Category: Free the Jackson Five

Minneapolis gets high marks for its “quality of life,” but the home addresses of its cops tell a different story. According to police insiders, less than ten percent of Minneapolis’ police force lives within city limits. Mayor R.T. Rybak and would-be mayor Hennepin County Commish Peter McLaughlin both claim they want more cops living in…

If you casually mention at a social gathering that you think little boys are more destructive than little girls, most people will probably agree. Even those who do not will probably give scant notice to the fact that you were making assumptions about behavior based on a physical attribute—a practice more commonly known as stereotyping.…

St. Paul Human Rights Director Tyrone Terrill, usually nattily attired, does not look like a flame-throwing, flak jacket-wearing radical. But some think he sounded like one in his recent open letter chastising the local African-American community for failing to distance itself from gang members and their “terrorist” acts. The letter, published in the Minneapolis Spokesman…

In springtime, every man’s fancy turns to love–and, in my case, to commencement speeches. I love reading them, listening to them, critiquing them, even the bad ones. I dream of marching with colleagues through a cheering thong of graduates, resplendent in flowing robes, and delivering a simple yet powerful address that brings the youthful crowd…

Seventeen years ago, I received a degree from the University of Michigan Law School, one of America’s top schools. My Harvard undergraduate degree opened doors at Michigan, and both of those degrees have opened other doors ever since–a fact that I have always appreciated. I have since learned that it’s our humanity, not paper credentials,…

This November, Minneapolis’s only African-American City Council members, Natalie Johnson Lee and Don Samuels, will go head to head for the same council seat. Redistricting has yanked Samuels’s troubled Jordan neighborhood out of the Third Ward, the old “Nordeast,” and fused it with the Fifth Ward. The Fifth Ward, meanwhile, lost the Warehouse District and…