The complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers' strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics

When viewed from our turbulent times, the Minneapolis of fifty years ago might seem serene, but Minneapolis schoolteachers of the day remember it quite differently. It was, author William D. Green said of their recollections, as if they'd been through war. This book recreates twenty days in April 1970 when a then-illegal strike by Minneapolis's public school teachers marked a singular moment of cultural upheaval--and forever changed the city's politics, labor law, educational climate, and the right to collective bargaining.

Since the inception of public education in Minnesota, teachers were expected to pursue their vocation out of civic spirit, with low wages, no benefits, and no job security. Strike! describes the history and circumstances leading to the teachers' extraordinary action, which pitted the progressive and conservative teachers' unions against each other--and both against the all-powerful school district, a hostile governor and state legislature, and a draconian Minnesota law. Capturing the intense emotions and heated rivalries of the strike, Green profiles the many actors involved, the personal and professional stakes, and the issues of politics, law, and the business of education.

Informed by interviews, firsthand accounts, news reports, and written records, Strike! brings to life a pivotal moment not just for Minneapolis's teachers but for the city itself, whose government, school system, and culture would, in a complex but inexorable way, change course for good.

The true story, and the black citizens, behind the evolution of racial equality in Minnesota

He had just given a rousing speech to a packed assembly in St. Paul, but Frederick Douglass, confidant to the Great Emancipator and conscience of the Republican Party, was denied a hotel room because he was black. This was Minnesota in 1873, four years after the state had approved black suffrage--a state where freedom meant being unshackled from slavery but not social restrictions, where equality meant access to the ballot but not to a restaurant downtown.

Spanning the half-century after the Civil War, Degrees of Freedom draws a rare picture of black experience in a northern state and of the nature of black discontent and action within a predominantly white, ostensibly progressive society. William D. Green reveals little-known historical characters among the black men and women who moved to Minnesota following the Fifteenth Amendment; worked as farmhands and laborers; built communities (such as Pig's Eye Landing, later renamed St. Paul), businesses, and a newspaper (the Western Appeal); and embodied the slow but inexorable advancement of race relations in the state over time. Within this absorbing, often surprising, narrative we meet ordinary citizens, like former slave and early settler Jim Thompson and black barbers catering to a white clientele, but also personages of national stature, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom championed civil rights in Minnesota. And we see how, in a state where racial prejudice and oppression wore a liberal mask, black settlers and entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists maneuvered within a restricted political arena to bring about real and lasting change.

The life and work of an African American suffragist and activist devoted to equality and freedom

At her last public appearance in 1962, at 88 years old, a frail, deaf, and blind Nellie Francis was honored for her church and community service in Nashville, Tennessee. No mention was made of her early groundbreaking work as an activist in Minnesota and nationally. Even today, while her advocacy for women's suffrage and racial justice resonates through current issues, her efforts remain largely unrecognized. In telling Nellie Francis's complete story for the first time, William D. Green finally brings the remarkable accomplishments of her complicated life into clear view, detailing her indefatigable work to advance the causes of civil rights, anti-lynching, and women's suffrage.

Green's account follows Francis's path from her first public event (giving a speech on race relations to a white audience at her high school graduation) to her return to Nashville and retirement from the national stage. In the years between, she campaigned in Minnesota for racial dignity, women's suffrage, an anti-lynching law (after the infamous lynching in Duluth in 1920), and interracial collaboration through the women's club movement. She came to know most of the prominent civil rights leaders of the twentieth century and met three presidents and countless business leaders of both Black and white societies. But she also faced intense and vicious reprisals, as when, as leader of the local chapter of the NAACP, she and her husband, a prominent African American civil rights lawyer, experienced the fury of the Ku Klux Klan after moving into a white neighborhood in St. Paul.

Green retrieves Nellie Francis's story from obscurity, giving this pioneer for gender and racial equality her due and providing a long-awaited service to the history of Black activism and civil rights, both regional and national. His book offers welcome insight into the universal, yet often unacknowledged, challenges that strong and engaged Black women are forced to endure when their drive to enact justice confronts racism, cultural pressure, and societal expectations.

How white advocates of emancipation abandoned African American causes in the dark days of Reconstruction, told through the stories of four Minnesotans

White people, Frederick Douglass said in a speech in 1876, were the children of Lincoln, while black people were at best his stepchildren. Emancipation became the law of the land, and white champions of African Americans in the state were suddenly turning to other causes, regardless of the worsening circumstances of black Minnesotans. Through four of these children of Lincoln in Minnesota, William D. Green's book brings to light a little known but critical chapter in the state's history as it intersects with the broader account of race in America.

In a narrative spanning the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lives of these four Minnesotans mark the era's most significant moments in the state, the Midwest, and the nation for the Republican Party, the Baptist church, women's suffrage, and Native Americans. Morton Wilkinson, the state's first Republican senator; Daniel Merrill, a St. Paul business leader who helped launch the first Black Baptist church; Sarah Burger Stearns, founder and first president of the Minnesota Woman Suffragist Association; and Thomas Montgomery, an immigrant farmer who served in the Colored Regiments in the Civil War: each played a part in securing the rights of African Americans and each abandoned the fight as the forces of hatred and prejudice increasingly threatened those hard-won rights.

Moving from early St. Paul and Fort Snelling to the Civil War and beyond, The Children of Lincoln reveals a pattern of racial paternalism, describing how even enlightened white Northerners, fatigued with the Negro Problem, would come to embrace policies that reinforced a notion of black inferiority. Together, their lives--so differently and deeply connected with nineteenth-century race relations--create a telling portrait of Minnesota as a microcosm of America during the tumultuous years of Reconstruction.

In the 1850s, as Minnesota Territory was reaching toward statehood, settlers from the eastern United States moved in, carrying rigid perceptions of race and culture into a community built by people of many backgrounds who relied on each other for survival. History professor William Green unearths the untold stories of African Americans and contrasts their experiences with those of Indians, mixed bloods, and Irish Catholics. He demonstrates how a government built on the ideals of liberty and equality denied the rights to vote, run for office, and serve on a jury to free men fully engaged in the lives of their respective communities.

A Peculiar Imbalance is the little-known history of the black experience in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, a time of dramatic change in the region. William D. Green explains how, as white progressive politicians pushed for statehood, black men who had been integrated members of the community, owning businesses and maintaining good relationships with their neighbors, found themselves denied the right to vote or to run for office in those same communities.

As Minnesota was transformed from a wilderness territory to a state, the concepts of race and ethnicity and the distinctions among them made by Anglo-Americans grew more rigid and arbitrary. A black man might enjoy economic success and a middle-class lifestyle but was not considered a citizen under the law. In contrast, an Irish Catholic man was able to vote--as could a mixed-blood Indian--but might find himself struggling to build a business because of the ethnic and religious prejudices of the Anglo-American community. A Peculiar Imbalance examines these disparities, reflecting on the political, social, and legal experiences of black men from 1837 to 1869, the year of black suffrage.

The complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers' strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics

When viewed from our turbulent times, the Minneapolis of fifty years ago might seem serene, but Minneapolis schoolteachers of the day remember it quite differently. It was, author William D. Green said of their recollections, as if they'd been through war. This book recreates twenty days in April 1970 when a then-illegal strike by Minneapolis's public school teachers marked a singular moment of cultural upheaval--and forever changed the city's politics, labor law, educational climate, and the right to collective bargaining.

Since the inception of public education in Minnesota, teachers were expected to pursue their vocation out of civic spirit, with low wages, no benefits, and no job security. Strike! describes the history and circumstances leading to the teachers' extraordinary action, which pitted the progressive and conservative teachers' unions against each other--and both against the all-powerful school district, a hostile governor and state legislature, and a draconian Minnesota law. Capturing the intense emotions and heated rivalries of the strike, Green profiles the many actors involved, the personal and professional stakes, and the issues of politics, law, and the business of education.

Informed by interviews, firsthand accounts, news reports, and written records, Strike! brings to life a pivotal moment not just for Minneapolis's teachers but for the city itself, whose government, school system, and culture would, in a complex but inexorable way, change course for good.