East Side Freedom Library

The First Rainbow Coalition - Film Screening
2026-05-21 19:00 - 21:30 (America/Chicago) | East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier St, Saint Paul, MN, 55106
This film will be screened for free as part of our Reel Stories: Housing Justice in Film series, presented in collaboration with Trilingua Cinema, East Side Freedom Library and East Side Housing Justice.
May 21st, 7:00pm
East Side Freedom Library
1105 Greenbrier Street, St Paul

“You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.”
-Fred Hampton
Join us with our partners at East Side Freedom Library for a free screening of The First Rainbow Coalition about Fred Hampton and the Chicago Black Panther Party. Then stick around for a post-screening discussion about what lessons might be drawn from the film with present day Twin Cities tenant organizers.
Synopsis
In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party, notably led by the charismatic Fred Hampton, began to form alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latinx group the Young Lords Organization and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots. Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar America to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition. The First Rainbow Coalition tells the movement’s little-known story through rare archival footage and interviews with former coalition members in the present-day.
This film is rated TV-PG.
This film will be screened in English with English subtitles.
Trailer

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

East Side Community Night with Upstream Minnesota
2026-06-17 17:30 - 19:30
Wednesday, June 17 | 5:30–7:30 PM East Side Freedom Library | 1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul Free | RSVP here
(RSVP not required, but if you would, it will help us ensure we have enough food and drinks for everyone. )
Join us for a community evening hosted by our partners at Upstream Minnesota, a storytelling organization dedicated to capturing and sharing the voices and histories of communities across the state.
On June 17th, Upstream Minnesota brings its Storystream Trailer to the East Side Freedom Library to record stories from neighbors who want to share them. Come talk about your East Side stories, projects, gardens, and the places you love. The evening includes food, music, and East Side trivia.
We’ll close out the night with live music from Obsidian James, an Afro-Indigenous singer-songwriter from Harlem who now calls Minnesota home.

Book Launch - Without Terminus: untraining an archive by chaun webster
2026-06-27 14:00 - 16:00
Saturday, June 27, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM | East Side Freedom Library
In collaboration with the Community Digital Repository at ESFL

Join us for an afternoon of reading, conversation, and fellowship with poet and sound artist chaun webster and Black Studies Professor and Pullman railcar researcher, Dr. James Robinson.
chaun webster’s third collection, Without Terminus: untraining an archive, is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving work — part elegy, part archival detective story, part visual poem. Drawing on his family’s history as Pullman porters, webster explores Black rest, memory, and the labor that grief demands of the living.
Kirkus Reviews calls it “a virtuoso work of literary experimentation in the service of a forgotten history.” Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part, describes it as “an act of revolution cloaked in the language of poetry, wielding a heart full of courage.”
This is a free event.
We’d love to know you’re coming: register here if you’re comfortable doing so.
It’s never required, and walk-ins are always welcome.

More praise for Without Terminus: untraining an archive

“Without Terminus tracks chaun webster gone further into that which won’t stop, even for that last, bleak station. In his third work, the poet considers the possibility of Black rest without Black death, the labor that memory demands of the living, and Black life as both fuel and lubricant for the U.S. progress engine. This work demands of Webster new grammars, a hauntology, a means of being without, which is to say a praxis of knowing with grief even that which you can barely mourn. Deeply intimate and tirelessly self-interrogating, Without Terminus is webster at his best. Phenomenal!”
—Douglas Kearney, author of I Imagine I been Science Fiction Always
“A beautifully lyrical rumination on unknowing. For webster, ‘without terminus’ doesn’t mean forever, as in elongated emptiness, but ‘frayed edges’ as a reclamation and new space, the limits as haven. This book is a marvel, a language and image train to travel with.”
—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
“Without Terminus is an unflinching document of familial love and the legacy of Blackness in America. It is an act of revolution cloaked in the language of poetry, wielding a heart full of courage.”
—Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part

A Glimpse Inside the Book
From page 5 of Without Terminus: untraining an archive:
“i am the grandchild and great-grandchild of railworkers. both of them porters of the sleeping car, both of them having demands placed upon their bodies that interdicted their rest. during their employment they were both suspended in the irony of the sleeping car, which stole their ability to sleep, that robbery of rest a down payment for the ease of white train passengers. it is a familiar formula.”

Speaker Bios
chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer living in Minneapolis whose work is attempting to put pressure on the spatial and temporal limitations of writing, of the english language, as a way to demonstrate its incapacity for describing blackness outside of a regime of death and dying. webster’s books include, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (Noemi Press, 2018), and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world, (Black Ocean Press, 2023). Both books were awarded the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry.
Dr. James Alexander Robinson is a native son of Saint Paul, a railroad hub. James Robinson comes from a family of railroad workers. His research specialty is the historical study of Black railroad dining car cooks and waiters, their unions, communities, and families, and on Black railroad workers in general (Pullman Porters, Red Caps). Additionally, James has written on the history of Saint Paul’s Pilgrim Baptist Church. Dr. Robinson is currently the assistant professor of Black Studies within the Ethnic, Gender, Historical, and Philosophical Studies Department at Metropolitan State University. He earned the Interdisciplinary Studies PhD in Black Studies from the University of Iowa, where Dr. Robinson also earned a Master of Arts in History. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from Macalester College. Professor Robinson teaches courses on “Forms of Black Studies,” “Black Thought,” “Black Life in Wealth and Poverty,” “Black Intellectual History,” “Black Culture History,” “Black Life and Culture,” and “African Americans in Minnesota.”

Cuba May Day Report - Let Cuba Live!
2026-06-28 14:00 - 16:00
Sunday, June 28, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM | East Side Freedom Library

Cuba May Day Report – Let Cuba Live!
Presented by SCOTA and MN Cuba Committee
Join 3 Brigadistas for a report on their recent trip to Cuba for May Day.
Hear first-hand stories from Cuba and discuss ongoing solidarity work: #NoWarOnCuba
Report back from building relations with Cuban labor and Che Guevarra Volunteer Brigade.
We will also be collecting monetary donations for the neonatal campaign through Global Health Partners & Saving Lives.
Sponsors:
SCOTA, MN Cuba Committee, Vets for Peace, Northern Sun News/KFAI, Bldg Relations Cuban Labor, NNOC, GH Partners, ESFL

Third Thursdays for Housing Justice - "Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street"
2026-07-16 18:30 - 20:30
Thursday, July 16, 2026 | 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM | East Side Freedom Library
In partnership with Trilingua Cinema

Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street
As part of our “Reel Stories: Housing Justice in Film” series with Trilingua Cinema, we will be holding a screening and discussion around a documentary about community organizing in one Boston neighborhood that had had enough of being used as a dumping ground.
We’d love to know you’re coming: register here if you’re comfortable doing so.
It’s never required, and walk-ins are always welcome.

What is the Housing Justice Program?
The Housing Justice Program grew out of East Side Housing Justice, a coalition that began in 2019 that drove discussion around housing issues. We are continuing that work by coalition building and creating events that help us rethink common narratives around housing
What are Third Thursdays?
As part of our Housing Justice Program, we are holding events on Third Thursdays to talk about housing in a variety of ways, like documentary screeningss and talks with local activists! We hope to spark invigorating discussion and build quality connections amongst our community.
Why you should come!
Come through to learn and meet others who care about housing! We want people to carry lessons from these events beyond our four walls and make connections. Here at ESFL, we believe solidarity is the way forward, so come through, make friends and start building power for change!
We’d love to know you’re coming: register here if you’re comfortable doing so.
It’s never required, and walk-ins are always welcome.
Want to learn more? Reach out to the Housing Justice team!
lucid@eastsidefreedomlibrary.org
dakota@eastsidefreedomlibrary.org

Third Thursdays for Housing Justice - "Blue Houses: A Reflection on Home"
2026-08-20 18:30 - 20:30
Thursday, August 20, 2026 | 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM | East Side Freedom Library
In partnership with Trilingua Cinema

Blue Houses: A Reflection on Home
Join Kao Kalia Yang and Katrina Mendoza as they tell stories of their different blue houses from their childhoods. A chance to reflect on what a home can mean for yourself and your neighbors.
We’d love to know you’re coming: register here if you’re comfortable doing so.
It’s never required, and walk-ins are always welcome.

What is the Housing Justice Program?
The Housing Justice Program grew out of East Side Housing Justice, a coalition that began in 2019 that drove discussion around housing issues. We are continuing that work by coalition building and creating events that help us rethink common narratives around housing
What are Third Thursdays?
As part of our Housing Justice Program, we are holding events on Third Thursdays to talk about housing in a variety of ways, like documentary screeningss and talks with local activists! We hope to spark invigorating discussion and build quality connections amongst our community.
Why you should come!
Come through to learn and meet others who care about housing! We want people to carry lessons from these events beyond our four walls and make connections. Here at ESFL, we believe solidarity is the way forward, so come through, make friends and start building power for change!
We’d love to know you’re coming: register here if you’re comfortable doing so.
It’s never required, and walk-ins are always welcome.
Want to learn more? Reach out to the Housing Justice team!
lucid@eastsidefreedomlibrary.org
dakota@eastsidefreedomlibrary.org

Third Thursdays for Housing Justice - "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth"
2026-09-17 18:30 - 20:30
Thursday, September 17, 2026 | 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM | East Side Freedom Library

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Another part of our Reel Stories series, we will hold another film and discussion, this time around the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St Louis. The complex gained an infamous reputation and became a cautionary tale around public housing, but like many things, the true story is more complicated
We’d love to know you’re coming: register here if you’re comfortable doing so.
It’s never required, and walk-ins are always welcome.

What is the Housing Justice Program?
The Housing Justice Program grew out of East Side Housing Justice, a coalition that began in 2019 that drove discussion around housing issues. We are continuing that work by coalition building and creating events that help us rethink common narratives around housing
What are Third Thursdays?
As part of our Housing Justice Program, we are holding events on Third Thursdays to talk about housing in a variety of ways, like documentary screeningss and talks with local activists! We hope to spark invigorating discussion and build quality connections amongst our community.
Why you should come!
Come through to learn and meet others who care about housing! We want people to carry lessons from these events beyond our four walls and make connections. Here at ESFL, we believe solidarity is the way forward, so come through, make friends and start building power for change!
We’d love to know you’re coming: register here if you’re comfortable doing so.
It’s never required, and walk-ins are always welcome.
Want to learn more? Reach out to the Housing Justice team!
lucid@eastsidefreedomlibrary.org
dakota@eastsidefreedomlibrary.org
