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.