How do you remember—and reconnect—a neighborhood destroyed by highway construction over a half-century ago?

Since 1983, this has been the mission of Saint Paul, Minnesota’s annual Rondo Days festival. “[You see] everyone you grew up with and everybody you’ve ever known, your childhood and everything,” said former Rondo resident Brian White, Sr. in 2015. “You might see people you haven’t seen since you were five, six years old out here.”

It may mix historical exhibits, field day tournaments, 5K runs, picnics, dances, and religious services, but the festival is no ordinary reunion. Rather, it is an effort to memorialize a riven historically Black community, while also giving living reminder to the persistence of the Rondo diaspora.

Since the early twentieth century, Pullman porters, factory and packinghouse workers, and accountants all populated Rondo, making it “a hub, a place where military, professional, and streetwise Black people gathered, talked, and exchanged ideas,” Marvin Roger Anderson, a co-founder of Rondo Days told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1990. By the 1950s, bounded by Rice Street to the east, Lexington Parkway to the west, and University and Selby Avenues to the north and south, Rondo’s roughly 1.25 square miles  were home to about 80% of St. Paul’s Black population.

It was a place of “beautiful and gracious homes,” remembered former resident Joyce Williams in a 2016 oral history interview, with “hardwood floors, beautiful woodwork, hutches, [and] stained glass windows.”

In 2021, while testifying to the Minnesota House transportation committee, Representative Ruth Richardson called Rondo “the heartbeat of the Black community” of St. Paul.

Nonetheless, between 1956 and 1968, the state of Minnesota and the city of St. Paul razed the neighborhood in order to make way for I-94, the east-west interstate that runs from Michigan to Montana. Richardson pointed out that, far from an accident, the decision to route the highway through Rondo was intentional: Officials had dismissed an alternative, less destructive plan through an “underutilized industrial area.”

The highway construction devastated St. Paul’s Black middle class. Over 600 Black families lost their homes, alongside longstanding businesses and institutions. Rondo residents also lost the ladder to generational wealth: a 2020 study suggested that, compounded over time, the lost home equity added up to nearly $160 million.

The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act—at the time, the single biggest federal infrastructural investment in the nation’s history—reshaped the nation in countless ways. And it came at great cost. Between 1957 and 1977, nearly 1 million Americans lost their homes to highway construction, most of them people of color. Since the early 1990s, some 6,300 additional families have been displaced by highway expansion projects.

Planners knew that the interstates threatened urban communities. In 1958, the Sagamore Conference—convened by the Highway Research Board and attended by top federal, state, and municipal officials, academics, and civic leaders—issued a report clearly noting the perils of highway construction. It warned of widespread displacement, with low-income, non-white, and elderly residents facing the “greatest potential injury.” (Nevertheless, to this day, literature from the Department of Transportation that is used frequently in planning and engineering graduate programs self-servingly casts this history as a series of minor, unexpected, and unintended consequences.)

In some cities, “freeway revolts” did halt construction, but this advocacy failed to include non-white homeowners. In Memphis, the white, middle-class-led Citizens to Preserve Overton Park successfully challenged the construction of a highway corridor for I-40 in the Supreme Court. But Black activists in Nashville who organized a similar group to challenge I-40 construction through their community failed in the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court denied the case a hearing. Nashville’s Black community could only stand by as the highway ripped through its businesses, homes, and institutions.

In June 2021, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg initiated new efforts at the Department of Transportation (DOT) to address this problematic legacy, dedicating $1 billion to “reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.”

But money doesn’t do anything on its own. To repair the damage that the planners of the 1950s wrought on communities of color, we have to address both the physical infrastructure itself, and the stories we tell about it. That means first, acknowledging and reckoning with the interstates’ history and, second, community-based efforts to restore the physical fabric of the divided neighborhoods.

To change the cultural narrative of the highways, urban planners Sarah Jo Peterson and Steven Higashide advocate for “truth and reconciliation” carried out, in part, by existing institutions such as the Transportation Research Board and university researchers, or perhaps even a Congressional commission.  “If we have any hope of avoiding future injustices, we have to fully understand the past,” notes Higashide.

These efforts feed physical solutions like ReConnect Rondo, which received a $2 million grant from Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Program in February 2023. ReConnect Rondo is aligned with but independent from Rondo Days: an initiative “to create Minnesota’s first African American cultural enterprise district connected by a community land bridge” that will “repair, restore, and revitalize Rondo.”

Nearly 25 years ago, St. Paul journalist Joe Soucheray wrote that the Rondo Days festival “comes in softly and touches in a healing way the fading scar of Rondo Ave.” Over the years, this soft touch has had an impact, including by efforts to make the community more visibile through signage, a tribute at the local library, and Rondo’s inclusion in a permanent exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. More recently, a small pocket park called the Rondo Commemorative Plaza opened with the intention to honor the community and welcome new members, such as Somali, Karen, Hmong, and Oromo residents. ReConnect Rondo’s dream of physically and psychologically suturing the old community through a land bridge serves as an extension of this decades-long project.

The eventual Rondo land bridge will be the physical culmination of the efforts catalyzed by Rondo Days. But it is only possible today thanks to the labor of locals, former residents, and activists to make the community’s narrative known. Now it’s up to the rest of us to build it.

The post A Black Neighborhood, Upended by a Highway, Looks to Reconnect appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

OREGON, as the program was known, became wildly popular with students across the United States during the 1980s. Today it is memorialized on t-shirts and in (paper) card games, hearkening to a pixelated time before the PlayStation and the Xbox. But it’s more than cute nostalgia for ‘80s buffs. OREGON is an artifact of an idealistic era in American computing before companies and commerce had taken over digital networks, enticing us to spend so much of our time and money online, tracking, storing, selling, and commodifying our personal data.

It was a time created in, and exemplified by, Minnesota.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Minnesotans created their version of a proto-internet that was centered on community, not commerce. This network wasn’t the domain of dot-com hipsters and billionaire venture capitalists on the make. Rather, it was led by civic-minded Midwesterners dedicated to shepherding public resources for the common good—people who realized that network access would someday be a necessity, and who worked to make it available to everyone, no strings attached.

Just as Minnesota farmers created a pioneering network of grassroots organizations that worked to increase family income and political power during the latter decades of the 19th century, Minnesotan teachers, engineers, and politicians united their state with computing networks starting in the 1960s, at a time when information technology was invisible to most Americans. Although computers proliferated in military, commercial, and university spaces—with several thousand in use by 1960—they functioned behind the scenes, processing checks for Bank of America, managing orders and inventories for Bethlehem Steel, and protecting against Russian airborne attacks.

The term “Silicon Valley” had yet to be coined, but in essence, Minnesota was the Silicon Valley of the Cold War. We forget this today, in part because Minnesota’s computing companies never sold to household consumers, instead providing gigantic, multimillion-dollar mainframe computers to the government, military and intelligence agencies, and other industries. During the 1960s and 1970s, Minnesota-based technology giants such as Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, UNIVAC, and IBM-Rochester anchored a robust high-tech economy in the Twin Cities. Honeywell alone accounted for 14,000 workers at its 21 plants, with an annual payroll of $70 million, historian Tom Misa has noted. Minneapolis-based General Mills, best known as a cereal company, also built “military electronics, torpedo directors, and bombsights during and after World War II,” and later made computers for NASA, the army, and the intelligence agencies. Hundreds of smaller businesses in the Twin Cities region also contributed parts, service, and expertise to the booming computer industry.

This enthusiasm for computing—and the recognition of its profound and growing importance to American life—permeated Minnesota’s schools. At University High School in Minneapolis, a group of teachers arranged for a teletype terminal to be installed during the 1965-66 school year. The teletype had a keyboard where users could communicate with a central computer, or with each other via the network. The terminal connected by long-distance telephone line to a computing network at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Suddenly, computing was a tactile, interactive experience for Minnesota students and teachers. They did not have to shuffle old-fashioned punch cards to create computer programs, handing the cards over to an operator who ran them through a remote, room-sized mainframe. Rather, students just sat down, typed in commands or requests, and got the solution to a problem or the latest news from another school seemingly instantaneously, displayed by the printer built into the teletype.

Twin Cities students developed a zeal for personal computing long before personal computers even existed, spending hours crafting games, programming, and otherwise exploring their networked world. At University High, student journalists celebrated computing at their school with front-page articles in the high school newspaper, the Campus Breeze. One 1966 story reported how teachers had revised math courses to accommodate student computing. The 1968 report “Computer Game Intrigues Students and Teachers” described a decision-making computer game that involved the “market situation” of real beer companies (another beloved Minnesota industry).

Working through professional associations, University High teachers urged colleagues at other area schools to put the “computer in the classroom,” too. Before long, they creatively employed a uniquely Minnesotan statute to make it happen. Enacted in 1943, the Joint Exercise of Powers law permitted cities, counties, or school systems to join together for specific purposes, attaining legal and budgetary status as a wholly new entity. This turned out to be perfectly suited for the proliferation of networked computing. A single school system couldn’t afford the then-tremendous expense of purchasing and maintaining (or even leasing) a mainframe computer; an IBM 360 model cost around $2 million in the mid-1960s—around $15 million in 2018 dollars. But several school systems could band together to cover costs, linking their teletypes to a jointly-owned (or leased) mainframe.

In 1967, 18 school districts around Minneapolis-St. Paul did just that, using the state law to create the Minnesota School Districts Data Processing Joint Board to provide computing services for over 130,000 students. The joint board’s network was known as Total Information for Educational Systems, or TIES, and quickly expanded beyond the metro area. Participating schools used TIES for administration, education, recreation, and socializing, with over 26,000 students logging on to the system’s teletypes during the 1970-71 school year.

The TIES newsletter detailed the many ways students and teachers created new uses for the computers. In 1972, math teacher Linda Borry led a computer-composed music experiment; by 1974 students enthusiastically played a network version of the classic dice game Yahtzee, written at a TIES school. TIES’ structure enabled its phenomenal growth: If a student in one district wrote a program, they could save it to the TIES computing library, where it might be called up, used, and modified by another user in a different district.

The computer language called BASIC, short for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was key to the rapid growth of the network. BASIC had been created at Dartmouth as a user-friendly way for people to create computer programs. The language itself—and the programs created with it, eventually including OREGON—circulated freely around Dartmouth’s and Minnesota’s networks. Crucially, BASIC created a common language across computer networks. During the 1960s and 1970s, programs created for one brand of computer (say, an IBM) generally could not and would not run on another kind of computer (say, a Hewlett-Packard). But many computer manufacturers created their own versions of BASIC, and many of those versions were similar enough that a program or game written for one kind of computer could run on another with only minor changes. This allowed Minnesota students and their networked friends to eagerly play games such as OREGON, CIVIL (a Civil War simulator), and MANAG (competition in managing a business)—even outside of class.

By the early 1970s, several other networks serving students and educators had emerged around Minnesota, and administrators and legislators began to contemplate building a statewide TIES. Many were interested in managing the ballooning costs associated with multiple networks. But their vision was also propelled by a collaborative, user-focused ethos that paid special attention to the public good. State educational leaders believed that familiarity with digital technology would be essential in the future, and recognized that by the early 1970s, students in the Twin Cities region had far greater computing access than students across much of the rest of the state. They reasoned that teaching computing in public schools could provide a way to “insure a common experience for all children,” as TIES employee Donald Holznagel put it, giving all young Minnesotans an equal shot at digital citizenship. In the state where longtime senator and Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey enacted the nation’s first municipal civil rights law in 1948 to provide equality in employment, it wasn’t a huge leap to strive for equal access to computing.

Starting in 1973, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC, brought that vision of a statewide network for the public good to life, building on the networks that Minnesotans had already been cultivating for a decade. During the 1974-75 school year, the MECC network connected approximately 800 terminals around the state and served 84% of the state’s public school kids. In just two years, Minnesotans had tripled the number of students outside the Twin Cities area who had computer network access. Governor Wendell Anderson proclaimed October 19-25, 1975 to be “Computer Week.”

By bringing together Minnesota’s multiple networks and the software they had built, MECC fueled American computing’s journey on a path that, at least for a time, valued digital resources as a common good. For a while, it seemed like an ethos that might catch on. And OREGON seemed to prove their point. The game was a runaway success, not only in Minnesota, where students on a typical day during the 1977-78 school year enjoyed over 5,000 user sessions, but in public schools all around the U.S., where MECC became one of the earliest providers of educational software during the 1980s. As The Oregon Trail spread to school-age students around the nation; some started coding in BASIC, and others ventured onto nascent social networks such as Dartmouth’s “Conference XYZ” chatroom, or local dial-up bulletin board systems.

But kids in the other 49 states never had the kind of access Minnesota children enjoyed, and even today, over 30% of Americans, especially those in poor or rural areas, do not have broadband access at home. For Minnesotans of that first Oregon Trail generation, widespread civic support made computing comparable to water or to electricity—a public utility—built on the pillars of community, cooperation, and collaboration. Had other states followed Minnesota’s computing model, their students would have played The Oregon Trail as computing citizens, too, accessing public networks, creating programs, and sharing software—all as a public good. As it turned out, the rest of the nation has yet to catch up.

The post How Minnesota Teachers Invented a Proto-Internet More Centered on Community Than Commerce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We had decided to create a Jeopardy game for Women’s History Month based on women who were involved in the early years of the physician’s practice that evolved into our internationally renowned academic medical center. I offered to visit the clinic’s historical archive, expecting to glean a few little-known facts about the handful of women who were staples of the organization’s 150-year-old history.

To my surprise, the staff in the archive brought me lists, files, and boxes of information about many women I never had heard of before. As a native of Rochester, Minnesota, where the clinic originated, and as an employee for nearly two decades, I was mystified as to how I missed knowing about these women and their important contributions.

Weeks after completing the Jeopardy game, the absence of these women in our local history still unsettled me. I consulted several histories of the region that cover the years when the Mayo practice was emerging from the prairie, expecting to find that women were included and that I had merely missed seeing their stories previously.

But I found very little about women at all.

The most comprehensive early history of the city of Rochester is a pictorial history. I counted 270 photographs in the book and only 49 of them—18 percent—are of women. There are nearly as many images of horses in the book as there are of women. That was my tipping point, and I embarked on a quest to uncover the stories of these significant women.

Mayo Clinic’s early years were documented in an 800-page book with hundreds of citations, but this seemingly comprehensive history included only scant mention of women. So I dove into the many files provided by the archive staff, and over four years I collected the stories of more than 40 women who made important contributions during Mayo Clinic’s founding years.

Dr. William Worrall Mayo began practicing medicine in Rochester during the Civil War. His sons joined him after medical school and together they built a practice in leased office space downtown.

In 1883, a devastating tornado hit the small prairie town, killing 40 people and leaving 500 people homeless.

As the town was recovering, Mother Alfred Moes, the mother superior of a Franciscan congregation of sisters, envisioned the need for a hospital to meet the needs of the community. She persistently approached Dr. Mayo, who was reluctant to start a hospital because of the cost and poor reputations of hospitals at the time. But eventually he agreed that, if she and the sisters built it, he and his sons would care for patients there. In 1889, after six years of giving music lessons and selling handicrafts to fund the hospital, the Sisters opened Saint Marys Hospital with 27 beds and two operating rooms, a venue that became the cornerstone of a successful surgical practice.

The Clinic’s renowned nursing care began within weeks of the hospital opening. Edith Graham, the youngest of 13 children from a farm outside of Rochester, took the train to Chicago with three other young women to obtain nursing diplomas. After graduation, Edith returned to Rochester and began teaching the Sisters the latest in nursing practices, establishing a sound basis for nursing care in the facility.

Alice Magaw, who also went to Chicago for nurse’s training, would develop a method for administering anesthesia at Saint Marys that set the national standard. Considered the “Mother of Anesthesia,” she documented 14,000 cases without an anesthesia-related death, greatly contributing to the excellent surgical outcomes that Mayo physicians achieved in the early days and upon which they established their reputation.

In 1892, Sister Joseph Dempsey followed Mother Alfred as the administrator of Saint Marys Hospital, a role she held for 47 years. Under her competent leadership, the hospital grew from 27 beds to 600, making it the largest and arguably finest privately owned hospital in the country. At the opening reception of the seven-story expansion of the hospital in 1922, Dr. Henry S. Plummer, one of the most esteemed physicians in the Mayo practice, declared: “Only someone of great genius and great faith would dare to double the size of this already great hospital…. Sister Joseph had the vision and greatness to do it.”

In 1899, Dr. Gertrude Booker Granger became the second physician outside of the Mayo family to join the practice. She assumed responsibility for the ophthalmology cases, making her the first specialist at the clinic. She also made many important contributions to public health in Rochester. Shortly after Granger’s arrival, several more women physicians became part of the clinical practice and research.

Another important addition was Mayo’s head librarian. From her arrival in 1907 to her death in 1936, Maud Mellish Wilson expanded the clinic’s national and international reputation. As a gifted editor as well as librarian, she assured that the medical articles the Mayo doctors wrote were of the highest quality. She also started the highly influential medical journal known today as Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Women joined the Mayo practice as social workers, caring for the non-medical needs of patients. These included unescorted children sent from across the country, and Jewish patients whose dietary needs and customs at death were unfamiliar to the Mayo doctors. Women, mostly nurses, from Mayo Clinic also deployed to France during World War I and cared for wounded and ill soldiers 50 miles from the front.

Put simply, Mayo Clinic would not be the internationally renowned medical center that it is today without the contributions of many women who are left out of the history.

To its credit, Mayo Clinic supported my research and writing to fill in the missing pieces of history, but the Mayo history is not the only record that has overlooked women. I am now researching the contributions that women in the Midwest made during World War II in the military, industry, and home. I am running into more gender bias as I consult books, even recently published, with titles such as World War II: A Complete History, which include very few women, despite the reality that millions served in the armed forces, millions worked in industries, and millions supported home front activities vital to the war effort.

And of course, the problem of underrecognition is broader, to the point of being pervasive. Very few trade biographies published each year are about women. Our daily newspapers and news feeds, which form our most immediate historical records, reveal significant gender inequity as well.

The trouble with biased histories is that they endure. Even Ken Burns’ documentary of Mayo Clinic, which first aired in September 2018, gives well-deserved recognition to the Sisters of Saint Francis, but only briefly acknowledges a few other women, mostly the spouses. The critical contributions of Alice Magaw, Maud Mellish Wilson, and other important women are left unrecognized.

What began for me as a desire to set the Mayo Clinic record straight has become a commitment to find and proliferate the contributions of as many women as I can during my career. I hope others will join me in this endeavor.

The post The Women Who Built Mayo Clinic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is one of the great ironies of 20th-century American history: Hubert Humphrey, the foremost proponent of civil rights among American politicians, had little contact with African Americans until age 28.

Humphrey’s distance from people who would benefit from his legislative prowess was a result of biography and history. He was born in 1911 in the tiny prairie hamlet of Wallace, South Dakota, which had no African Americans. In 1919, he moved with his family 50 miles southwest to slightly larger Doland, where he encountered only a few African-American highway workers with whom he traded the newspapers he hawked for rides on their mule-pulled wagons, a practice his mother, Christine Sannes Humphrey, disapproved of.

But young Hubert’s pharmacist father, Hubert Sr., strongly encouraged his son toward a more liberal outlook by reading nightly to him and his three siblings from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Woodrow Wilson. Demonstrating a strong commitment to democracy and social justice, Humphrey made his pharmacy into a meeting house for townspeople to debate local and national issues.

Still, even during young Hubert’s undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota—in a state where African Americans then made up less than .05 percent of the population—he recalled having only one serious conversation with an African-American student.

This changed when Humphrey, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa and won the University of Minnesota’s Forensic Medal for his debate skills, sought his Master’s degree in 1939 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He chose LSU because the chairman of its political science department was a friend of his Minnesota mentor, and offered him a paid fellowship.

Nearly half of Baton Rouge’s population was African-American, and strict segregation was the order of the day. Humphrey’s sensibilities were jarred when he saw “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs at every public facility. We don’t know if Humphrey made any African-American friends in Baton Rouge; he makes no mention of friends other than Russell Long, the son of Louisiana’s populist governor Huey Long, who was a campus politician and later a colleague of Humphrey in the U.S. Senate. And he spent much of his time on campus, engaged in his research.

But he couldn’t help but notice that wealthy whites lived in stately mansions, middle-class whites resided in neatly painted homes, and African Americans lived in unpainted shacks near open sewage ditches.

He realized, as he recalled in his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, that he was a “conventional northern liberal,” and that he had thought of blacks only as a group and had not been aware of institutionalized white paternalism. He also recognized that his classmates, living in a city with African Americans, weren’t any more connected; they avoided most blacks. The one exception was an LSU classmate who told Humphrey he loved his “mammy,” an African-American employee of his parents who had brought him up and done more for him than his own mother.

Humphrey’s Louisiana experience convinced him that no one could view black life in Louisiana—Southern segregation—without “shock and outrage.” But it also opened his eyes to prejudice in the North that he had not recognized. His “abstract commitment” to civil rights became one of “flesh and blood,” he recalled in his autobiography.

It was hardly a full awakening to racism. Humphrey wrote his Master’s thesis on “The Political Philosophy of the New Deal,” in which he heaped praise on President Franklin Roosevelt’s willingness to use the federal government to undertake bold experiments intended to stabilize society, preserve capitalism, and establish basic economic security for everyone, especially those most in need. But Humphrey said nothing about the New Deal’s failure to advance civil rights or race relations significantly.

Returning to the University of Minnesota to pursue a doctorate in 1940, the always cash-strapped Humphrey took a Works Progress Administration job directing its Twin Cities Worker Education Program. He traveled the state and soon began speaking out against the deplorable working conditions of lumberjacks, miners, and factory workers—as well as against racial and religious discrimination. He was in favor of establishing a federal committee to ensure fair employment practices, which FDR created in 1941. This work led several public and labor union officials to urge him to run for mayor of Minneapolis.

On his second try, in 1945, Humphrey won. His coalition included strong support from African-American and Jewish communities (though they comprised just 1 and 5 percent of the city’s population, respectively), as well as from organized labor, which provided campaign funds and volunteers. In addition, key members of the business community—including John Cowles, owner and publisher of three major Minneapolis newspapers, including the Star Journal, the Morning Tribune, and the Times—backed Humphrey in the belief he would work to rid the city of its organized crime units.

Humphrey soon forged an urban New Deal that brought significant reform to a corrupt police force, improved labor-management relations, and regulated housing sales and rental practices. He also succeeded in shutting down many illicit business operations run by organized crime.

Above all Humphrey sought to root out discrimination in Minneapolis, which journalist Carey McWilliams had labeled the “capital of anti-Semitism in America.” He established a Mayor’s Council on Human Relations that organized a major self-survey drawn by Fisk University sociologists; the effort sent 600 volunteers to survey businesses, labor unions, and realtors about racial attitudes and discriminatory practices. This was a groundbreaking idea, advanced by an African American university that was a premier educator of teachers in 1947.

He ultimately convinced the city council to urge real estate developers needing its approval not to put restrictive covenants in deeds—which was one way neighborhoods were segregated by race and ethnicity.

Humphrey gained his most significant breakthrough in January 1947 when he persuaded the city council to pass a fair employment practices ordinance that outlawed discriminatory practices in hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation of employees, and established a commission to enforce its ruling with fines or jail sentences. (This was the nation’s first municipal fair employment practices commission.)

Similarly, Humphrey sought to desegregate bowling alleys, one of America’s most popular after-work facilities at the time. He succeeded in Minneapolis. In 1948, he had the Minneapolis and St. Paul Committee on Fair Play in Bowling sponsor a nondiscriminatory “All American Bowling Tournament.” But, despite a lobbying campaign, he was unable to persuade the American Bowling Congress to induce the owners of the nation’s 75,000 bowling alleys to open their lanes to all players.

Later in 1948, Humphrey, then an aspiring candidate for the U.S. Senate and a speaker at the Democrats’ national convention, stepped dramatically onto the national political stage. His address, delivered despite threats from the White House that he would hurt the party and his own career, called on Democrats to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” This speech galvanized the convention to adopt the first civil rights platform in the Democrats’ history; it called for equal employment opportunity, equal treatment in the military, protection of voting rights, and safety from lynching.

These advances had political costs. Humphrey’s speech caused some Southern Democrats to bolt the convention and form the Dixiecrat Party. But it also energized President Harry Truman’s campaign—in part by drawing African-American voters in big cities in crucial states—and was greatly responsible for his stunning upset victory over the Republican nominee, New York Governor Thomas Dewey. Humphrey also won his election to the Senate over incumbent Republican Joseph Ball by campaigning on civil rights and “health care for all.”

Humphrey’s 1948 efforts had put civil rights on the nation’s agenda and it would stay there for decades. The senator would keep pushing, despite suffering many bitter verbal attacks from Southern Democrats. Through the middle of the 20th century, he would be the nation’s political leader in advancing the historic civil rights acts of 1957, 1964, 1965, and 1968. These laws were intended to assure every American the right to full and fair participation and equal treatment in every aspect of life, including voting, employment, home ownership, schooling, and military service.

He would lose the presidential election in 1968—the campaign for which he may be best remembered—but he then returned to the U.S. Senate in the 1970s to continue advancing legislation for rights. He became the leading voice of American liberalism and, as Vice President Walter Mondale said upon his death in 1978, “the country’s conscience.”

The post How the South Made Hubert Humphrey Care About Race appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in a town of 400 people in central Minnesota. When people ask the name of the town, I say, “You wouldn’t know the name, but if you’ve driven along the interstate from the Twin Cities to Fargo-Moorhead, stopping halfway to fish, you’ve been to my town. In fact, you might have purchased fishing gear at my parents’ hardware store.” It was in this hardware store that I, a shy child prone to eavesdropping, first studied the language of emotional restraint: listening to the way people talked, to where they paused and for how long, to what they said and—more telling—to what they did not say.

All of these factors—where I come from and my desire to make sense of this place on the page—make me a Minnesota writer, as I discovered again with my second book, a novel set both in San Francisco, where I live today, and in a town in Minnesota like the one in which I grew up. Near the end of the novel, the main character’s father, in a fit of rage, empties the contents of the family’s refrigerator onto the floor. The father is a police officer, and the mother, who grew up on a farm, worked for the electric company until they got married. They are of this place, so when I opened their refrigerator in my mind and then described on the page what I saw, of course there was leftover hotdish.

Hotdish is what most of the country calls casserole, and Minnesotans eat it regularly and with gusto. It consists of three ingredients: some sort of carbohydrate, meat (usually ground beef), and vegetable (string beans, carrots, peas—and yes, canned is fine, even preferred). Finally, a can of cream of mushroom soup is used to bind, moisturize, and mingle the flavors. Particularly popular is Tater Tot hotdish, which Minnesotans claim to have invented. (I’m fairly sure that this claim has gone largely unchallenged.)

Hotdish is a tribute to Minnesotan practicality: easy to make and clean up after, easy to transport. Ease of transportation is essential. While it’s true that hotdish is part of everyday life—filling and accommodating of the Protestant work ethic, with its emphasis on no-fuss meals (because everyone is busy working)—it is also a mainstay of community events, served at funerals and church potlucks, as well as post-Memorial Day parade luncheons.

My novel’s manuscript went off to a copyeditor, who, in the margin next to the scene where hotdish is flung from the refrigerator, wrote the following: “Do you mean that the dish is hot?” I understood her confusion. I had spelled it as two words, “hot dish.” There she was in New York trying to figure out how a dish could be pulled from a refrigerator, hot. I considered my options: I could go with the more universal word casserole, but I felt that in making this simple word substitution, I would lose not just the essence of the place but some degree of credibility, if only among other Minnesotans.

I turned to Facebook, crowdsourcing these two simple questions: Do you know what hotdish is? Do you spell it as one word or two? The first response, from a writer whose memoir had discussed the pervasive silence of growing up in that part of the country, offered this basic definition: “Ummm. Church-basement-post-funeral goodness.” Another response, from my college roommate who now lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, expressed shock that anyone would not know what hotdish was: “Seriously? I make hotdish every week. One word. That’s my final answer.”

In total, 106 people responded to this Facebook post, many, though not all, from the Midwest, some responding to my question, others asking new questions. A poster in Indiana asked about the grammar of the word: “You don’t use the article with ‘hot dish,’ right? You make ‘hot dish,’ not ‘a hot dish’?” Because I no longer eat, make, or discuss hotdish on a daily basis, I found myself struggling to remember, but my high school English teacher quickly responded: “Minnesotans eat ‘hotdish.’ I serve either ‘hotdish’ or ‘a hotdish.’”

Ultimately, instead of casserole, I chose to stick with “hotdish,” changing the spelling to one word. In the margin next to the copy editor’s question, I defended the spelling change as well as the word itself by linking to a page from Senator Al Franken’s website for the Annual Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Off, a competition that replaces party politics with hotdish. This event seems uniquely Minnesotan to me, at once naïve and hopeful, its success determined by both individual and collective abilities to be polite and restrained, to sublimate partisan anger into the preparation of an agreed-upon state food.

I spent several years working toward a career in academia, engaged in the sort of critical analysis and textual parsing that would have had me discussing hotdish as a metaphor of community mingling, ingredients coming together to create a pragmatic citizenry where individual differences are buried beneath a blanket of cream of mushroom soup. This is the type of intellectual exercise that would make Minnesotans laugh uncomfortably, but with a sense of superiority that they would never state directly. The unstated would go something like this: “While you sat around thinking about something as useless as how hotdish symbolizes the Minnesotan sense of self, I made an actual hotdish for supper.” In any case, I gave up on academia long ago, and these days, I use the word casserole, having adapted to the world in which I live, where casserole conveys meaning.

My characters, however, continue to eat hotdish, just as they drink pop rather than soda, and refer to the final meal of the day as supper. In one of my stories, “Talking Fowl with My Father,” the narrator goes home to care for her sick father, a man similar to my own, who is determined not to change in order to accommodate the world. When the narrator calls him to the table, announcing that dinner is ready, he does not come, and when she finally goes to check on him, asking, “Didn’t you hear me calling you for dinner?” he says that he did hear, adding, “But in this house, we eat dinner at noon. If you want me to come for supper, you’ll need to say so.”

In another story, the narrator returns to the town where she grew up to help her mother in the wake of her father’s death. Her father, incontinent at the end, had kept soda bottles near the bed, which he urinated into during the night. She begins gathering them up, noting: “My mother watched, insisting that I call them pop bottles. She thought I was saying soda on purpose, to bother her. She said that there was no way a person could say pop for years and then find herself one day thinking soda.”

Though both stories are fiction, I have spent the last half of my life—that is, the years I have lived away from Minnesota—having such conversations with my parents, who are distrustful of the fact that I have lost my Minnesota accent, which mysteriously disappeared in my mid-20s. “I don’t understand your brogue,” my aunt said when we saw each other for the first time after many years, as if I had become Irish. They regard accent and word choice as proof of belonging, and conversely, my loss of these cultural and geographical markers as proof that I no longer choose to belong. Of course, there is a deeper conversation here, one that we will never have, for doing so would require us to learn new rules of communication. Instead, we will continue to rely on subtext, talking about pop versus soda in order to avoid discussing the greater gulf that lies between us.

When the publication catalogue for the German translation of my novel arrived recently, my wife, whose first language was German, spent some time looking at it before mentioning that the other books by American authors were listed as “Translated from English” while mine alone was “Translated from American.” I suspect that what they really were trying to say was “Translated from Minnesotan.”

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In measures of civil engagement, Minnesota ranks at the top, and California ranks near the bottom. Minnesotans vote, get involved with community organizations, and build up social capital in a way that Californians can only envy. What are Californians lacking–more time? A kick in the rear? In advance of the Zócalo event in Fresno “Is Social Isolation a Threat to Democracy?” we asked several Minnesotans and Californians to weigh in on the question of whether Californians can ever become as civically engaged as Minnesotans.

Maybe–because Minnesota has overcome its own diversity challenges

From the vantage of the pundit class, the Twin Cities (like Minnesota generally) have little to teach a society in the midst of rapid change. As an Ivy League academic recently said to me, “What does the Twin Cities have to do with the future? More than 50 percent of Americans will be people of color in the year 2050. Minneapolis-St. Paul is white-bread, homogeneous, and staid.” This is a radical misreading of Minnesota’s civic success.

The immigrants who flooded in during the boom years of the late 19th century, when the population doubled again and again and again each decade, never thought of themselves as “white bread.” Minnesotans were a motley crew of fiercely clannish Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, and Irish Catholics who mingled with Yankees from back East and black refugees from the segregated South. In the 1900 census, 29 percent of Minnesotans were listed as foreign-born; most of the rest had one or two foreign-born parents. In some cases, they came as bitter enemies; in others, they simply were ignorant about one another’s cultures and beliefs.

The key to Minnesota’s civic success is that over time Minnesotans forged what can be called a different kind of politics, one in contrast to the ideological war that consumes the nation today. Minnesota developed a set of civic institutions and public spaces–colleges, schools and businesses, religious networks, trade unions, cultural groups and arts organizations, parks, libraries and nonprofits–where people built relationships and learned to work across differences. These are the foundations of the open, empowering civic culture that makes the state and the Twin Cities first in civic engagement.

Can California forge similar relationships out of its radical diversity? We’ll see.

Harry C. Boyte is the Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

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Yes, if we can regain a little faith in our institutions

With all due respect to the fine citizens of Minnesota, why should we settle for their example?

Californians have a tradition of social, political and even cultural engagement. Whether we arrived in a covered wagon, a Model T, or in the back of a Chevy pick-up, our decision to come to California was an act of civic participation in its purest form: a commitment to pursue a better life. Our history is filled with examples of Californians working and fighting to create what everyone now calls our Dream.

But it’s true that we don’t participate in the electoral process the way we used to. It’s also true that residents of other states get involved in local issues to a greater extent than Californians. But “civic engagement” without a specific goal is an 8th grade social studies assignment. I don’t believe for a second Californians are reluctant to get involved or that we don’t understand the importance of participation. Our challenge is what we’re being asked to get involved with.

Minnesotans vote and volunteer more than the rest of us. Looking at the Minnesota Civic Health Index they invest that energy into a system they apparently have confidence in.

But in California we have lost faith in many of our institutions. Survey after survey shows we don’t trust government–especially our state government. We only modestly trust our local institutions. The City of Bell. Need I say more?

But while Bell provides a vivid example of what can happen when citizens disconnect from local participation, Bell residents are also showing us the way back. They are busy working on getting themselves and their neighbors engaged with their city on critical issues: the budget, public safety and economic development. And they’re going a step further. Grassroots leaders like Nora Saenz are asking themselves and fellow residents, “What do we want our city to be?” Saenz says Bell has a chance to redefine itself beyond simply addressing how to improve local services. It’s a good question for all of us: “What do we want California to be?”

I believe responding to that question is a better start for us in California, rather than worrying about how they do it in Minnesota.

Victor Abalos is an LA-based communications and civic engagement consultant. His clients include California Forward and the National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials (NALEO).

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Yes, unfortunately, because Minnesota’s catching up to California

Thanks to Garrison Keillor’s stories from Lake Wobegon, most Californians probably think of Minnesota as a quaint winter wonderland, where ruddy-cheeked Scandinavians organize church suppers and clothing drives. Hardly anyone from outside Minnesota realizes that over the past four decades we have become a much more diverse state in terms of culture, ethnicity, race, and religion.

In some respects, St. Paul and Minneapolis are becoming more like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Last winter was very warm, and, despite the housing crisis, our suburbs continue to sprawl. While the state overall is still 85 percent white, the non-white population has increased dramatically over the past four decades. A sense of community prevails particularly among less affluent populations, for whom working together to solve problems is not just a courtesy but a matter of necessity. Those Minnesotans carry forward a long tradition of populist and progressive social movements dating back to the 1920s, when an amalgamation of farmers and unionized workers formed what is now the Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) Party.

But Minnesotans also have a one-percent class that every day seems to embrace more closely the Tea Party and its allies on the religious right. As in California, the uber-rich are white, suburban, and terribly anxious about protecting themselves and their privileges. They seek to shrink the public sector and thus squash civic engagement projects that empower the 99 percent For example, last fall Republican state legislators banded together to slash the budget of the state’s Department of Human Rights, a neutral state agency whose mission includes educating the public to make the state “discrimination free.”

The real question is: What will it take to prevent Minnesota from becoming more like California?

Karín Aguilar-San Juan is an associate professor of American Studies at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

*Photo courtesy of the queen of subtle.

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My father and mother “came up” during the Depression. They grew up in North Dakota on the prairie. My mother was from a farming family in Wyndmere. They owned a large farm but were cash-poor. Like her father, the son of Czech immigrants, my mother was a lifelong Democrat.

My father came from a strict and forbidding Norwegian mother and a charming entrepreneur father who was alternately successful and ruined. My father was a “self-made” man, a Republican who believed, as Republicans once did, in fiscal responsibility, separation of church and state, and limited government. He was pessimistic about people and suspicious about fun.

Throughout my youth, I was a kind of natural anarchist and a dreamy follower of Blake (once I left Catholicism behind). My mother liked to recite page after page of Milton, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Dickinson, and I grew up in a rocking bath of words, pushed on a swing to the words of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Swing”–out and back into the air, back and forth inside the poem itself. I became a nominal Democrat and an awkward rebel. My father and I argued bitterly.

Now that my father is gone, my siblings (I have four brothers and a sister) have inherited the split political affiliations of their parents. My eldest brother, a retired judge, lives just one door away from my mother on a quiet lake. (She remains feisty and outspoken even at 95.) Recently, after visiting my mother one afternoon, I strolled over to his place to say hello. This is always delicate, for my brother is anti-gay, anti-feminist, pro-life, and pro-Michele Bachmann. We see eye-to-eye on almost nothing.

He was in his yard, surveying some recent repairs to his roof. A tree had fallen on it during one of many freak storms popping up everywhere lately. I made the mistake of trying to tease him. “Now maybe you believe in global warming?” I asked.

He turned to me and pointed a finger in my face. “That’s all a lie!” he shouted. We were off. I pointed out some of the crazy things that Michele Bachmann believes. “You are a liberal, elitist socialist,” he sneered. “Straight from Obama’s playbook.”

This stopped me. I asked him how he could he call his own sister these types of names. “You don’t know me,” I said. “What you believe precludes knowing anyone who doesn’t share your views.”

I left shaken, bewildered by the chasm between my brother’s beliefs and mine. Two sides in one family, two sides in the nation. What used to be civil debate in a healthy two-party system is now, so often, destructive and bitter conflict.

I thought back to a visit I’d made with my mother, years earlier, to my brother’s courtroom. He was a juvenile court judge in St. Paul. My mother and I watched case after desperate case of troubled and violent and lost youth come before him. The last case he heard that day involved a mother pleading to have her son, a tall, sweet-faced fifteen year-old, taken away. “Please take him,” she begged. “Just take him away. I can’t handle him. I’m a single mother. We’ve been in this court so many times. He stole another car. He and his friends were drunk. I can’t do this any longer.”

My brother asked her to think carefully about what she was doing. Then her son got down on his knees and wept. His sobs, loud and hoarse, racked the courtroom. “Please!” he sobbed. “Please, Mom! Don’t give up on me!” The mother stared straight ahead at my brother. “Just take him”, she said, “Just take him.” She turned and walked away, and her son was remanded to state custody.

Day after day, my brother saw this sort of thing. Maybe his outlook today springs from a yearning for its opposite: for order, for tough love, for the preservation of family life.

When I was a young poet, I founded a poetry program in prisons in New York. This was my way of trying to figure out how to confront alienation, how to help the lost and the forgotten. It was hopelessly idealistic, and my brother scoffed, but I do think that in some cases, it provided clarity and comfort to people. I hope so, at least.

The human heart is divided, and all of us can be of two minds. We call ourselves “right” and “left” in our politics–but we are two, separate and the same as twins. Like twin cities, mirroring each other, but alien, and apart.

Carol Muske-Dukes is the current Poet Laureate of California and a professor at the University of Southern California. Her latest book of poetry is Twin Cities (Penguin Poets Series, June 2011).

*Photo courtesy of *clairity*.

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It was in the farmhouse that I sat at midnight, alone, at the kitchen table, with a cup of tea and one of my favorite childhood books, Louis Sachar’s Wayside School is Falling Down, unopened in my grasp. At that moment – a rarity, if not functional impossibility – I had escaped the din of life. The follicles in my ears stood at rapt attention, trying mightily to search for the quietest of noises. But there were none. Everyone and everything slept. The frost kept critters at bay, and even the wind decided to rest for the night. Only my heartbeat stood between pure, unadulterated silence.

A slow sigh escaped my lips. Not a sigh of regret or exasperation or negativity. Just – contentment. I had made the long, difficult trip, trying to get away from my rowdy, peripatetic life. My future legal career is in Los Angeles. My friends are in Chicago. My Dad’s family lives in St. Paul. My Mom’s family resides in the farmhouse. My life is almost always a constant din, a racket both literal and figurative – from the unwavering traffic outside my downtown Los Angeles apartment to the constant voice in my head pushing me to achieve certain goals in my last year at law school. Getting away for Thanksgiving – or for any holiday – always presents an opportunity to escape the noise.

But it was not easy.

Traveling proved to be a loud logistical nightmare, starting with the flight: long security lines; new X-ray technology that broadcasts intimate details to airport security; travelers nervously glancing at their watches; constant messages blasting over the loudspeaker (“The moving walkway is ending!”). Passengers, in an attempt to avoid fees, shuffled aboard with bulbous bags only to find the overhead compartments full. The plane’s engines droned incessantly; what felt like days-old recycled air blasted from above.

The perils of travel, and the constant whirl of sound, were hardly limited to the airport. On this particular Thanksgiving, my circuitous route brought me from Los Angeles to Chicago for 36 hours, to my Dad’s house in St. Paul for a couple of days, and finally to the farmhouse in Owatonna, Minnesota, 80 miles from my Dad’s house. Along the way I connected with bits of my past. Chicago was a blur: seeing old friends, meeting new ones, eating Gino’s East pizza, watching a football game at Wrigley Field, laughing, yelling, cavorting. St. Paul involved my Dad, traffic, a Timberwolves game, and a movie.

It wasn’t until I reached Owatonna that I complete my journey to the place where I first began to find my identity. Of course, even traversing the 80 miles from St. Paul to Owatonna proved difficult. Freezing rain peppered the freeway and swirling gusts pushed my car from side to side. The wind howled through the imperfect window seals. Even here, in my car on a desolate Minnesota highway, 3,000 miles away from the fracas of downtown Los Angeles, noise permeated my world.

I finally made it. But the ever-elusive quiet would have to wait. My twin brothers, 12-year-old 6th graders, demanded my attention for most of the day. My Mom wanted to catch up for hours.  After a loud but gratifying day of video games, football, wrestling, and talking, I was spent and the rest of the house was fast asleep. I was alone. It was then that I sat down at the kitchen table with my cup of tea and Wayside School is Falling Down. That book, which I first read in grade school and have read countless times since, first introduced me through its series of eccentric parables to the notion of individuality and the conflicts it can create. I didn’t need to read it again – its weight in my hand was nostalgic enough. Instead I silently reflected on my trip.

The concept of home, like the quiet we all seek, is often obscured and difficult to find. Is home where you grew up? Where your family now lives? Where your friends are? Where your career is? As I sat at the table, a hardcover memory still unopened yet firmly in my grasp, I knew I was home. I realized it was not my physical presence in the house but the culmination of the connections I made during my journey, and the chance to reflect in the enveloping silence, that made the experience so rich.

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