Author William D. Green, a professor emeritus at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, will publish Strike! Twenty Days in 1970 When Minneapolis Teachers Broke the Law (224 pages) on June 23 via University of Minnesota Press. The following sneak-peek chapter has been excerpted with permission from the author and publisher. Enjoy!
The Gathering of the 1025 Club at 15th & Nicollet
On the evening of April 8, 1970, two men, dressed in the dark suits that seemed more characteristic of midlevel company management, hurried from the car that had taken a circuitous route to the Cross Keys Motel in southwest Minneapolis, where they would anxiously spend the evening. Neither man expected to get much rest, let alone sleep, for what they had done, just hours before, was in violation of the law, and potentially even worse—alienating to a very important segment of the citizenry who had entrusted the educational welfare of their children to their care.
Would those mothers and fathers understand what the organization they led was doing and why the sacrifice was necessary? And would their own people, who hours before had jubilantly declared that they had had enough with the tyranny of an unjust law, defiantly stand up against it and the powerful men who resolutely stood behind it? How resolute would otherwise law-abiding citizens be the moment they, as the moral and educational steward of seventy thousand schoolchildren, felt the new label—lawbreaker—weigh down upon their shoulders once the unsettling sobriety of the morning’s light enveloped them? How strong would they remain during their sobering drive home to their families and the bills that would mount as their modest household savings dwindled? Would they all step forward in the morning at the designated time to the designated spot and show their faces to the citizens of Minneapolis?
These were the key concerns that the two men had as they entered the motel room that they would soon share with a few others. They had worked hard to get the vote to strike, and so far the price of their labor was to be named in the injunction issued earlier that afternoon by Judge Leslie L. Anderson and their anticipated arrest at any time. They expected the police to be waiting for them at their homes, which was why they hoped the cramped motel room would be a place for needed rest before the big moment in the morning. This was entirely new ground for these schoolteachers. And underneath the bravado, none of them knew how it would end, for they had reason to worry whether Minneapolis had grown weary of militancy.
Indeed, the nation had grown cynical. It was the second year of Richard Nixon’s presidency. For many, it was still hard to think how closely he had defeated Minnesota’s Happy Warrior as war continued to rage in Southeast Asia despite the president’s promise to bring the troops home. The nation had grown even more restive. Vice President Spiro Agnew, speaking for the so-called Silent Majority, called such critics “effete snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativity.”
On February 20, U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman sentenced five of the Chicago Eight, at which time defendant David Dellinger told the judge that he was “a man who had too much power over too many people for too many years,” but adding mockingly that he admired Hoffman’s “spunk.” On a more tragic level, out east a grand jury on Martha’s Vineyard assembled on April 6 to investigate Ted Kennedy’s involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. A month later, on May 4, four Kent State University students would be shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard, and “hard hats” and antiwar demonstrators would fight each other in the streets of New York City on May 8. Near the end of the year, on November 17, the courts-martial of seventeen officers would begin for the My Lai massacre. And during the months in between, teachers would strike in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago.
Minnesota was not insulated from unrest that brought a conservative tint to the body politic. College students occupied administration offices at Macalester College and St. Olaf College, and university students occupied the Red Barn in Stadium Village. Charles Stenvig, a former police officer and now the city’s mayor, was at war with the Civil Rights Commission, sparked by the 1967 race riot on Minneapolis’s North Side; and many civilians, no doubt reminded of horrific images of black children being set upon in Bull Conner’s Birmingham in 1963 and more recently of antiwar demonstrators in Mayor Daley’s Chicago, wearily looked on as the Minneapolis Police Department, as if to follow suit, acquired police dogs. Everyone seemed to be striking—truck drivers, carpenters, cement masons, Honeywell tradesmen, then postal workers and air traffic controllers. It was this sign of the time that prompted lawmakers to nip in the bud the perceived rising tide of anarchy when they enacted “Meet and Confer” for public employees.
Indeed, Minneapolis teachers were part of a movement toward greater militancy in education in general and toward a stronger voice in determining the quality of their work environment. They had previously taken to the streets. In 1948, they had experienced several pay cuts and were out in the bitter cold for weeks. Again in 1951, teachers had gone out in support of the janitors’ strike. That same year, in response to these strikes, a no-strike law for public employees was passed, barring, in a procedurally questionable violation of the constitutional ex post facto ban, any increase of benefits to those who took to the streets. Further, under the new law, strikers were subject to a possible automatic dismissal, or at least a loss of tenure with a two-year probation and a forfeiture of any salary increase if they were rehired. One was deemed guilty simply for committing the act, and there were no provisions for appeal or allowances for mitigating circumstances.
In 1967, the legislature, under the authorship of an attorney and Republican lawmaker named Clinton Hall, from Rushford in southeast Minnesota who chaired the Labor Relations Committee in the house, passed the infamous Meet and Confer law, which made no provision for real collective bargaining. It was not mutually binding, and it made no provision for mediation and arbitration. As if this were not enough, the 1967 law retained provisions banning strikes by teachers and imposed severe sanctions against those who nonetheless went on strike. As the state supreme court affirmed, “strikes by public employees are a real danger to the safety and welfare of the general public.”
In these troubling times, at least my child’s schoolteacher would not be disrupting my family’s life, many Minneapolis parents probably hoped. It was an attitude many teachers felt as well. The educational welfare of seventy thousand children would be affected. It was one thing to cheer amid an enthusiastic throng of friends and colleagues in response to inspiring MFT leaders calling for a strike; quite another to actually do it.Norm Moen, then MFT president, and Dale Holstrom, executive secretary who would lead negotiations for MFT, knew it as well. Neither slept that night.
Adrenaline was their only fuel that morning as they nervously drove north on Nicollet. As they came to the rise of Nicollet Avenue, which momentarily blocked their view of the intersection where strikers were to meet, their nerves tightened. What greeted them as they crossed over was a gathering of hundreds of teachers who filled the intersection, waiting for their leaders to arrive. As Holstrom would later say, “I was exhilarated … People I never thought would be on the line were there—at least half a dozen I never would have bet a dime on.” It had finally begun and they were—all of them—fully committed and, suddenly, without benefits, without retirement, without a job.
