At the East Side Freedom Library we try to promote a conversation between the past and the present. We think this helps us not only to ask new questions of the past, but also to gain new insights to help us shape the future.
Last month, historian/journalist/activist scholar Jelani Cobb helped celebrate our fifth anniversary by taking us back to the Reconstruction Era and asking us to consider the relevance of its successes and limitations to the challenges we face now. If you have not yet watched the video of his presentation, catch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWdiAYrUY4&t=6s. Dr. Cobb provided a great exercise in putting the past and present into a conversation.
At ESFL we continue to engage a living past, a past that is still with us. We invite you to join us in the second half of July as we plunge into several conversations between the past and the present.
On Thursday evening, July 18, we will launch our first book, Reinventing the People’s Library. In it, historian Greg Gaut lays out the development of this very building, its design in 1917 as part of a new neighborhood library system in St. Paul, its significance in the lives of immigrant communities, and its reinvention in 2014 as the East Side Freedom Library. We hope that you will join us, listen to Greg discuss his research and writing process, and share some of your own stories about this building and our neighborhood.
This summer marks the 85th anniversary of the 1934 Minneapolis strike, “the strike that made Minneapolis a union town.” ESFL has copies of the books written about the strike, the Northwest Organizer newspaper (published in the 1930s by the Teamsters union), and we are developing an archive of resources about the strike and about how it has been remembered over the years. While no strike participants remain alive, five years ago 130 of their descendants came together, shared stories, and worked to get a plaque made and placed in the Minneapolis warehouse district. On Friday evening, July 19, we will honor these descendants and then screen the documentary film, Labor’s Turning Point. It will be a very special evening.
Knowing our history matters for all of us. On July 20, our East African neighbors – Oromo, Eritrean, Amhara, Eritrean, and Somali – will come together to discuss “Impediments to Ethiopia’s Transition to Democracy and Implications for the Horn of Africa.” The Twin Cities is home to members of these communities, and more. For decades, this region has been a site of political upheaval. Ethnic and religious minorities have faced particular challenges, as have political activists who have sought to create progressive change. One consequence of this instability has been the put-migration which has become the basis for diasporic communities in Europe, Australia, and North America, including here in the Twin Cities.
Here, people from East African communities have begun new conversations, considering their past, present, and future. What problems does their history pose? What possibilities might it also support? Recent developments in Ethiopia – including the election of Abiy Ahmed as Prime Minister, the negotiation of a peace treaty with Eritrea, ending decades of conflict, and last month’s coup attempt – suggest how much is at stake.
Next week (all of the above is just in one week!), ESFL and our collaborators at ABC Realty will continue our conversations about the fight for housing justice. Through the documentary film, Jim Crow of the North, we will explore the historic legacy of restrictive covenants and red-lining in the shaping of the demographics of the Twin Cities, an area with one of the worst gaps in the country between white and black home ownership. Join us on our journey into the past to find new, productive ways of engaging the present – and shaping the future.
– Peter Rachleff
Co-Executive Director