. Nevertheless, this was prompted by the social and economic inequities suffered by blacks right here in Minneapolis.
After it became clear that those running the meeting had absolutely no interest in letting those of us who were delegated by our fellows to speak, we left. The most that came out of that meeting was a rather nebulous hope that some sort of community human relations board would be formed by the PTA.
In the course of the School Board’s deliberations, our demands had become thirteen. The additional demand was for removal of the plain-clothed police who had begun circulating in the hallways during school, harassing black students. The administration adhered to the belief that we were the primary cause for the disturbance. The School Board met on February 9, 1972 and agreed to the more important of our demands: the hiring of a permanent black assistant principal, more black teachers and a black counselor, sensitivity training for teachers and staff, and the implementation of a black studies curriculum. We were not able to establish a committee of parents and students to review the course textbooks. Still, this was quite an accomplishment. And I want to be clear, it was initiated and led by the black students. We had parental and community support—there were also those in the community who opposed us—but it was our student movement that brought about those changes. Accordingly, we finished the year with some positive, albeit guarded, prospects for the next academic term.
The “Riot” of February 1973
At the start of the 1973 academic year, which was my senior year, I was teaching a class in African American literature at the Sabathani Afro-American Cultural Arts Center. In this Mahmoud El Kati was a generous mentor, and the Way curriculum a useful model. The course was accredited as a high school language arts course by the Minneapolis Public Schools. Having already satisfied all but one of my credit requirements to graduate during my junior year, I was able to attend school for half the day, and spent the rest teaching at the Center. A group of us at the Center had also started a video access program called “Real Vision.” Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba Aiken were the creative force behind the project. Our agenda was to document the significant events of the black community at large for broadcasting on the Community Access Channel.
At the same time, things at Washburn were still unsettled. In the wake of our success in 1972, the same groups of white students who had been harassing us began a campaign of terrorizing individual black students going to and from school, as well as anyone they could catch alone in some secluded part of the school building. The area around the gym was particularly risky to be alone in. It seems to me that they were not at all happy about the outcome of the School Board meeting, and encouraged by certain of the adults—the same adults who were vociferously opposed to busing or school integration—they were going to make that displeasure known to us the only way they knew how: violence. As in 1972, this prompted a response from black students. The igniting spark ensued on Tuesday January 30 when a fight broke out between a white student-athlete and a black student athlete. The white athlete was one of the more aggressively racist students, who used to constantly harass us. He got beat that day, before the gym teacher stopped the fight. The next day, Wednesday, January 31st , he came to gym class with a good-sized group of other white students and a fistfight broke out between them and a group of black students who were there playing basketball. The police were called and came to the school with dogs. Patrolling the grounds and hallways, they kept singling out black students, disrespectfully addressing them as “boy” and demanding they explain what they were doing at school. This only made things worse. The next day, February 1st , a very large crowd of white students—there must have been over 100—gathered at the 50th Street entrance, which they claimed as theirs. A group of us—in fact, it was easily the majority of the black students in attendance at the school—confronted them, asserting the right to go in and out any of the school’s doors we chose. I was in that group and was aggressively confronted by a group of the white students screaming racial slurs and proclaiming that we had no business at Washburn because we only brought trouble. There were white parents in that crowd, as well as police, who stood by while these students carried on, and only intervened when fighting started. We then dispersed.
Violence Planned against Black Student Leaders
I was told afterwards by the new black guidance counselor, that a list had been drawn up, of black kids who were to be severely hurt, and I was at the top. This was confirmed later that evening by my uncle’s brother-in-law, who was a police officer. Based on this threat, a number of us students organized into a security cadre to protect ourselves from any future attacks. We deliberately did not have guns and knives, even though we heard credible rumors that some of the whites did. Instead, we were armed with trashcan lids and broomsticks. A number of houses in this neighborhood were missing trashcan lids around that time. It was defensive violence against systematic violence.
Twin Cities Black Students Show Up in Solidarity
Anyway, word got out in the community and the next day, a number of black students from North, Central, and even De LaSalle high schools came to Washburn at the end of the school day in solidarity. That day, Friday February 2nd, a group of white students that was even larger than the day before gathered at the 50th Street entrance. Word spread fast that some of them were armed, so most of the black students gathered at the 49th Street entrance to march home. We were joined by those students from other high schools, and also by some of our parents, mine among them. As planned, we had our defensive trashcan lids and broom sticks.
A car I did not recognize—I think it was one of those students who had come in support—pulled up with additional baseball bats. It was determined, however, that given our parent’s presence we would not need to defend ourselves so those things were not used. The newspapers reported that I was seen passing out bats, even though my parents entreated me not to. This was a straight-up falsehood. I did no such thing, nor did they. The Star and Tribune were inundated with readers’ letters of complaint about their biased coverage by parents who had been there on the scene. Refusing to call it a retraction, the Tribune printed a “correction” in which they stated that my parents denied they had tried to restrain me or that I had handed out weapons.
No matter, the Washburn Principal, Roland DeLapp, asserted that my having allegedly passed out broom sticks was sufficient grounds for my expulsion. His motivation was pretty clear. He had decided, as he told the PTA the following Monday, that only 25 black students, with me at their lead, and 250 whites were responsible for all the trouble. Although he characterized those whites as “verbally abusing the other race,” only two of them were suspended for fighting, while one of the two blacks with whom they fought was expelled. The reason given for the difference in punishment was that the black student in question had come back on campus while the whites had not. It was reported to DeLapp by a number of black students, that one of the whites had also come back on campus, but he, in full character, did not believe them. In its “correction” the newspaper reported another falsehood, which was that my parents did not contest my expulsion. In point of fact they did, and I was reinstated and graduated with my class, participating in the full commencement ceremony. Again, the paper falsely claimed that I was being permitted to complete the one credit needed to graduate, which was based on what DeLapp told them. Had they bothered to investigate by speaking with my parents or the School Board, they would have learned that I had already fulfilled my credit requirements, with good grades, and my graduating was not at all contingent on doing any more school work.
Given that fact, it was agreed there was no reason for me to be on campus. I spent the rest of the term teaching the course on African American literature at the Afro=American Cultural Arts Center. Uncle Floyd’s brother-in-law, the policeman, informed my family in late July that there was still a credible threat against me. My parents believed this enough to send me away that August to Howard University, where I had already been accepted. After a year at Howard, I was accepted at Al-Azhar University in Cairo Egypt, one of the most prestigious Islamic Universities in the world.
I returned to Minneapolis in July 1979, and finished my degree in Islamic philosophy in 1981. I spent a year in France, then returned to Minneapolis to complete my graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. After teaching at Swarthmore College for a year, and spending time in Morocco, I moved to Pittsburgh in 1990 where I was a professor in the Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1994, where I am currently professor of comparative studies in the Department of English.
Police Brutality in Minneapolis
Besides the struggle at school, we had to deal with police brutality on the streets. Charles Stenvig, who had been a policeman, was elected mayor in 1969, and his “law and order” regime was notorious, very much like that of Philadelphia’s Mayor, Frank Rizzo. He served two consecutive terms, and when he lost his second reelection bid to Albert Hofstede in 1973, he became acting Chief of Police. I cannot quote any statistics about the police department under Mayor Stenvig, but I can tell you some of what I and my friends experienced in our own neighborhood at that time. The harassment was pretty regular. We were always being randomly stopped by the police. I’ll tell you about some of the more dramatic encounters.
In the summer of 1971, a young white man, a teenager, had been beaten up by some blacks somewhere near Lake Harriet. My brother Michael and I were at the Dairy Queen on 48th and Nicollet, getting some milkshakes when the police came, catching us in a rather broad dragnet in which they rounded up any young blacks found on the street from Lake Harriet to Nicollet between 42nd and 50th. I was still 16 and Michael had just turned 12. We were completely unaware of the assault, having had nothing to do with it because we’d been at the Dairy Queen drinking our malts, and told the police this. They did not care. We were simply the wrong color in the wrong place (past the designated western boundary of the black neighborhood), at the wrong time. I kept saying, “You have no probable cause to arrest us. We’ve done nothing.” I would not shut up. I was very loud, hoping the white people who were there and had seen us drinking our milkshakes, would intervene on our behalf. All that happened was the police became irate. They took us downtown.
There was this infamous elevator in the basement of the garage of the City Hall. They roughed us up till we got up to the booking floor. They didn’t charge us, and they didn’t call our parents. Instead, we were released into downtown Minneapolis. It was past midnight. We likely could have gotten arrested again for being out past curfew. We went to the Curtis Hotel where I pleaded with the concierge to let us use the phone to call our parents. Our father came and picked us up.
The second time I was arrested, was at the 1972 Aquatennial Torchlight Parade. It was the same sort of thing that led to the 1967 Northside riot. Brian Herron was with me. We were watching the Sabathani Drum and Bugle Corp bring up the end of the parade, and the cops started attacking us. The police lined up, waiting for us on 6th Street with dogs and on horseback. They charged us and we fought back and things got a bit wild. Both of my parents came down to the police station that time. My mother was furious and told the police that she was a friend of Humphrey and Don Fraser. But this was Stenvig’s reign. The cop answered her very disrespectfully, right there in front of my father. I got upset. He pulled out a gun. My father made me sit down and be quiet. My mother did have friends, and I was released a few hours later. And even though there were reports in the newspaper of eleven arrests, I was not among them. There was a large protest at city hall the next day about the police brutality during the parade.
My last encounter with the Minneapolis police was when I came back in 1979, after studying four years abroad in Egypt. I was studying and working at the University of Minnesota, and had gotten an apartment in the Whittier neighborhood on 22rd and Clinton over by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I would regularly go to this corner grocery up on the corner of 22nd and Nicollet. Once, I was stopped by a cop in broad daylight on that corner after I’d just gotten off the bus. He said I’d jaywalked. I told him I crossed the street as the light was changing. He became very angry and aggressive, threw me up against the wall, frisked me. After telling me I was uppity, he told me to get lost. A few nights later, when I was walking to the same store to buy something for dinner, three police cars swooped down on me. The cops jumped out with guns drawn and told me to get on the ground. The grocer, a white guy, came out and said “This is the second time you’ve bothered this man. He’s not doing anything. I know him. I’m watching you. You need to stop this!” They backed off and explained—to him, not me—that they were looking for a clean shaven 6 feet tall black man who had just robbed someone. I am barely five feet eight and I had a full beard at the time. I’ll never forget that grocer. His intervention touched me because when my brother and I got arrested at the Dairy Queen back in 1972, there were a bunch of whites standing around who did nothing.
The sad thing is that these are mundane stories. Such things have been happening to black men in Minneapolis and everywhere else in this country for a long time; and I mean for generations.
Black Lives Matter and the Way to Revolutionary Change Today
I believe it is this generation’s project to rethink revolution, to produce a political culture that has not existed before. How do we achieve the massive realignment of wealth globally so that we all can live with dignity and viable aspirations for the future? And by viable, I mean how can we do so in a way that not only does not decimate the planet’s ecosystems but repairs the damage already done in the course of more than two hundred years of industrialized extraction and consumption? What forms of sociality and polity must be conceived and enacted that achieve true social and economic justice? What is the character of such justice? And to ask that is to ask: How do we understand life and existence in relation to other ways of being, including those of other species? In sum, how can we create new forms of collectivity, of sociality that depart from the current dominant system predicated on market-driven individual property rights? These are the sort of questions being raised in our times, which the French philosopher Alain Badiou calls “the era of riots” (le temp des émeutes) When he says “riots” (émeutes) he means spontaneous popular uprisings that challenge not only the given political order, but the way in which life has been organized on the basis of hierarchical binarism and unfettered acquisitive extraction. Badiou is trying to understand the historical significance of such events as the 2010-2011 Tunisian Revolution, in which the people’s uprising toppled the Ben Ali regime. To get a better sense of how this “riot” was more than just a spontaneous violent eruption of popular rage, I suggest you read a special dossier I edited in 2011 for the journal boundary 2—the editorial collective of which I am a member—entitled the Tunisia Dossier: The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity. This is a collection of writings by some of the Tunisians active in the revolution. To date, it is the only publication in English in which these Tunisian activists speak for themselves in their own voice—rather than being interpreted by some Western journalist of expert analysts—explaining what they were trying to do, how they were actively re-imagining and reconstituting the world from the bottom up through organizing autonomous zones of community-based policing and social services in cities such as Kasserine the epicenter of the revolution. I continue to work with these Tunisian revolutionaries, and was in Kasserine in 2016, where they organized with workers, academics and community activists a conference workshop to establish the terms of their collaboration in forming a new civil society based on social justice and equality. The same sort of uprising occurred this past February in Algeria, where the people also toppled a long-standing despotic regime; as did the Sudanese people in 2019. All of these “riots” provide demonstrative evidence that capacity of the people-at-large to forge new forms of sociality and governance is real. These are instantiations of popular sovereignty. They give renewed meaning to the 1970s slogan, “power to the people.”
Much of my scholarship has been in the Arab world, and I have spent a great deal of time in Tunisia since 1988, getting to know many of those who were active in the Revolution. I have also spent time in Algeria in 2016 and 2018 getting acquainted with some of the activists who came to spearhead the 2019 uprising. I remain in regular communications with the groups in both countries. One of the things that has struck me is their acute interest in the history of black struggle in the United States, specifically the Black Power movement of the 1950 and 70, and the current Black Lives Matter movement. That interest is reminiscent of the sort of internationalist solidarity of the 1960s and 70s.
There are indeed reverberations across these uprisings of the global south and Black Lives Matter, some of which are discernable in Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors’s and Opal Tometi’s initial call back in 2013 for an end to basing revolutionary intervention on the patriarchal hetero-normative family structures, insisting instead that we rethink everything in an effort to form a different kind of social consciousness. Those reverberations continue if the current call for defunding the police, which is far too often misconstrued in the media to mean the wholesale elimination of police, when what it means is the reconstituting of the police as a community action, rather than a militarized occupation force. This latest global reverberation is pronounced, given that neoliberal globalization’s engendering of profound social and economic inequity has required police everywhere to function as a security force for the elites. This explains in some measure how Tunisian, Algerian, and Sudanese youth subjected to continual police repression can identify with blacks in the US being subjected to systemic police brutality.
For all the reverberations, however, we must take care. The American tendency toward normative equilibrium is a strong force of neutralization, turning the popular drive for systemic transformation into a slogan or hashtag, which even the most exploitative corporate interest can sign on to. Perhaps the singular example of this is Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, publishing statements in support of Black Lives Matter, while the Amazon-owned Wholefoods fired workers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, California and Seattle Washington because the facemasks they were wearing for protection against Covid-19 had printed on them the statement “Black Lives Matter.” We need to be attentive to the myriad ways in which the capacity to monetarize everything tends to diffuse any transformative energy into emotionally appeasing self-righteousness.
With that caveat, I am optimistic about this generation’s capacity to achieve broad societal change. As for the role of people of my generation, the generation of the 1960s and 70s, I agree with my old friend, Reverend Brian Herron, in opening his space at Zion Baptist on the Northside to youth leaders involved in Black Lives Matter, and then stepping aside, is practicing what he call “ministry of being present,” meaning not presuming to know better simply because he is older, but trusting in the youths’ thoughtfulness and being ready to share experiences and knowledge when asked.