Alternate Universe Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Gary Marvin Davison Eliminates the Office of Black Male Achievement, Department of Indian Education, and the Department of College and Career Readiness on 30 August 2017

As Alternate Universe Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), I am today announcing the elimination of the Office of Black Male Achievement, Department of Indian Education, and Department of College and Career Readiness.

 

The jettisoning of these sinecures is in line with our full focus on academic achievement in accordance with my five-point program for student educational advancement at the Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

That program focuses clearly on the following:

 

1)  grade by grade knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum, linked to the Minnesota Department of Education academic standards, the Core Knowledge Foundation curriculum for grades pre-K through grade 6, and my own curriculum for grades 7-12, as detailed in the August 2014 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota;

 

2)  vigorous and rigorous retraining of all teachers, thus prepared to impart a knowledge-intensive curriculum;

 

3)  coherent and comprehensive tutoring and academic enrichment for students, according to individual need and interests, for all students at all schools throughout the district;

 

4)  resource provision and referral to families struggling with challenges of finances and functionality;

 

5)  dramatic paring of the central school district bureaucracy, from the 500-650 staff member range that typically prevails to approximately 150, pending staff additions for tutoring, academic enrichment, and family resource provision and referral.

 

I will be evaluating all positions and departments in view of contributions to the academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools, the latter clearly the focus of all of our efforts.

 

The following changes for the Office of Black Male Achievement, Department of Indian Education, and Department of College and Career Readiness are effective immediately:

 

These bureaucratic entities are terminated as independent agencies. 

 

All staff in these erstwhile agencies of the Minneapolis Public Schools are hereby notified that their employment at the Minneapolis Public Schools is terminated. 

 

Michael Walker, Anna Ross, and Terry Henry are invited to apply for new MPS positions, as follows:

 

Michael Walker is invited to apply for the position that I am creating that will lead program and staff in the energetic new resource provision and referral program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Anna Ross is invited to apply for a position subsumed under the new Department of Academic Programming and Achievement that will provide consultation on academic matters pertinent to American Indian history and culture.

 

Terry Henry will be invited to apply for a new program ensuring that students of all demographic descriptors will earn a four-year high school diploma that will allow them to go forward to post-high school training with strong knowledge and skill sets appropriate for any college, university, or other post-secondary setting.

 

These staff dismissals and newly defined positions indicate my seriousness in addressing the current knowledge and skill deficiency of all students at the Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

These changes proceed in accordance with my recognition that the Office of Black Male Achievement has done nothing during the academic years ending in 2015-2017 to advance the academic progress of the approximately 7,000 African American males enrolled at the Minneapolis Public Schools, including the merely 298 students that the office has typically served annually. 

 

The changes move forward in recognition of similar failures in the Department of Indian Education, and in view of the fact that the Department of College and Career Readiness has overseen a wretched situation whereby one-third of MPS graduates need remedial instruction once matriculating on a college or university campus.

 

All staff and the public whom we serve please be aware of our clearly prioritized five-point program and the new, clearly articulated knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that guides these staffing decisions and all of my actions as Alternate Universe Superintendent of the Minneapolis Pubic Schools. 

 

Ed Graff’s Tenure as Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent is On A Course Toward Termination, and An Electoral Shakeup of the MPS Board of Education is in Motion

In the months ahead, we are likely to look back on the week that ran from Sunday, 13 August, through Saturday, 19 August 2017, as the point at which Ed Graff’s tenure as superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) began a course toward termination and at which an electoral shakeup of the MPS Board of Education commenced.

 

This is a school district that has failed its students for four decades now.

 

Graff and the current membership of the MPS Board of Education have been particularly suspect for the quality of leadership that they have personally exhibited for a full year.

 

Ed Graff gained the position of MPS superintendent at the end of the second stage of a prolonged, 17-month, botched search.  The board failed to recognize the superior talent represented in at least two other candidates over the course of the two-stage search.  The outcome produced, the happenstance that after 17 months the board would opt for Graff, an administrative mediocrity whose contract in Anchorage was not renewed and who left behind an academic track record comparable to the miserable achievement rates that were waiting for him when he arrived in Minnesota, would be stupefying if the incompetence of the school board were not so abidingly manifest.  

 

This a school board that since the election of November 2017 has been weakened badly by the loss of three of its best members:  Tracine Asberry and Josh Reimnitz, who lost narrowly to teacher union-backed candidates;  and Carla Bates, who did not run for election after 12 years of service.  These three were replaced respectively by Ira Jourdain, Bob Walser, and Kim Ellison (the latter of whom vacated her District 2/ North Minneapolis seat to run for Bates’s at-large seat;  the District 2 seat went to KerryJo Felder).  The current board is now comprised of eight Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT)-backed candidates and the ineffective Don Samuels.  

 

As I detail in many articles below as you scroll on down this blog, Graff and the school board gathered  for their annual retreat on 14 and 15 August 2017, a week after they lost control of their regular monthly meeting to a rowdy crowd animated in opposition to placement of School Resource Officers (SROs) in the schools.

 

For those details you, my readers, can peruse articles posted in the aftermath of that 14-15 August meeting to discover just how clueless Graff and this iteration of the MPS Board of Education were in mounting a defense of, still trying to plug on with, their inept Strategic Plan Acceleration 2020.  Stuck with this plan, and with this inept school board membership, Graff confronts a situation that would be extraordinarily challenging even for a foremost administrative talent, which he decidedly is not.  In the context of a situation in which the same academic failure describes the public school district in its core function, Graff mumbles on about social and emotional learning, equity, community engagement, an unspecified multi-tiered system of support, and accountability---  without offering any viable plan of action.

 

You will find in one of the articles as you scroll on down my own vision for the Minneapolis Public Schools, rendered with the specifics that Graff is incapable of offering.

 

Graff maintains a countenance of yoga-induced cool and is rarely rattled.  His responses to me have proved the exception, as I have definitely gotten under Graff’s skin multiple times;  I have rattled Graff in the absence of any attempt to do so, the rattling coming only as a byproduct of my efforts to get Graff to detail his academic program.

 

Frustrated that I was exposing his lack of any definition of an excellent education or any sense of how to advance the academic achievement of students in Minneapolis, Graff in one moment of lost cool emitted this question: 

 

“Well, why don’t you just be superintendent, Gary?”

 

As you will read as you scroll on down, I have accepted his offer.

 

I have become superintendent in an alternate universe and have assembled a team ready to take over in the conventional universe as the months ahead ensue.

 

The ineptitude displayed at the 14-15 August retreat on the part of both the school board and Graff now makes this displacement of the current board membership imperative.

 

Ed Graff’s tenure as Minneapolis Public Schools superintendent is on a course toward termination and an electoral shakeup of the MPS Board of Education is in motion. 

                                                                                         

The termination and the shakeup will occur in the course of the period running from the present (late August 2017) through the school board elections of November 2017.

 

The K-12 Revolution is in motion, meticulously planned in the style of pragmatic revolutionaries:  Think Saul Alinsky, Mohandas K. Gandhi, A Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinhem.

 

The K-12 Revolution is in motion, open to all people with love of young people, knowledge, and democracy for people of all demographic descriptors.

Introduction to My Multi-Article History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis

A couple of weeks back, I posted several articles on the history of the African American community of North Minneapolis. 


As you scroll on down this blog, you will now find that the series has now been rearranged for convenient reading in chronological order, from Part One so through Part Four.

These articles represent an overview of a bevy of information that I gathered in the course of the first years of the new millennium, acquired via documents and through approximately one hundred hours of interviews with community elders and a few younger longtime Northside residents.  My interviewees included famous folk, such as the towering eminence of Harry Davis, as well as people of lower profile with long memories of the old Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, W. Gertrude Brown, and the Jewish community with which African American Northsiders made firm friendships and common cause.

 

As the 19^th century turned into the 20^th century, the Northside became a residential area inhabited by people who were denied housing elsewhere in the city;  this was especially true for Jewish and African American people, who established homes just along, just south, and many blocks north of, old Sixth Avenue (today’s Olson Highway).  Housing tended to be cheaper in North Minneapolis, so that economically poorer people from among European populations also settled on the Northside;  Norwegian and German immigrants established residences stretching northward from West Broadway, while a Finnish community developed along Glenwood Avenue at the far southern part of the Northside. 

 

Especially along Sixth Avenue and Plymouth Avenues, Jewish and African American folk had by the 1930s and 1940s built a thriving community of businesses, churches, synagogues, community centers, and schools, the latter including North High School when it was the best high school in the state of Minnesota.  During the 1950s The Wheatley continued to offer vital athletic, artistic, domestic arts, and academic programming for African American youth, and during the 1960s The Way and Opportunities Unlimited continued to do the same.  Jewish youth tended to congregate at the Edmund Cohen Community Center and after school classes at the Talmud-Torah School.

 

The 1960s and 1970s brought big changes to North Minneapolis.  These were years of great in-migration from people originally from such areas as Southside Chicago;  Gary, Indiana;  Kankakee, Illinois;  Detroit;  and East St. Louis;  who had little knowledge of Northside history and heritage.  Riots broke out along Plymouth Avenue in the summer of 1967 that had the effect of hastening Jewish movement toward St. Louis Park and speeding middle class African American migration toward the near suburbs.  By the late 1970s, a much more economically challenged African American community came to dominate residence on the Northside;  housing prices took a plunge, so that other economically challenged communities of Hmong, Hispanic, and some European provenance also moved to North Minneapolis.

 

When crack cocaine hit the streets in the 1980s and gang activity became rife during that decade and into the 1990s, decision-makers and staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools faced a challenge for which they were totally unprepared.  Children from impoverished and oft-dysfunctional families are in even greater need of an excellent education than those from less challenging circumstances, but the staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools operated from a middle class framework from which service to the children of the poor could not be properly rendered. 

Political figures in the United States and those who elect them typically operate from a place of lamentable historical ignorance.   This is true at the national, state, and local levels.  At the local level, Ed Graff and most members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education have very little  understanding of the history of North Minneapolis, either as to the depths of Northside splendor or with regard to the severe challenges of the last four decades. 

 

The historical ignorance of Graff and members of the school board contributes to their incompetence and impedes their development of a viable program of educational excellence capable of addressing the needs of the students and families whom they serve.

 

Superintendent Ed Graff must quickly get up to speed in his knowledge of many matters, including the history and nature of the community that he serves.  The best of the current staff at the Davis Center (central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools, 1250 West Broadway) must do the same, develop a program of educational excellent that follows my five-point plan, and start rendering to Graff the advice that he needs.  If Graff cannot get up to speed and serve all students and families of all demographic descriptors, then he must exit as superintendent.

 

All members of the current membership of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education are suspect for their miserable record of failure.  We should specially target Rebecca Gagnon, Nelson Inz, and Don Samuels for defeat in their reelection campaigns in 2018.

 

Students of North Minneapolis, and those throughout this typical iteration of the locally centralized school district, have been waiting a very long time for an education of excellence.

 

We need decision-makers who understand the history and the nature of the communities whom they serve.

 

The time for the K-12 Revolution has arrived.

 

History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis >>>>> Part One: Historical Background

History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis

An Overview: 

 

Part One:  Historical Background

 

Gary Marvin Davison

 

The story of the North Minneapolis African American community is intimately linked to the history of the territory (established 1849) and state (established 1858) of Minnesota, and to all key events in the history of the United States.

 

People from outside the cultural universe of the Dakota and the more recently arrived Ojibwe people were first drawn to the place we now call Minnesota in the 17^th century.  These were mostly fur traders keen on getting as many beaver pelts as they could for shipment back to a lucrative market in Europe.  The French and the British dominated this trade, but among the traders there were representatives of a variety of ethnicities, including those of African ancestry.  The most famous of these were Pierre Bonga and his son George, the latter of whom became particularly successful as a trader, interpreter (he was fluent in French, English, and Ojibwe), and diplomat who helped to lower the cultural barriers between the native inhabitants and the European arrivals.  Bungo Township and Bungo Brook in Cass County were named for the Bonga family.

African Americans were also linked to the history of Ft. Snelling, which was completed in 1820.  James Thompson arrived at Ft. Snelling in 1827 as a slave but lived to see emancipation become a reality for those formerly held in bondage;  he became the only African American among the St. Paul Old Settlers Association.  Dred Scott became a particularly well-known former resident at Ft. Snelling:  His two-year residence at the fort during 1836-1838 led him to file a lawsuit contending that his residence in a free state should end the condition of servitude that his master sought to maintain upon returning to the South.  Scott won the case in a lower court, but the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the earlier decision.  The high court’s ruling (in 1857) that slaves were transportable property greatly added to the North-South tensions that culminated in the Civil War. 

Among the Minnesotans who fought in that conflict were 105 African Americans.  Thus, Minnesotans of African ancestry were part of the historical flow of events culminating in the 13^th Amendment that officially ended the institution of slavery.  By the time that amendment went into effect (1868), African Americans had already settled in the corner of Minneapolis then known as St. Anthony, across the Mississippi River from today’s downtown.  Sometime in 1857 eight families of free African Americans with roots in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois settled near the Falls of St. Anthony.  Members of these families and later African American arrivals to Minneapolis formed St. James Episcopal Church in 1863.

In that same year a steamboat known as the “Northerner” arrived in St. Paul with a raft in tow that carried 76 African American men, women, and children.  The leader of the group was Robert Hickman, destined to become one of the most important figures in the early African American community of St. Paul.  Hickman was instrumental in forming the Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1866, and after his formal ordainment in 1877 he became this important congregation’s official pastor.  Pilgrim Baptist Church has endured to this day as a thriving congregation of St. Paul.   

Until about 1910, the greatest settlement of Twin Cities African Americans, and the heart of African American society and culture, lay in St. Paul.   Most African-American pioneers of the 1860s and 1870s settled initially on a bend in the Mississippi where the lower levee was located, taking up residence alongside Irish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Jewish immigrants.  As the area became too crowded to support additional families, these groups spread out.  Although the immigrant families had generally gotten along well as they battled common conditions rooted in poverty, when they spread out they tended to sort themselves into certain areas heavily identified with particular ethnic groups.  African Americans faced severe discrimination in all facets of life in St. Paul, including those bearing upon housing and residence.  Only on the immediate north and northwest corridors leading to residential areas on the western plateau did they find reasonable welcome along a pathway that had been forged by the Jewish community.   

By 1900 population pressures and greater commercialization of areas branching from downtown St. Paul forced African Americans farther north and west onto a plateau along Rondo Avenue and adjacent streets from Rice to Lexington.  Rondo, St. Anthony, Central, Carroll, and University avenues east of Dale Street became the hub of the famous “Rondo Community.”  Here were numerous African American-owned barbershops and hair salons, restaurants, pharmacies, fraternal lodges, churches, and commercial establishments of various kinds.  Until well into the 20^th century, St. Paul produced the greater number of outstanding African American leaders in the Twin Cities:  entreprenuers Thomas H. Lyles and James K. Hilyard;  John Quincy Adams, editor of the highly influential newspaper, the Appeal;  lawyers Frederick McGhee (who helped  W. E. B. DuBois launch the Niagara Movement in 1905 that culminated in the founding of the NAACP in 1910), J. Frank Wheaton, and William T. Francis;  and Dr. Valdo Turner, one of the city’s earliest African-American physicians.

The spirit of the Rondo community endures to this day (celebrated as “Rondo Days” for several recent summers), despite the fact that the construction of I-94 in the 1960s destroyed the street that was the community’s namesake and caused great geographical, social, and commercial disruption.  Long before that tumultuous decade, though, the demographic and cultural weight among African Americans in the Twin Cities had shifted to Minneapolis.

History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis >>>>> Part Two: Development During the First Decades of the 20th Century

Part Two:  Emergence of the North Minneapolis African American Community

 

Minneapolis became one of the minor destination points for those taking part in that phenomenon known as the “Great Migration,”  the movement of some 300,000 to 1,000,000 African Americans who left the South for better opportunities during the years encompassing World War I (1914-1918;  American participation, 1917-1918).  The war created economic demands and labor needs that slowed the flow of European immigrants and opened up unprecedented opportunities for African Americans in major cities.  Those opportunities were genuinely great in destinations such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh;  they proved to be much less so in Minneapolis.  Nevertheless, the city’s African American population increased from 2,592 to 3,927 between 1910 and 1920, a 51.5% increase as compared to just 7.3% for St. Paul (the African American population of which grew from 3,144 to just 3,376 during the same period).

 

From the 1880s forward the residential weight of African Americans in Minneapolis shifted across the river from St. Anthony into the rapidly growing commercial area that came to constitute downtown.  During the 1920s the weight shifted again, from the downtown area to the Seven Corners area, and to the Near North Side.  By 1930, these areas contained 2,100 (50.2%) of the city’s 4,176 African American residents.  Another concentration of African American population took shape in South Minneapolis along 4^th and 5^th Avenues between East 35^th and 41^st streets.  Of these areas, the smaller Southside African American community contained more middle class families, people who ran their own small businesses or had attained professional certification of some sort.  The Northside also had a good number of lower middle class African American families, and most all families had middle class aspirations;  but many families kept their dignity and tried to forge a better life from initially impoverished conditions.  Some family heads found work on the railroads or in meatpacking plants, but most unions were closed to African American participation;  accordingly, those African Americans who found employment generally became nonunionized redcaps, porters, janitors, waiters, cooks, maids, and barbers.

The African American community of North Minneapolis was from the 1920s through the 1940s concentrated between Plymouth and Glenwood Avenues.  The area around Glenwood Avenue held a significant number of Finnish families, while the area around 6^th Avenue (today’s Olson Highway) contained families bearing a considerable mix of ethnicities:  German, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian and, especially, Jewish.  In time, the earlier arrived German Jewish families tended to move their own residences westward toward Penn Avenue  and northwestward toward Plymouth Avenue, while still maintaining property and serving as landlords to the less economically successful Jews who had been in the community for many years, the more recently arrived Russian Jews, and other ethnic groups on the Northside.  The major area of African American residence on the Northside was just north of 6^th Avenue, on streets branching eastward and westward from Lyndale Avenue North.

Sixth Avenue looms large in the consciousness of those African Americans old enough to remember “The Avenue” in its heyday.  The first African American-owned store to open on the Avenue was “Miller’s Plantorium,” which featured a drycleaning operation and a haberdashery.  Soon the first African American-owned grocery store on 6^th Avenue was opened by William Allen and his son Albert.  Starting three-fourths of a block east of Lyndale Avenue, businesses owned by African Americans, Germans, Jews, and a smattering of other ethnicities stretched westward for seven blocks along 6^th Avenue.  There were twelve restaurants and delicatessans:  Morman’s Barbecue, Monarch Barbecue, Shell’s Barbecue, Price and Smedler Fried Chicken, Tanner’s Chile Parlor, Barney’s Lunch Counter, Brochin’s Kosher Meat and Sandwiches, Graham’s Hot Barbecue Links, Foster’s Sweet Shop, Canton Chinese Restaurant, Law’s Seafood, and Malcoff’s Kosher Meat Sandwiches.  There were three pool halls:  Charley Banks, Oliver & Boyd, and Al Hector’s.  At the west end of this vital commercial area stood the Liberty Theater, where in the 1920s an adult could see a silent movie for 25 cents, children for a dime.  The theater had a stage on which an amateur show was held once a month.  Every week the Liberty would hold a raffle, with the winner coming away with a turkey and the runner-up getting a goose or a duck.

Sixth Avenue also featured a lively nightlife and became a gathering place for African Americans from all over St. Paul and Minneapolis.  There were four nightclubs in the 1920s:  the Kongo, the Delisa, the Blue Lantern, and the Sunset Club.  Nine bands and combos performed at these clubs and other Minneapolis venues.  These popular groups included the namesake groups of Grant Moore, Eli Rice, Rook Gangza, Ray Dyset, Leon Lewis, Clarence Johnson, the Pettifords, the Scottie Williams Combo, and Mr. Black’s Band.  Certain members of these groups also played at the Elks Hall on the third floor of the Kistler building at 6^th and Lyndale, where dances were given three nights a week and every holiday, virtually always filling to capacity.  As Clarence Miller, designer of a priceless map with commentary on the 1920s heyday of the Avenue writes, “In the summer months (before air conditioning), they would always raise the windows to cool and air out the place (deodorizers were not invented then, talcum powder was the thing) and if the wind was blowing towards downtown you could hear the wailing of the trumpets and trombones as you came across the 7^th Street Bridge.”

By the 1920s several predominately African American churches had been established on the Northside, including three that would have enduring significance:  Zion Missionary Baptist, Wayman’s African Methodist Episcopal, and Border Methodist;  the former two congregations remain active on the Northside, while the latter has merged with Hennepin Methodist in downtown Minneapolis.  During the 1920s and 1930s it was said that Sunday was not Sunday if one did not stroll down the avenue in the afternoon or in the evening.  At such times people walked four and five abreast on either side of 6^th Avenue from Lyndale to Bryant, thinning out somewhat by the time Emerson loomed.

So 6^th Avenue was the home to places of African American business, worship, and social interaction.  It was also home to an underworld, controlled at the top by Jewish mobsters such as Kid Cann (Isadore Blumenfeld), who offered gambling, prostitution, and booze (the latter of which was illegal during the Prohibition era, 1919-1933).  Ten or fifteen prostitutes generally walked the Avenue at night;  numerous after hour spots could be found where one could buy moonshine at all times of the night and a man or woman for an hour.  Reefer seeds and Bull Durham cigarettes were free inducements to this trade.  There were also numbers runners selling “policy,” an illegal form of lottery.  Given the high unemployment rate for African Americans, stemming from severe job discrimination, as many as 40% of adult wage earners either earned or supplemented their income from one or more of the illegal activities found on the Avenue.  Many of these people lived otherwise upstanding lives, attended church, lived amicably with their neighbors, and caused little or no trouble.  They found acceptance among those who held strictly to legal professions, because there was an understanding that in a city where discrimination was rife, one did what one had to do to feed, clothe, and house one’s family.

 

Nevertheless, there was concern in the community about the influences that such activities had on young people.  Concern focused especially on the fates of young, poor, single women drawn to the big city, on their own, all too susceptible to the exhortations of those plying the illegal trades.  As a result of a youth study by a white women’s civic organization, Women’s Cooperative Alliance (WCA), the idea of a settlement house for young African-American women on the Northside was first put forward in 1922.  A campaign run by these wealthy and well-connected women (many of them wives and daughters of the city’s elite businessmen) raised enough money to purchase the old Talmud Torah School at 808 Bassett Place.  By the time this Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House opened in 1924, its target population included not just young girls but all members of the community, males and females, old and young;  programming, though, was especially abundant for children and adolescents.  “The Wheatley,” as the organization came to be known in brief, proved to fill a need so great that a new, much more ambitious campaign was mounted to build a bigger facility, which opened in 1929 at 809 Aldrich Avenue North.

 

For forty years, the Wheatley would be the heart and soul of the African American community of North Minneapolis.  On it second floor were several rooms, a commons area, and kitchen where University of Minnesota students and nationally famous personages such as Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, and A. Philip Randolph could stay at a time when dorms and hotels in Minneapolis refused service to them.  Thus, kids who gathered for classes in sewing, cooking, and dancing;  to participate in sports programs such as football, basketball, and baseball;  or who took advantage of a well-stocked library or special programming designed to convey African-American history and culture;  rubbed shoulders with some of the brightest and most talented people in the land.   The children and adolescents got a chance to see someone who looked like them making beautiful music, dancing, doing political or labor organizing, and in general moving confidently in the world.  This made a lasting impression on those who came to the Wheatley from 1924 through the middle 1960s;  for many an impressionable youngster the Wheatley experience gave them confidence to go forth in a world that did not always seem to welcome their participation, to take on the challenges of an adversely stacked deck and come out a winner.

Presiding over the residential, educational, recreational, health, and nutrition programs at the Wheatley from 1924 until 1937 was a remarkable head resident, W. Gertrude Brown.  A physically stout, strong woman who rose to about 6’2” in height, Ms. Brown was even keener of intellect. She quickly became a leader in the greater Twin Cities community, even as the Wheatley became the most famous African American institution in the area.  Ms. Brown adroitly served as the nexus between the well-to-do white community and the neighborhood people whom she loved and who loved her.  For a long while she also managed to do a challenging balancing act, offering space and lodging to groups gathered in Minneapolis to promote the activities of the NAACP, Urban League, Brotherhood of  Sleeping Car Porters, and a few much more radical groups seeking to advance the cause of poor people and people of color.  Every person who lives today to reflect upon the presence of W. Gertrude Brown remembers her as a towering and totally positive presence in their lives:  full of stern love, ready with instructions on deportment and grooming, tolerating no nonsense but dispensing abundant tough love.

In 1937, though, Ms. Brown could no longer keep her balancing act alive.  She departed under pressure, it seems, from a white board of directors which found her too much an activist for her people, and from a number of prominent African American men who had become jealous of her success and her reputation.  Two head residents quickly came and went, then the highly competent Henry Thomas came on staff to direct the Wheatley from 1942 through 1965.  Ray and Mae Hatcher served several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s as directors of boys’ and girls’ programs respectively.  Harry Davis and Ray Wells took over the boxing program and provided instruction to a succession of Golden Gloves champions from the late 1940s into the early 1960s.

 

History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis >>>>> Part Three: 1940s-1960s

Part Three:  The North Minneapolis African American Community, 1940s-1960s

 

About the time that W. Gertrude Brown made her exit from the Wheatley, two significant changes came to the Northside.  In 1937 came the completion of the first stage of the Sumner Housing Project, then in 1941 came the construction of Floyd B. Olson Highway along the thoroughfare that had been known as 6^th Avenue.  The housing project offered affordable and attractive residential units;  those whose families were able to secure spots in the facility considered themselves very lucky.  The highway, too, seemed a harbinger of modernity, with a greatly broadened roadway appropriate to the age of the automobile.  But construction of the highway dismantled or induced the departure of those businesses, now mostly Jewish owned, that had thrived along old 6^th Avenue.  Many of these moved in the early 1940s, typically to Plymouth Avenue, which to later generations would become “The Avenue.”

 

During and after the World War II (1939-1945) years, unprecedented opportunities opened up to African Americans on the Northside.  Executive orders issued by Presidents Roosevelt  and Truman banned discrimination in companies contracted to the federal government.  Enforcement is never perfect in such cases, but the number of jobs now open strictly on the basis of talent, ability, and capacity for hard work increased greatly.  An ordnance plant in New Brighton became a major employer of African Americans, as did Onan Industries, located on the Northside;  and certain Twin Cities companies such as General Mills, Pillsbury, and Honeywell compiled better records in employment practices than had been the case before World War II. 

 

One of the major forces working to ensure better employment opportunities, and working to promote and report on enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws in the Twin Cities, was Cecil Newman, editor of the long-lived newspaper, the Minneapolis Spokesman.  Newman had founded the Spokesman in 1934, by which time John Quincy Adams’s Appeal had faded from the scene in the aftermath of the great editor’s death in the 1920s.  The Spokesman quickly surged into the market that the Appeal had dominated, and for decades thereafter would be the preeminent African American-owned newspaper in the Twin Cities;  its location in Minneapolis (the Appeal had been based in St. Paul) signaled the shift that had taken place in the relative influence of the African American communities in the two cities.    Newman was an enormously influential presence in the Twin Cities, posting job openings, running articles and editorials protesting discriminatory policies, working closely with the Minneapolis Urban League and the NAACP, and offering his newspaper headquarters as an information clearing house that in many ways advanced the cause of equal opportunity for African Americans.

 

Housing discrimination, though, continued to be widespread, even as the late 1940s, the 1950s, and, especially, the 1960s brought to Minneapolis thousands of new African American migrants, mostly from the American South.  Most of these settled on the Northside, which was already becoming more African American in residential patterns as prosperous Jewish people found ways to crack the prejudice against them to forge new institutions and to take up residence in nearby St. Louis Park.  Most of these new arrivals had little sense of the history of the African American community on the Northside:  Minneapolis had been just one of several northern urban options, and they came to the city for jobs, not to acquire a sense of history.  By the late 1960s, such inner city populations were voicing their displeasure at the world in which they had landed, to the power elite in cities that had fallen far short of the promised land when it came to jobs, housing, and racial attitudes.  When in the summer of 1967 major riots broke out in Cleveland, Detroit, and Los Angeles, young African American people also thrust their voices and bodies into the whirlpool of discontent:  A major riot lasted for several days along Plymouth Avenue, destroying many Jewish-owned businesses, and hastening the Jewish exit to St. Louis Park.

 

History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis >>>>> Part Four: 1970s into the New Millennium

Part Four:  North Minneapolis African American Community, 1970s into the New Millennium

 

By the early 1970s, the world that the young people who had grown up when Phyllis Wheatley, Sumner Field, Glenwood (now Theodore Wirth) Park, Sumner Elementary School, Lincoln Junior High, and North High School were in their heyday was gone.  In programming and service to the community, Phyllis Wheatley faded to a shadow of its former self;  in the mid-1960s, the old building had fallen to the forces of urban renewal and a new professional social work approach to providing an array of community services at separate locations.  Sumner Field had lost its own best programming and no longer offered the warming houses to ice skaters in winter and the friendly, concerned personnel that had staffed the park during the 1920s-1940s era.  Glenwood (Theodore Wirth) now seemed far away to a generation oriented more toward Plymouth and Broadway Avenues.  Sumner Elementary had succumbed to the construction of Olson Highway, Lincoln became an elementary school, and North High was housed in a new building that was increasingly filled with African American students, with scant evidence of the Jewish young people that had so outnumbered the African American kids just a few years before.

Ironically, in a country in which desegregation now was the official policy, African American kids grew up in a residential and academic world that became increasingly segregated.  Whites left the Northside and other inner city areas in great numbers.  As the previously restricted housing covenant eased, many middle class African Americans also chose to move to the suburbs.  By the 1980s, the Northside became the residential focus of another wave of migrants, this time from other northern cities, notably Chicago.  The quality of housing, education, social services, and standard of living in Minneapolis seemed to most of these new arrivals to be much better than that which had prevailed in their previous locales.  A few saw Minneapolis as relatively virgin territory to ply a trade in the newly popular drug of crack cocaine, or to establish a base for gang activity.

A number of new institutions arose to serve the needs of this less stable and more restive African American population.  From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, first Syl Davis and Gwyn Davis, then Spike Moss did their best to keep hope alive among African American young people with programming that in some ways was reminiscent, though with a much more activist edge, of that which had been offered by the old Phyllis Wheatley:  The Way and Opportunities Unlimited offered classes in African American history and culture, encouraged and developed talented young musicians (including Terry Lewis, Jimmy Jam, and Prince), sponsored marching bands, and inspired young people such as Bobby Champion, who would found the highly successful gospel choir, Excelsior.  In the early 1990s, The City, Inc., already operating on the Southside, would establish itself on the Northside and in many respects carry on the work of The Way.  Pilot City would come into a spot at Plymouth and Penn formerly occupied by a synagogue, bringing an array of medical and social services to a community in need.  Peter Hayden would found The Turning Point to help those who sought to put the world of drugs and addiction aside and begin life anew.  Eric and Ella Mahmoud would establish two promising new educational institutions, the Seed Academy for those of preschool age, and Harvest Prep for those at K-8.  Al Macfarlane would turn Insight News into a dynamic new African American newspaper, sponsoring also the influential Insight News Forum every Tuesday at Lucille’s Kitchen, and later a similar program, “Conversations,” on Mondays.  Alfred Babbington-Johnson, with his values-oriented entrepreneurial initiatives at Stairstep Foundation;  and Jerry McAfee, with his community outreach activities through his pastorate at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, emerged in the 1990s to offer hope to people in a community searching for spirituality, meaning, identity, and economic uplift.   In the late 1990s, Sherrie Pugh would come on staff as the executive director of the Northside Residents Redevelopment Council, offering a creative vision of community beautification and more high-quality, affordable housing.  Clarence Hightower, inheriting the legacy of Gleason Glover and Gary Sudduth, would oversee the construction of an impressive new building at Penn and Plymouth, and a number of “continuous improvement” initiatives at the Minneapolis Urban League. 


Scott Gray's tenure as Minneapolis Urban League President/CEO was not successful.  The verdict on the current tenure of Steve Belton is still out. 

North Minneapolis, Past and Future

 

Young people on the Northside almost surely know the names and accomplishments of Terry Lewis, Jimmy Jam, and Prince.  They may very well know the names and the work of Spike Moss and Bobby Champion.  But there are a bevy of people who grew up in the older Northside, the world focused on 6^th Avenue and Phyllis Wheatley, who have achieved great things, who rest not on the tips of young tongues but who are now or have until recently graced life in North Minneapolis with their presence.  There are in fact too many to give proper due to all of them, so that a few examples must suffice. 


Just within the last few years those who knew Harry Davis and Earl Miller have been forced to witness the passing of their superlative lives.  Mr. Davis was the Golden Gloves mentor who emerged as a major municiple leader, and who ran for mayor in 1971.  Earl Miller, along with Nellie Stone Johnson, worked with DFL luminaries Orville Freeman and Hubert Humphrey to bring greater justice to working people.  Bertha Smith was a path-breaking Minneapolis teacher (there were no African American teachers in the city until the 1950s, and very few well into the 1960s) and guiding force in a number of community organizations.  Larry “Bubba” Brown exerted a steady presence that helped to bring a more diverse work force to Hughes Contractors and initiated a mentoring organization for Minneapolis youth.  Marion McElroy worked in local businesses and for several years in Washington, D. C., forging the kind career that gained for her a place on one recent list of 100 African Americans in the United States who have made outstanding contributions to community and nation.  Jack Hyatt was for many years a foreman at Onan Industries, where he mentored such other Northsiders as Melvin Stone.  Charles Beasley was a fine jazz musician who long led a band that played every week in St. Paul and select venues in the greater Twin Cities.

And there are many others, people whom these generally low-key and humble community elders would say deserve mention ahead of themselves.  All would wish that Richard Green, the Northsider who became the first African American superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools, could be counted among the living and thus mentioned with the others in the paragraph above.  They would say the same of Archie Givens, who rose from very humble roots to the status of Minnesota’s first African American millionaire, and whose legacy lives on in the Givens African American Literature Collection.  And they would likely say that Pauline Young, despite the fact that she is not a native Northsider, needs to be mentioned for the entrepreneurial energy that she and husband Sylvester brought to their hair salon and barbershop for many years on Plymouth Avenue.

Jack Hyatt, one of the great fountains of information whose memories have informed these pages, has said to me more than once, “I wish you could see 6^th Avenue and the old Northside through my eyes.”  Although I can’t literally do so, this gentle and articulate man brought me into a greatly enhanced line of vision of the community that he loves, and for which he retains great hopes. 


The overhaul of K-12 education as delivered by staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools will be key in fulfilling the hopes of the eminent Jack Hyatt and other stalwart Northsiders whose spirit guides our activism.

Alternate Universe MPS Superintendent Gary Marvin Davison >>>>> Message to the MPS Board of Education and the Community as to the New Revolutionary Program of the Minneapolis Public Schools

In an alternate universe, here is the decisive program for overhauling the processes of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education---  a program not conveyed at last week’s retreat held in the conventional universe on Monday, 14 August, and Tuesday, 15 August 2017.

 

One year ago, in the conventional universe, at the annual retreat in August 2016, consultant Michael Casserly of the Council of Great City Schools stated that he had never seen a strategic plan such as Acceleration 2020, with its focus on the school as the unit of change, work.  He conveyed to the conventional decision-makers that in those systems wherein meaningful change had occurred, the departure from the previously prevailing processes and programs was system-wide, rather than site-focused.

 

Casserly is a boring speaker who heads an organization with an oxymoronic title, inasmuch as there are so few even merely good urban schools in the United States;  nevertheless, Casserly is correct in his fundamental observation that the current conventional strategic plan is not viable and that change in the culture and programming of the school district must be system-wide.  

 

Strategic Plan Acceleration 2020 has many more vexing problems beyond the errant focus on site-based change.  A previous candidate in the conventional universe, school turn-around specialist Charles Foust, asked MPS school board members how they knew that this plan was going to work.  In a real head-scratcher, the board offered no answer.  Conventional MPS board member Kim Ellison later told me that she regarded Foust’s question as rhetorical, leaving me to wonder if Ellison understands rhetorical questions and other literary devices, since Foust clearly expected an answer to a question that was in no sense rhetorical.

 

With reference to Ellison’s stupefying, ignorant comment, you have yet another reason as to why I went to voters in our alternate, better universe, and asked for a completely new school board, to which they agreed and gave to me in November of last year 2016.  Thank you for your important presence at this current gathering, now that we have ousted Rebecca Gagnon, Kim Ellison, Nelson Inz, Bob Walser, and Don Samuels---  relegating Siad Ali, Ira Jourdain, Jenny Arneson, and KerryJo Felder to our new advisory council.

 

The deficiencies in Strategic Plan Acceleration 2020 are manifold.

 

Perpend:

 

1)  The targets for annual academic growth (yearly five percentage point increases in math and reading proficiency for the general student population, eight percentage point increases for the lowest achievers, ten percentage point increases in the four-year graduation rate) over the course of school years ending in 2014 through 2020 are worthy, but the strategic plan has no viable program for attaining these goals.

 

2)  Likewise, the key goals of student outcomes, equity, student/family/ community partnerships, effective teachers/school leaders/ staff, stewardship, and resource focus on students and schools are fine---  but in view of the lamentable academic quality in our schools, these goals become just so much verbiage.

 

3)  Verbiage rather than a plan for academic excellence characterizes Strategic Plan Acceleration 2020;  in the absence of true programmatic features for achieving academic excellence, the plan simply gives us words:  close reading, literacy strategies, core instruction, personalized learning opportunities, readiness at grade-grouped transitions, behavioral interventions, and high school ethnic studies courses.

 

We must admit that our Strategic Plan Acceleration 2020 is philosophically errant in making the school rather than the entire system the unit of change.  And we must as we move forward in our overhaul of the entire district make our goals clearer and most importantly achieve absolute clarity as to our program for achieving academic excellence.

 

…………………………………………..

 

Know, then, that this is what we are going to do:

 

1)  Immediately, as we enter the 2017-2018 academic year, we are going to teach the grade-level based academic standards for the state of Minnesota and then go beyond those standards with a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that will be based on the Core Knowledge series of E. D. Hirsch and my own program detailed in the August 2014 edition of my academic Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

 

2)  In recognition that teachers come to us woefully ill-trained from academically insubstantial programs in departments, schools, and colleges of education, we are going to drop the term, “professional development,” in favor of a much more rigorous academic training program along the lines that I detail in the September 2014 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

 

3)  We are going to implement district-wide tutoring for students languishing below grade level in reading and math, paired with a daily academic enrichment program for all K-5 students---   thus allowing each student, each day, to extend levels of knowledge and skill on the basis of current level of achievement;  at grades 6-8 and 9-12, tutoring will be aggressive and of the same spirit as that prevailing in grades K-5, while increasing course specialization will offer the academic enrichment component.

 

4)  We are going to train an ample staff of people comfortable on street corners and in the homes of our most challenged student populations, conveying our enormous respect for all families and our pledge to provide needed resources directly or referral to social agencies with which we will be building enhanced, very strong, relationships.

 

5)  And I will be dismissing most of the current staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools, moving from a typical staff burden of 500 to 650 to a core financial, legal, operations, employment, and academic staff of at most 150---  thus allowing for new staff for tutoring and for family outreach, and for the shift of other resources to teacher training.  

 

 .........................................................................

 

The aim of this program is offer a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to students of all demographic descriptors, so that all students are achieving at grade level or above in a program much more academically fulfilling and rigorous than prevails in the conventional universe.

 

We will define an excellent education as a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts, delivered in grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors throughout the K-12 years.

 

We will define an excellent teacher as a professional of deep and broad knowledge, possessing the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.

 

We will identify the three main purposes of an excellent education to be cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

                                                                                                                                                                                            

……………………………………………………………………………

As alternate universe Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools I will continue to work with you, newly selected members of the alternate universe MPS Board of Education, to implement this program of educational excellence.

 

I will with you and our new and vigorous staff deliver the program of academic excellence given above to all students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  We will be clear as to student progress in ascending to the elevated academic level that we expect of those students and of ourselves;  and we will be clear as to how we are moving forward to bring all students to that level.

 

As we offer this program and succeed in our alternate universe with the delivery of a knowledge-intensive education to all of our precious young people, we will also serve as a shadow administration and school board in the conventional universe, for imminent replacement of current MPS Superintendent Ed Graff and MPS Board of Education members.

 

……………………………………………………………………………………..

 

The time is now for the K-12 Revolution, which we will imminently move from the alternate to the conventional universe.