by David Beckford | Jan 14, 2020 | Uncategorized, Voices from Recast
Interview of Makram El-Amin
Interviewer: 00:20 Yeah. So, can you tell us your first and last name, and spell it?
Makram El-Amin: 00:23 Yes, my name is Makram El-Amin, that’s M-A-K-R-A-M. El-Amin, E-L hyphen A-M-I-N.
Interviewer: 00:33 All right. So, can you look at this map and tell us where you live, around this area?
Makram El-Amin: 00:42 Okay. So, I’ve lived in a couple places.
Interviewer: 00:47 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 00:48 I currently live just north of Lowry. So, Lyndale, and a lot of what is in this area, North Market is a little far. So, I live probably right in this area right here, right now. Just off the expressway right here.
Interviewer: 01:08 Oh, I see that.
Makram El-Amin: 01:08 Yeah.
Interviewer: 01:09 Yeah.
Makram El-Amin: 01:10 Yeah. But I grew up right up on 8th Avenue, which is just below, on this map here, North High School. And I’ve lived right across in Harrison neighborhood. Right across over on the other side of Olson Highway.
Interviewer: 01:28 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 01:29 I’ve lived there as well. And bought my first home on 2711 Girard Avenue.
Interviewer: 01:36 I live on Girard Avenue.
Makram El-Amin: 01:37 Do you?
Interviewer: 01:38 Yeah.
Makram El-Amin: 01:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I’ve lived, and I’ve owned property in and around there.
Interviewer: 01:42 Yeah.
Makram El-Amin: 01:43 So, I’ve lived all over-
Interviewer: 01:45 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 01:45 … basically.
Interviewer: 01:45 So, how long have you been living in North Minneapolis?
Makram El-Amin: 01:50 Let me see. My family moved to`… we moved to basically the projects.
Interviewer: 01:58 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 01:59 And this is 1976 when we moved here. My dad came before we came, we were in Chicago still, so my dad came up probably three, four months, just to kind of find us a place, start his job, and all that. Then he brought us up here then, right. So, it was ’76-ish, right?
Interviewer: 02:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 02:17 You know, ’76, ’77, is when we actually came up here.
Interviewer: 02:24 Okay.
Makram El-Amin: 02:24 We’ve lived in North Minneapolis, we’ve grown up here. For a short stint of time there was a couple years we lived in Brooklyn Center.
Interviewer: 02:34 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 02:34 My family, not my parents, my family.
Interviewer: 02:36 Yeah.
Makram El-Amin: 02:36 My wife and my children. We’ve lived in Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park area for a short time.
Interviewer: 02:42 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 02:45 But then we missed it, so we came back. We came back, and we’ve been back for 10 years at least.
Interviewer: 02:55 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 02:55 You know what I mean?
Interviewer: 02:56 Nice.
Makram El-Amin: 02:56 Yeah.
Interviewer: 02:56 So, thinking about from one month here-
Makram El-Amin: 03:00 Yes.
Interviewer: 03:01 … what positive or negative changes have you seen so far?
Makram El-Amin: 03:06 You know, it’s interesting. When we moved here all of my family was in Chicago. So we were kind of like the defectors. We kind of broke the gang up-
Interviewer: 03:14 Mm-hmm (affirmative). (laughs).
Makram El-Amin: 03:14 … and came up here, right? I can remember distinctly being very sad.
Interviewer: 03:22 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 03:23 Thinking there’s nothing like Chicago. I mean, what are we doing?
Interviewer: 03:29 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Interviewer: 03:29 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 03:30 All that kind of stuff. First time riding on the airplane, to come up here, you know. But when I got here, we had this, I don’t know what it’s called, it’s like a bunker mentality. You know, where it was us against the world basically. We’re here, we’re in a new space. Our family was very, very close, tight knit.
Interviewer: 03:52 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 03:53 I can remember growing up having family meetings, and all that kind of stuff. Just making sure we’re touching down with each other and all that. And so my experience kind of grew out of that, right?
Interviewer: 04:06 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 04:07 And what I’ve found is a community. That’s what I found, I found a community. I found when I got over, mind you, I was a kid then, right? So, was I kind of getting over my initial loss of thinking I’m leaving my cousins, I’m leaving all that kind of stuff. I found I opened up and kind of embraced it for my own self. I found a community.
Interviewer: 04:35 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 04:36 I found people who were close.
Interviewer: 04:41 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 04:42 And tight knit, particularly there in [inaudible 00:04:44] area, it’s Heritage Park now.
Interviewer: 04:45 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 04:46 But it used to be the projects. And that’s where we grew up, going to Phyllis Wheatley, Bethune, went to all that kind of stuff. I can remember going there for the community center type stuff, you know what I mean?
Interviewer: 05:01 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 05:05 And I met friends there that I’m still friends with today, even all these years later, you know what I mean? I found community. We found that, coming from Chicago, and coming up to North Minneapolis, and people talking about negatively, and that sort of thing. It’s like, what you talking about? This is heaven up here, you know what I mean? In fact, I remember growing up, this sounds crazy, we used to say, you know, the saying in New York that says “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” right?
Interviewer: 05:45 Yeah, yeah.
Makram El-Amin: 05:46 We said about Minneapolis, we said “If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it nowhere.” Where we thought it was opportunities, it was plentiful, it was a lot from what many of us kind of experienced before. Not to say, we weren’t well-to-do or about any stress. We lived in public housing. So, we weren’t well-to-do anything, the pride of public housing we shared. We were kind of like live-in guests who had a house, and almost like a guest house connected, and our family stayed there until we approved for our public housing. Again, I found community. I found a lot of people I who I can really relate to. Minnesota began to grow on me, and grow on me to the fact that when I went back to Chicago, they said “Man, ya’ll talk different now. What’s wrong with ya’ll? What’s up, ya’ll talk proper.” Stuff like that, we hear that kind of stuff from our cousins, who just a few years earlier, you couldn’t tell us apart type stuff.
Interviewer: 06:57 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 06:58 So yeah. Those are some of my early memories, yeah.
Interviewer: 07:01 Yeah. So, the community that you found back then, do you see any changes compared to back then?
Makram El-Amin: 07:07 Certainly. Certainly. I think it’s becoming more densely populated, there’s a lot more people here now. The black community ha grown. You could basically find us all in one spot almost, but now … Just say you lived in Brooklyn Park back then. It was like, damn, what’s the zip code out there? How many buses did you take? It was like that.
Interviewer: 07:34 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 07:35 It was like that because back then there was no development. There was not even Brookdale and all of that. That stuff was still to come. Back then that stuff was wide open. It was like farms out there.
Interviewer: 07:52 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 07:53 It was still like that. So, I remember what happened with a friend, he said “I live in Brooklyn Park.” Brooklyn Park? Dang, I mean, it just seemed like you had to go on a road trip.
Interviewer: 08:02 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 08:03 When basically it’s just straight, basically. Brooklyn Park is the hood now.
Interviewer: 08:06 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 08:06 That’s the hood, so that’s the change. That’s the change. Where things seemed to be so distant have people living now, not just in North Minneapolis and South Minneapolis, but living in Richfield, and Roseville, and New Hope, and Crystal, and all that has become the hood. And there’s really no real differentiating that now, but back then, oh man, I was like you’re crossing lines basically.
Interviewer: 08:38 (laughs)
Makram El-Amin: 08:38 Obviously with that, the population, folks coming from everywhere. There’s a situation where we’re from Chicago, it used to be kind of thing where everybody used to talk about how everywhere else was better.
Interviewer: 08:56 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 08:57 But yet, we’re all here. It was kind of like that whole-
Interviewer: 09:00 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 09:00 … that whole contradiction.
Interviewer: 09:02 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 09:02 And ain’t anybody going nowhere. That kind of thing,
because life is better here.
Interviewer: 09:08 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 09:08 Say what you want. Say what you want. Even now I enjoy travel, my work is taking me all over the world. But man, I’ve got to come home, I got to touch down. I think that that is when I began to know when I began to miss it. We used to go back and stay in Chicago for summers. At least a good chunk of the summer, and I would miss home.
Interviewer: 09:37 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 09:40 I can remember kind of feeling sort of weight about that. Like, my loyalties was a little-
Interviewer: 09:44 Yeah (laughs).
Makram El-Amin: 09:46 One time, the Vikings and the Bears were playing football, and I’m cheering. I want the Vikings to win. And my cousin’s look here like, “Who are you?” And at that point I had basically crossed over. (laughs).
Interviewer: 10:00 You knew it was official.
Makram El-Amin: 10:05 Yeah, it was official. It was official, man. I was, even now my wife’s from Chicago-
Interviewer: 10:11 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 10:11 … from Chicago, I went back to Chicago after high school, went to college there for a couple years.
Interviewer: 10:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 10:16 That’s where we met, in college. But even now, she moved
up here with me, and then go back, we can stay three days, four days, but then it’s time to come home.
Interviewer: 10:30 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 10:31 It’s time to come back home now.
Interviewer: 10:32 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 10:35 I know you didn’t ask for all that, but I’m just, you know.
Interviewer: 10:37 (laughs) No, that’s fine. It’s fine. So, we’re gathering this story to increase understanding between the city of Minneapolis and the community.
Makram El-Amin: 10:46 Yes.
Interviewer: 10:46 Yeah. The impact of historic discriminatory government policies-
Makram El-Amin: 10:53 Sure.
Interviewer: 10:54 … and practices in areas like housing-
Makram El-Amin: 10:58 Yeah.
Interviewer: 10:58 … transportation, economic development, and things like that.
Makram El-Amin: 11:02 Yes.
Interviewer: 11:03 So, can you tell us what impact have you seen in others-
Makram El-Amin: 11:09 Yeah.
Interviewer: 11:09 … or even in your life in the community?
Makram El-Amin: 11:12 It’s interesting. We’ve seen the historical divestment within North Minneapolis. In fact, there’s a program on, I think Carrie Levin did this, it’s maybe a month and a half, two months ago, when they talked about North Minneapolis, you may have saw that. And they talk about the old maps that was in the city planner’s office, not just somebody’s map. It was in the city planner’s office, where they had our area as the quote the negro area, the ghetto, right?
Interviewer: 11:42 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 11:44 And the same thing, in the same part, where Rondo and all that over there, that area, same-same. Same-same.
Interviewer: 11:49 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 11:50 But there was a historical way to where the investment, and all that kind of stuff, economically and all that kind of mess coming about. It was all around that space. In fact, even the way we were designed, North Minneapolis was cut off.
Interviewer: 12:07 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 12:08 In many ways, it was cut off and disconnect, even from downtown, as close as we are.
Interviewer: 12:12 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 12:13 It was disconnected. That seemed like a different world.
Interviewer: 12:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 12:18 So, we saw that. Even along West Broadway. If you think about West Broadway and Lake Street being on par, as far as economic corridors and whatnot.
Interviewer: 12:31 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 12:32 You see the investment that happened over on Lake Street, and how Lake Street has just transformed. That still has not happened, definitely not happened, definitely not the scale-
Interviewer: 12:43 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 12:44 … as what other places had happen. So we’ve seen those kind of things all the time. We’ve seen programs come, and programs go. This program name, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig type thing. Where they kind of try to dress it up, whatever, but it’s still is trash. It’s garbage, right? And they would present various things as though it’s going to redo this kind of stuff. All that stuff comes and goes. No real substantive change has happened for years. For years. So, when you get folks speaking out politically, social activism, community organizing and what not, coming against these sorts of, I would say oppressions really.
Interviewer: 13:29 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 13:31 These things are not figments of people’s imagination. They’re not. These things have historical contents, historical reference from my appearance to others. Even my children, they’ll come to know, I think seeing things happen now is great. We love to see development, but you can see how they would do it. They’ll develop North Loop.
Interviewer: 13:55 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 13:56 And still not North Minneapolis. And that was all warehouse stuff, we’d just ride our bikes through that kind of stuff. It was like an adventure, because it was junk basically. It was all junkyards, and all that kind of stuff around too. Now, you can’t afford to live over there. Which is just another form, or another reiteration basically, of the same old stuff. You know what I mean? And it’s just so close, which makes it even that much more frustrating, you know?
Interviewer: 14:34 So, what changes have you seen in this community that raise your level of trust and concern? And what do you think the city of Minneapolis can play in relieving that stress in the community here?
Makram El-Amin: 14:43 Yeah. There’s the issue of crime and safety, it’s just a real issue. I figure that’s just intensified over time. Whether it’s homicides, those sorts of things, I mean, those things happen.
Interviewer: 15:02 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 15:04 The drugs, how drugs ravage the community. I can remember even in the ’80s. In the ’80s, I graduated from North High School in 1988.
Interviewer: 15:18 Oh wow.
Makram El-Amin: 15:18 This is just for time’s sake, right?
Interviewer: 15:21 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 15:21 Okay, so ’85, ’86, and ’87, right around that time, crack was booming. Crack hit the scene, it was booming, right? And it was plentiful, everybody had it. Even square dudes, like, look man, this ain’t your… They all in, you know what I mean? It was craziness, and that brought about another level of viciousness, and of violence that took place. Gang violence. Then we had the Crips, came from West Coast, they were here and all of that. Vice Lords, Disciples, all that kind of stuff was in it. Which even predates honestly, predates crack, right?
Interviewer: 16:09 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 16:10 Vice Lords, the Disciples, the Crips was a little after that. But even then, even the street life was a little more organized than what it is today. You know, today is kind of hit or miss Helter Skelter, in terms of it’s a little more cliquish. Now, it’s territorial, low end, high end, that kind of stuff. Whereas for us, we walked around, there was certain areas… Well, it’s territorial, you didn’t necessarily want to hang out at Willard too much because then there was those other guys up there. That’s going to be a situation. But nonetheless, it still had a little more order to it. I will put it there. It was a little more order to the chaos.
Interviewer: 16:56 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 16:56 If that makes any sense, right? So, that’s the difference that I see. I think that even the levels of policing. All the code fours, and we used to have helicopters and stuff flying all around the hood, that kind of stuff. Real aggressive tactics in terms of stopping, harassing, it’s the whole broken window concept. Where they was nuisance kinds of stuff. It was basically to kind of harass. People talk about the issues with policemen. And I’m a chaplain for the Minneapolis police right now, all right? So that’s something, knowing my history, I felt that at this point in my career, and what I have vested in this community, that I need to be in places and spaces that matter.
Makram El-Amin: 17:52 So, I wanted to get into that space, and help liaise between the community and the department a bit, because clearly historically that relationship has been broken, to say the least, right? But people remember, a lot of guys who grew up, we remember guys, cops, we didn’t know their name. Their name was Batman, and Robin, and Wild, and West, and people like that. To where they are just as much as part of North Minneapolis as we are, in terms from a historical perspective. And when I say that, their names or whatever, it wasn’t because they were good guys. It was because those the guys that, if you got caught up, you was going to pay a price-
Interviewer: 18:45 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 18:46 … with these guys. They made no qualms about that. It’s common language for those who are kind of out here though. It seems like everything else today. I mean, everything is caught on social media now, and all that. It’s like, you asked a question. Is it happening more now? Or can we see it now? I think there’s tension between those two things, because many of us argue that, man, this is just kind of how it’s been.
Interviewer: 19:12 Right.
Makram El-Amin: 19:12 We just didn’t have iPhone’s.
Interviewer: 19:14 So, what are your concerns for the future then?
Makram El-Amin: 19:16 I would say that at some point in time, like now, that we have to, particularly when it comes to issues about policy, issues around crime and safety, and things like that. I think that these things should be more handled by the people that it’s directly affecting. I love to see an African American police chief. I think we need to see more on his down line. I’ve talked with them, spoke with them, working on very serious problems with him, right? But he readily admits, it’s the culture there, too, right? So, I think that that, city hall or what not, it’s kind of seen some changes in this last election. that sort of thing, I think that that’s just the way, that’s where it’s going to go. And I think it needs to continue to go there. I think more of our kids, my sons included, right? And his friends going into civil service. You need to be police officers, you need to be fire…
Interviewer: 20:21 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 20:21 You need to get into those sorts of areas as well. That was never presented to us when we was in school as a viable option. That’s basically like, we settled. We settled, if you didn’t go to college and all that kind of stuff. But now, people got college degrees that can’t even get work. You
know what I’m saying? And now you’ve got trades, and things that people, that they frowned on, but they steered us away on that kind of stuff here. But now, so much is needed now. If we could only have just seen what the future would bring, many people would be in better positions.
Interviewer: 20:56 So, how do you feel the city of Minneapolis can help with…
Makram El-Amin: 21:01 First of all, I think this is a great step by beginning to help people tell stories, right? Because I think that in that you’re going to find, really, the gem. I don’t believe that it is any entity like this that is going to come in and solve no issue for us, right? I think, if anything, facilitating sorts of things that allow them to come from the community, I think, is really the best hope for the city of Minneapolis or anything like that. I think that there is a underutilization honestly of communities of faith, of ours as well. Whether it’s from the city, or the school board, for all that. I said it to the mayor, and I said it to the superintendent of schools. Look, you don’t ask enough of us either. We have hundreds of families we deal with every day. And really, we’re like first responders, to be honest with you. When someone is having a crisis, when somebody is having an issue in their home or something, whatever, we hear that stuff first.
Interviewer: 22:04 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 22:04 We hear that stuff first. And I think that partnering more strategically would be something that could help, as far as a role the city could play, because they have resources. And they can mobilize in that way if it’s done correctly.
Interviewer: 22:22 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 22:22 If it’s done correctly. That’s my hope. That would be my hope.
Interviewer: 22:29 And speaking of hope, what gives you hope about this community?
Makram El-Amin: 22:30 You know what? I think, first of all, I have faith. I’m a person of faith. So, I think that that comes inherently with that, right? But I also believe in people. I believe in people, and I live among people. And I walk these streets with these people, right? And I know that these are good people, and I know even when I encounter somebody who is struggling, whether it’s homeless, or something to do with an addiction, I can see through the rough stuff as well. I’ve been sensitized to do that by my parents and others who were invested in me. You know, we don’t have throw away people.
Interviewer: 23:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 23:18 So, it gives me hope when I can actually be a part of the change as well.
Interviewer: 23:23 Mm-hhmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 23:24 And I think that’s what we try to do as an institution here.That what I try to do personally, and instill in the folks who I can touch and influence in any way. So, I’m very hopeful. I’m very, very hopeful. And the more hopeful I become, the more vocal I become also with things that ain’t right. So, I don’t want people when they hear me on the one venue, try and say that he’s not hopeful. I’m very hopeful. That’s what I’m pushing. If I wasn’t hopeful, we’d probably lay down and just let it, you know. But that’s not who we are, and that’s not what we’re going to do.
Interviewer: 24:04 And as we finish up, do you have any last thoughts?
Makram El-Amin: 24:09 I will say that this community is an untapped gem. If we think about what it has produced in terms of the human resources it has produced, just the quality of human people that’s come out of this community, I think that speaks to the strength of the community, you know? Do we have to change some things for the health and well-being of the community? Sure we do. Certain, we do. But I think that, again, projects like this and others, can help us find our voice, when it’s going that way. And the more people that we talk to, man, the more you’re going to hear. Especially those folks who’ve lived here for some time, and they’ve been able to see things, like the before and after’s scenario. And I think that that would be really helpful. I wish my father, unfortunately he’s hospitalized right now, I wish you could talk to him, and what he saw when he, basically, and our mother decided to bring us up here from Chicago in the ’70s, and him being in his ’80s right now.
Interviewer: 25:27 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 25:28 He has a story to tell.
Interviewer: 25:29 Yeah.
Makram El-Amin: 25:30 He has a huge story to tell, right? I’ve been blessed to come from a lot of story. I have some good storytellers. Folks that could help us create narratives around things, and I think the community could benefit from folks like him, too.
Interviewer: 25:48 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Makram El-Amin: 25:49 So yeah.
Interviewer: 25:49 Yeah, well thank you so much for-
Makram El-Amin: 25:50 My pleasure.
Interviewer: 25:51 … your time.
Makram El-Amin: 25:51 My pleasure. Thank you all for doing this. This is amazing. Amazing, yeah.
by David Beckford | Jan 14, 2020 | Uncategorized, Voices from Recast
Speaker 1: 00:00 And can you state your first and last name for us with spelling?
Kevin Jenkins: 00:04 Kevin, K-E-V-I-N Jenkins, J-E-N-K-I-N-S.
Speaker 3: 00:15 Got you. Thank you. All right. First question, one second. If you’d refer to this map, do you currently live or have you ever lived in this general area?
Kevin Jenkins: 00:24 Let’s see. Have I ever lived in the 55411 area. I lived on Penn. I lived… no. Yes, I do. I live right on Penn and Broadway, and I’ve been a North-Sider basically all my life. I’m 62 years old. So I’ve been here. I ain’t leaving.
Kevin Jenkins: 00:46 So… I’m somewhere in here.
Interviewer: 00:49 But anyway, they don’t got Broadway on here.
Kevin Jenkins: 00:52 Penn and Broadway.
Interviewer: 01:04 Since you’ve been here, from when you came til today, what positive and negative changes have you seen in the community?
Kevin Jenkins: 01:12 Positive change, I mean, I mean positive changes, and I’m going to speak from the 70s.
Kevin Jenkins: 01:16 Because I was 62 years old and that’s my era of time that I grew up in. Positive areas that we had was, we was very unified. It didn’t matter what went on in the community, we all was onboard with it.
Kevin Jenkins: 01:34 We had the riots. We had to rebuild our communities. We had community centers. We had restaurants. We had clothing stores, bowling alleys. You name it, we had it. We had different festivals, like now we have Juneteenth. We had something called Freedom Days, that was on Plymouth Avenue that the Wade Community Center did. We also had a bank that was First Plymouth National Bank that basically also did a festival on Plymouth Avenue.
Kevin Jenkins: 02:10 So, there was a lot of different things that we had going on during that time period and, again, we all was in-sync. We had different community centers such as the Hospitality House, Jerry Gamble’s Boys and Girls Club, North Commons, Park, the Wade Community Center, Phyllis Wheatley, there was numerous… we just had lots of stuff that the kids could do and the parents didn’t have to worry about where their son or daughter was at because they were at a community center doing something and at these community centers, like, I grew up through the Hospitality House and one of the things that we did was we had a game room that you learned how to played pool, bumper-pool, ping-pong. We played table games; we had cooking classes (we really loved cooking classes, those cooking classes were good). We had a choir. We had Bible study. We were one of the first community centers that had a traveling basketball teams and baseball teams. Our baseball team went up to… not Lino Lakes. Ugh, I can’t remember the… it was a facility that, you know, people that were incarcerated, and they had a baseball team. We played against them, and everything like that. So, we had a lot; we were just unified back then.
Kevin Jenkins: 03:51 K-U-X-A-L was our radio station that started at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and it was over with at 6, so nobody was on the streets from 4 to 6 because that was the only time we could hear some soul music and then we got KUXAL so KUXAL was there. Then, we ended up getting KUXL and the KHMO, which is the radio station that we have now.
Kevin Jenkins: 04:25 So we have had, there was a lot of different things that were going on but we were very, very unified. People were born into the community; they stayed in the community. We didn’t have a lot of people coming from out-of-town that was coming into Minnesota at that particular point. So, the neighbors knew each other. If you did something down the street, Miss Jo was going to be in your butt and then bring you home and then your parents was going to do what they needed to do for you and to you.
Kevin Jenkins: 05:12 So the neighbors, we all knew each other and we all believe in being unified so this way that as we were growing up, everybody basically grew up together. We went to the same schools together, so this was how it was back in the 70s.
Kevin Jenkins: 05:38 When we move and march into the 80s, that’s where the changes started happening at. We started migrating to different schools that were not in our communities anymore. We started migrating out of the community to other places to live. We had now a fluctuation of people from Chicago that were coming in, D.C. that was coming in, and Kansas City was coming in, so we had a fluctuation of a lot of now, new people, but what was happening was that they didn’t stay. So, they’d be here maybe a year and then after that, they would move.
Kevin Jenkins: 06:33 So, all of a sudden the community that was like “this”, solid, “fingers-together”, started splintering and started tearing us apart… and that’s then when the drug scene started coming in. That’s when we started seeing more African American folks dropping out of school. That’s when we started seeing this change of no emotion, no feeling. Instead of fighting with the fists, we started fighting with the pistol and we start… we saw people laying out there and people, all of a sudden they was like “Oh, another person dead.”
Kevin Jenkins: 07:27 We never was like that back in the 70s-
Kevin Jenkins: 07:30 … because one of the things that our parents taught us was one… respect, believe in god. Another one they taught us was, stick together, regardless, stick together.
Kevin Jenkins: 07:47 And we feared. At that ha… I mean, our thing was, we didn’t have a cell phone; we didn’t even have a pager at this point. We knew when the street lights come on, you’d better be on your way, no… not on your way, you needed to be on the porch of your house.
Kevin Jenkins: 08:08 That was our clock, was the streetlights… and you didn’t have like you have now, the disrespect of a lot of the teens that don’t listen to their parents. They’re going to do whatever they want to do. They started thinking life ended at 21. I don’t quite get that part, but… that how many of them thought. And so then they didn’t fear. Fear left the North Side and when fear left the North Side, now we had nothing but chaos and now you had leaders fighting against each other. You had the police department that could do whatever that they wanted to do, but we wasn’t unified like we used to be.
Kevin Jenkins: 09:06 So those are some pieces, right there that we had. One of the things that we had and I’m pretty sure you remember this… is, there was a parade called the Aquatennial and we had one or two drill team groups that were in the Aquatennial and we liked to follow the drill team. Well, at a point in time the police said “you guys can’t follow them”. They had the dogs out there, the horses out there and the water hose out there… and one of the things that we came up with was… Okay you don’t want us down there? That’s fine.
Kevin Jenkins: 09:55 And, so we had something called the Summer Fun Festival, which was at the Phyllis Wheatley Community that the Wade Community sponsored and this was all the bands that were back at that time period, so, we didn’t want to go downtown because we had our own entertainment right in our own neighborhood. And, so that’s the whole thing of the unity that we had and that’s the change that happened when we, when other people started coming in to Minnesota and part of it was, and this is just my thought, so I don’t know if this is true or not…but part of it was our welfare system. We had a great welfare system here and people that were coming from other places they were like, I want to go to Minnesota because we could be on welfare and live really good until they put the new law in to say you could only be on welfare for five years.
Kevin Jenkins: 10:57 So, again, there was a lot of great things that we did back in the days and where it started crumbling was when we started dividing ourselves.
Interviewer: 11:11 So, we’re gathering some of these stories to gain some understanding about the relationship between the city of Minneapolis and the community so I hear you touching on some of the things like economic issues that you saw back then. So, as you’re thinking about policy and things like housing policy back in the 70s, when you were growing up or even in the 80s and employment and discrimination in regards to some of those things.
Interviewer: 11:49 I’m wondering what impact do you think those things had on the community… things like housing discrimination, unemployment rates or lack of employment opportunities for folks in our communities and even lack of transportation to get people back and forth between those?
Kevin Jenkins: 12:10 Okay. Well that’s a loaded question.
Kevin Jenkins: 12:13 I’ll try to get… and if I don’t answer part of it-
Kevin Jenkins:12:18 … we come back into it. Housing, well, let me start with housing.
Kevin Jenkins: 12:27 We… growing up here, we never really saw a housing issue, because our parents either they stayed in the projects, or you stayed in a duplex or apartment or a house and growing up, we didn’t really see that we were poor because we always a roof over our head, we always had clean clothes, we always had something to eat. We might only have one TV, but the whole thing was is that we didn’t really see that there were issues where you could live and where you can’t live at.
Kevin Jenkins: 13:15 So, that didn’t show up in the 70s because base… and part of it was that everybody stayed in their own neighborhood. You know, so the North Siders stayed on this side of Broadway and all the way down to the project area. That was basically us as African American folk.
Kevin Jenkins: 3:39 We stayed right there; we might have moved from one place to another place but it was in our hood, basically. So, we didn’t see that type of discrimination but I’ll come back to that because I was going to go with the jobs situation.
Kevin Jenkins: 13:59 We had a program called M.Y.C… M.Y.C. if you were 14 years old, you could get an M.Y.C. job. Everybody basically had a M.Y.C. job. I’m not quite sure what it stood for but it was like a summer youth job that you could work at a community center; you could work at a park; you could work at a barber shop. I
mean, it was like places and basically you showed up for work, they taught you what you needed to learn and then you did the job.
Kevin Jenkins: 14:36 And everybody looked forward to that two weeks because that way you got your check and then we was down at Kiefers, Browns, the V store. These were some of the places that we shopped at. Flag Brothers was another one we could love to order stuff out of the catalog there.
Kevin Jenkins: 14:59 So we had jobs back then. Jobs… Then when we got more into the mid-70s. That’s when we started seeing some of the discrimination.
Kevin Jenkins: 15:19 We were like, I graduated in 1974, so at this point I wanted to get a job and there were criteria that you had to have or it would school you knew that got you in the door. So, if you was not ambitious and a person that could sell their selves, you didn’t get a job.
Kevin Jenkins: 15:48 There was not, at this point, an encouragement to continue to keep your education going so we wasn’t really going to college as much during this time. We were going to vocational schools because at this time trades were still in. So, you could get… so I’m a tailor by trade, so I learned how to sew, I learned how to do measurements, I learned how to fit clothes onto people, this and other. And so, basically, that’s what we… that’s what I did. I went to trade school, but once we got into the 80s, that’s when the push became more- go to college, go to college. If you didn’t have the money, they had things called grants that you didn’t have to pay back.
Kevin Jenkins: 16:45 So a lot of what we were pushed into is to like, okay, we need to further our education and in order to do that, we need to get some grants. There were some people that were very fortunate to get scholarships either from academics or, as far as from the arena of what they did, as far as… they played either basketball, baseball, ran track, whatever.
Kevin Jenkins: 17:12 So, we started going that way, there, but where the doors started shutting at was… okay but how are you going to pay this bill?
17:26 And, now the parents were stuck with… we got to make a little extra money so Kamal can continue his education. Well they couldn’t do it, so Kamal had to stop his education, or Susie, or whoever… and lack of money started becoming an issue and then we ran into the area of the split families.
17:59 We ran into the area that here, the mother is raising three or four kids and the father is nowhere to be seen, except when it was time for the birthday party or for the event. “Oh here was there?”
18:17 But… the family unit started crumbling, again, because everybody wanted to do their own thing and they lost sight of what the unit of the family was supposed to be about. So, again, the whole thing was there was a lot of stuff that we wasn’t addressing in the community but we were putting the blame on
somebody else, and like Michael Jackson said it really well: “The Man in the Mirror”.
18:56 Don’t look around you to blame somebody. Look at what’s in the mirror because what’s in the mirror has caused either something good or something bad. Stop blaming. Come back to self.
Interviewer: 19:12 Right. Change yourself before you change the world.
Kevin Jenkins: 19:15 Okay, I don’t know if I answered all that but-
19:17 Okay, okay, alright. [crosstalk 00:19:19].
Interviewer: 19:27 What part do you feel you can play in creating that more hopeful future?
Kevin Jenkins: 19:36 What part do I feel I have-
19:38 … Okay. Being a community person, being a Godly man, what I learned was, it’s not about what you say, it’s what you do.
19:55 What you do is going to speak more volume versus this. So what I had to learn was, I can’t be at every march or rally. I can’t be at every protest, but what I can be is, I can be an example of somebody that grew up on the North Side. I don’t know about the near thing but the North Side, that’s what we knew we was… that was able to be successful by making good choices, never feeling like you were ever better, always feeling like I can help somebody.
20:48 So, I really think that has been the theme and I spoke with other older people than me and that was one of the things that they said, that, you know, they don’t have that kind of energy out there doing stuff, but what they can do is to show you that if you stick with it, this is what’s ahead of you and it’s looking good, but if you quit, then, basically you stop right here.
21:24 And then they share with you what things that they went through. So, I’m going to bring you to a movie, a series, “Roots”. Basically the elders made sure that the kids understood where their peoples came from and the struggles that their peoples had to go through, and by being able to do that, those kids now
become adults. They learn from what the mistakes that their parents made or the victories that their parents made and then they share it with their kids.
22:09 Well, the sharing process was when we were here. Many of the young people don’t want to hear stuff. They think, oh, that was back in YOUR time. Believe you me, what you’re experiencing now is what we experienced then. It’s just another name, another shade, but still, if you don’t stick together, we’ll crumble.
Interviewer: 22:39 Can I… I was… I actually want to ask one last question.
Kevin Jenkins: 22:43 If you have another question, you can ask me, okay. I… you can go on. [crosstalk 00:22:48].
Interviewer: 22:48 I’m wondering, in your opinion, so you see a need for community to come together, to see transformation, and I’m wondering what you would envision the city of Minneapolis and their role with the community to build stronger community.
Kevin Jenkins: 23:08 I think part of their role should be… How can they give back to the community?
23:19 You’ve taken from the community a lot. How can I come… How can we give back?
23:27 We had a program called “Something to be Thankful For”. I don’t know if you remember that one or not.
23:34 Came out of the Oak Park Neighborhood Center and what we did was we invited every youth leader… it didn’t matter if they came out of the Way, Hospitality House, Jerry Gambles, the City Incorporated, we invited everybody to come together and what we wanted to do was do a joint function for the young people.
24:03 We received money from the city to be able to do that and by being able to do that, what it did was, it tore down these divisional walls that this community is better… this community center is better than this community center. “Oh you guys ain’t got it together.” We work together, but there was money
available for that. So, I think that what possibly could happen is that the community centers, the community organizations come up with a strategy, a plan to figure out some type of a program that you can get funding for. Bobby Joe said it really, really good when we lost our target, he said basically, if we’re not at the table when decisions are being made, then we’re on the table, which basically meant was, we wasn’t invited so we didn’t know and so basically they took our target away from us.
25:19 Now yes, we have Cov. But that used to be our target there. Because we wasn’t involved in the planning and the structure of how the North Side was going to be redeveloped.
Interviewer: 25:32 Yeah, we had no say in that.
Kevin Jenkins: 25:36 Right, so that’s some of the things that I think that the city can do is to be able to look at different programs that are coming out of the North Side and to be able to say, okay, what we want to do is we want to fund this particular program. What is the monies that are available and hold the city accountable, because the city dropped the ball at the Superbowl.
Kevin Jenkins: 26:06 There was supposed to be multiple jobs for small businesses, Mom and Pop shops, this that and the other, and all of a sudden they came to the table and there was all these criteria, and they didn’t meet it. But you said you was going to put so much money into making sure that the Superbowl had people of color that were represented, but then you made these stipulations.
26:34 That’s why we have to be at the tables. That’s why we have to support our mayor, our different governors, our congresspeople. We need to support them because they’re the ones that, when it comes time for the voice, they’re the ones.
26:51 I’ll give you another example. When the shooting happened with the young man on Plymouth Avenue and the group Black Lives Matter blocked off Plymouth, and all they wanted was tape, the mistake that they made… they didn’t listen to Keith Ellison; they didn’t listen to the mayor, they didn’t listen to the
ministers that were out there, that you’re going about it the wrong way in order to get the tape.
27:25 And… when they got the tape was when everybody got the tape, when the decision came down. You got… young people have got to listen to the elders that basically have been on those fighting grounds so that way that the young people don’t make the same mistakes that we made.
27:48 Those are some key pieces, right there and so I could share that with you there. [crosstalk 00:27:54].
Interviewer 27:54 I’m gonna go into a question that I had [crosstalk 00:27:57] got the time, we did already went over.
Kevin Jenkins: 27:59 Okay, alright. I’m sorry. I like to talk. So, go ahead.
Interviewer: 28:02 I was going to say, like, you talk about we need to support the, like, the black mayors and stuff like that and the city can do all of this fund money for these programs.
Kevin Jenkins: 28:14 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Interviewer: 28:14 But what can we do to get our own people involved, because yeah we can have the workshops and the programs-
Interviewer: 28:21 …but what’s going to make them show up? Because I feel like as a youth, we’re real disengaged right now.
Kevin Jenkins: 28:34 I think… the way that what you’re all doing right now, having conversation, because, again, how you all conversate… we’re right across the table from each other and we’re texting. We need to talk to one another. This is what we did and that’s why we could cry and you would know that this person is hurting right now. That’s why the sister upstairs said we need to go through more of an exercise, okay, that’s talking, not this texting. Because, when we knock- out the communication of texting, then, basically the young people aren’t going to understand how to talk to one another.
Kevin Jenkins 29:39 This is one of the reasons why trying to solve problems is… but we haven’t come to the table to talk about, how do we manage our anger? How do we go about developing these right tool that we can use? Maybe I haven’t been to college yet, but what can I do? I want to be able to go and get educated. What can I do…and these are things that like, I think with what you guys are doing right now is, we need to go back to what things worked for us and part of it was that we came together as a community. We talked to one another. We loved on one another. We prayed together. If you need some sugar, hey, I’ve got some sugar.
30:36 You know? And that’s way, way back, but the whole thing was that we wasn’t afraid of one another to conversate or touch. That’s what I think that what you guys are doing is that start right there. It’s starting to have these kinds of conversations so that way that you can look at… these are our situations that
we’re seeing that we would lack to tackle. Whatever that is, you’ve had some time, you’ve had time to organize.
31:15 Develop some type of plan. You just don’t walk into it. You just gotta make sure that you develop some type of plan because the biggest thing is, is that without a plan, it crumbles. It crumbles.
31:31 Supporting the North High Basketball team, supporting Henry High School Basketball team or whatever sports that they are, being there, supporting those young people that are doing some positive, great things. Yes, in this day and time there’s more young people going to college, more African American
folks that’s going to college than back in my time, but the whole thing was… is that those individuals got support and they believe in the people that were backing them and then they made things happen for them.
Kevin Jenkins: 32:12 One last story. I’m sorry, I’m okay… okay… a brother by the name of Trent Bowman… I don’t know, I know you know Trent, of you’ve heard of Trent before? Okay, he went to North High School. He got… he went to college and there was like about four or five, six people that, they all went to college for real estate. What they did when they graduated… they didn’t go to E. Dinah, they didn’t go to Richfield, they didn’t even go to Brooklyn Park or Brooklyn Center, they brought it back to the North Side.
Kevin Jenkins 32:49 They said “we need to help our community”. So, what we want to do is, we’re going to set up meetings, we’re going to talk to you, we’re going to check to see what your credit record looks like, your bank account… we’re going to find affordable housing that you own, not rent, own, and that was something that our parents didn’t teach us, was ownership. We’ve learned rentership or lay-away.
33:18 You know? And I’m being real, I’m being real. So what Trent and them guys did, they brought it back to the community and they helped brothers like myself that’s much older than them to be able to own a home.
33:36 So, that’s what we need, is people to bring back whatever that they earned or they got their degrees and stuff of this nature, to bring that back to the community. Don’t move away, come back to the community.
33:54 And that’s what… that’s my story.
Interviewer: 33:58 Well thank you so much-
33:59 Thank you, we really appreciate it.
Kevin Jenkins: 34:00 Okay.
by David Beckford | Jan 14, 2020 | Uncategorized, Voices from Recast
Interview of Kenneth Rance
Interviewer: 00:11 Alright, so first we’ll just ask you what’s your first and last name with the spelling?
Kenneth Rance: 00:16 My name is Kenneth Rance and that’s K-E-N-N-E-T-H R-A-N-C-E.
Interviewer: 00:24 Alright, so this will be a fifteen minute interview.
Kenneth Rance: 00:27 Sure.
Interviewer: 00:33 On the map, do you see where you live and where you work?
Kenneth Rance: 00:38 Yep. So I live in Lin Park, so on this map, it would be closest to 14th street and Lyndale
Interviewer: 00:50 So thinking back to that area today, what changes have you seen? Positive and negative.
Kenneth Rance: 00:58 Well, I’ve seen more gentrification of whites in my neighborhood. I have seen the property values go up. I see how the north loop is growing and rising exponentially and I believe that some of the carry over is spilling across Plymouth Avenue and down toward the Washington business corridor. What I think is most tragic is that there is a lot of drug activity from the corners of Lyndale and West Broadway from West Broadway to let’s say Penn Avenue. And I think that it is a travesty that the fourth district of the Minneapolis Police Department is not doing enough, in my opinion, to curtail some of that negative drug activity.
Kenneth Rance: 02:11 When you take a look at the Fourth Precinct crime statistics which I receive from who is our community liaison, you will see that from 18th and Lyndale to West Broadway in that area on the Near North is just a hotspot with Cub Supermarket. I applaud Cub for being in the community, unfortunately in a lot of urban communities you have food deserts and more lack of opportunity for them to buy fresh produce, things of that nature. So I think that they should be applauded for continuing to remain on the north side, but it goes without saying that it does have its challenges.
Kenneth Rance: 03:01 But my qualifier is this, born and raised on the north side, I love the north side. There is no other place I’d rather want to live. I have the resources to be able live in other communities, but I have made a very conscious choice and decision to live where I do.
Kenneth Rance: 03:27 Those are some of the changes that I have seen on West Broadway.
Interviewer: 03:32 Alright. Why do you think those changes are happening?
Kenneth Rance: 03:35 Well, I think that with gentrification some of it is strategic to let some of the property values go down and then have whites move into the community. And there has also been some economic development taking place on the north side.
Kenneth Rance: 03:59 When you take a look at the number of millennials that live in the Near North and they’re going to put a elementary school in Downtown East. What that says to me is that those families are not going to have children and those children have to have places to go. And so I think that, when you take a look at the real estate market here in Minneapolis and you take a look at the lack of affordable housing, okay, a two-bedroom apartment on average here is about $1200, right?
Kenneth Rance: 04:32 So North Minneapolis is one of the last few, I think, bastions of the city of Minneapolis where people can really afford home ownership. South Minneapolis is saturated, right? You’ve got the Phillips and some other areas, but really you’ve got the lakes and so on and those are very expensive. Also too, when you take a look at some of the pernicious ways a lot of these banks have refused to loan to people of color for them to be able to even afford homes, that is very strategic in locking them out. That’s why Minnesota is 50th out of 50th for black home ownership for people of color. That’s horrible. And we have the resources and the ability to do that and so now you have more of an influx of people moving in to Near North, Willard-Hay, Jordan, Cleveland.
Kenneth Rance: 05:32 You have all this development through the Greenway project, from the that’s gonna come right through north Minneapolis. It’s also bridging the gap between the Van White Bridge and the Kenwood area over there by The Blake School, right? You take a look at what they’re doing with the-
Interviewer: 05:50 I was looking for the lady at the front desk.
Kenneth Rance: 05:58 So you’ve got all that going and what I think it’s gonna do is it’s gonna disenfranchise more people of color through increased property taxes and higher rents and values and it’s gonna be harder for them to live within the city.
Interviewer: 06:19 Yep. So this is a long question, so I’m gonna sum it up. So policies such as housing, transportation, I know you mentioned product development and the war on drugs and other things that was happening in the 1990s. How do you think those policies impacted the community or even
yourself?
Kenneth Rance: 06:43 Well, look, so when we talk about Ronald Reagan’s the War on Drugs and if you read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander it does a very great job of kind of laying out what’s taking place. So when there are racial biases in this war on drugs and locking people up is not the solution. It’s been proven that drug [inaudible 00:07:10] is on par in black communities as it is in white communities.
Kenneth Rance: 07:14 If you take a look at the ACLU study of Picking Up the Pieces in 2012, you find that north Minneapolis District Four are policed at a much higher level than they are in other aspects of the city. So you lock up a father or a mother and that has an impact on their ability to earn and take care of their children and you then have them displaced and so you have more transient and you have more homelessness. Those stresses can lead to substance abuse problems.
Kenneth Rance: 07:50 And then the amount of bias that takes place in the Minneapolis public school system where they have concentrated schools and community schools for people of color and so they’ve had all the concentrated poverty in schools on the north side whereas, when we take a look at the schools on the south side of the city, they’re more inclined to put those students out or make it more challenging for them to be able to have access to the school. So they take out busing for high school, so now students then have to go to schools that are closer to them just due to the fact they don’t have the transportation. For middle school students and elementary school students, well if the parents have resources, like my family has been blessed to do, then we can afford to drive our children outside of the local schools they have more opportunity.
Kenneth Rance: 08:45 You also have to take a look at where the resource is going to. Where are the better teachers? Where are the teachers that are more seasoned and experienced? I believe that if the Minneapolis school system did a better job at dispersing whether it’s- not Title 9- Title 1 students, free and reduced lunch, and the entire school system had to proportionately kind of deal with those students with those specific needs or what not, I think we would have more equity, we’d have more balance, and we’d have better educational opportunities for all of our students.
Kenneth Rance: 09:36 And when it comes to economical development, the development is coming, but will we be a part of that? And public transportation has a lot to do with that, as well, when you take a look at the Bottineau Line.
Kenneth Rance: 09:53 When I grew up, there are people of color living in places in Minnesota that was just unheard of. Chaska and Burnsville and Apple Valley and Champlin and now that Section 8 volunteers aren’t in fashion anymore in the city of Minneapolis and they’re literally displacing of and just putting us anywhere.
Kenneth Rance: 10:23 And so as long as there’s a functional bus line to be able to take them from there back into the city to be able to work for low wage jobs is, for some people, it’s sufficient. The problem is is that right now, living in the city of Minneapolis, one out of every four people is a person of color, but as we grow towards a minority majority, the population of whites in Minnesota is declining. The future growth will come from minorities and immigrants. Well, if it is not deceptive to immigrants and if there are not opportunities for people of color, how will the state of Minnesota maintain its quality of life? And I think that there are some people in leadership that are aware of those analytics and those metrics, but it’s disturbing that not enough is being done fast enough. Because you cannot have all these people here without healthcare, education, and employment opportunities and expect to have a functioning civil society.
Kenneth Rance: 12:00 Did that answer your question?
Interviewer: 12:03 Yes.
Kenneth Rance: 12:03 I know it was a lot.
Interviewer: 12:04 It was a lot, but it’s good. That was good. Okay, what changes have you seen in the community that you have concerns about? Anything.
Kenneth Rance: 12:16 The gentrification is one thing. You have a lot of seniors that are living on fixed incomes that cannot continue to maintain their homes and now they’re selling them. And then you have people from other communities coming into the neighborhoods and they’re trying to change the culture of that community and I think that that can be very dangerous, I think that can be very rude, that can be very disrespectful, I think that that can cause a lot of conflict. I mean, take a look at the case with the gentrification that’s taking place in the Shaw-LeDroit Park area in Washington D.C. and Howard University and the residents want to walk the dogs on campus and they wanted to stop the Go-go music that’s been playing there for the last twenty years. Those things are not good and when you take a look at law enforcement and how heavily policed we are and taxes here.
Kenneth Rance: 13:26 I think what they’re doing with Northpoint I think is just awesome and with 150,000 people a year they see. I mean, it’s just enormous the amount of great work that Stella’s doing over there and the 70 million dollar project and the are all things that need to be supported and with these Promise Zones and Opportunity Zones and these Green Zones and I strongly encourage leadership in the city to be able to provide opportunities for people to have affordable housing and then the corporations need to do their fair share as well in being able to make home loans affordable to people of color and not pricing them out. And also being able to provide more public private partnerships and more access to jobs with livable wages. And a greater respect for our environment here and so what concerns me is that there’s empirical data that shows that if Minnesota doesn’t get it together, they’re going to have some serious problems on down the line with the number of Baby Boomers that are retiring. And it’s very expensive for retirees to live here, but people of color have to have their opportunities as well.
Kenneth Rance: 15:26 One last point, the state of Minnesota, I believe, had over a billion dollars worth of contracts last year. What percentage of them went to black businesses? It was less than a tenth of one percent. Yet, businesses in the state of Minnesota are skyrocketing. How is that equitable? It’s wrong and there’s certain mandates and laws on the books that say otherwise, that certain monies are entitled to those disenfranchised communities of color, but they have not the leadership, the governor to others have not been held accountable.
Interviewer: 16:25 I’m gonna ask you one last thing.
Kenneth Rance: 16:26 Sure.
Interviewer: 16:29 Do you have any last words? How would you wrap it up?
Kenneth Rance: 16:41 How would I wrap it up? I just think that there are certain powers that do not see the value of black people here in this state. And I think that it is time that they be recognized and be given a fair shot and opportunity to, as Snoop Dogg would say, “Live their best life.” You know what I’m saying? And, unfortunately, there are powers at be that are day in and day out trying to impede our progress, that are trying to snuff out our community, that are trying to displace us, and it’s wrong. And with all of this Minnesota nice that we talk about, it’s really Minnesota ice. And the numbers and the populations are growing and they’re changing where it has been shown, I was reading a study from Deloitte, that companies who embrace diversity in thought and in leadership do better.
Kenneth Rance: 18:39 Just the bottom line, they do better. And Minnesota will do better when they have equitable opportunity around the table to be able to take a part of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all of the values and virtues that we pride ourselves on as a nation. And if they don’t, we’re in big trouble.
Interviewer: 19:14 Alright, well thank you, we enjoyed your time.
Kenneth Rance: 19:16 Thank you.
by David Beckford | Jan 14, 2020 | Uncategorized, Voices from Recast
Interview of Jewelean Jackson
Interviewer: 00:26 Okay, may I have your first and last name the spelling, please?
Miss Jackson: 00:40 Jewelean, J-E-W-E-L-E-A-N, no middle initial, last name Jackson, J-A-C-K-S-O-N.
Interviewer: 00:51 Okay, nice to meet you.
Miss Jackson: 00:51 Indeed.
Interviewer: 00:52 Do you or have you lived in this area in the last 10 years?
Miss Jackson: 00:58 I have lived, played, worked, and prayed in this area for 40 years.
Interviewer: 01:03 Okay. From when you first moved in this area what changes have you seen over the years?
Miss Jackson: 01:09 Oh, even though they say the statistics say otherwise, it seems like there are more non-black folks, more Asians, more Somalis and it also seems as though there may be a little more negative behavior, be it us killing one another and/or the police killing us.
Interviewer: 01:34 I agree. So do you feel that’s a negative or a positive change?
Miss Jackson: 01:41 Well, I think it’s a double edged sword. I think part of the concern is that there seems to be a lack of value in human life too often amongst us and it’s reciprocal among the other folks as well. Now, I think in terms of Euros, it has more to do with they still think of us as animals, they still think of us as 3/5 human, they still think that we’re just a beast. The flip side of that is one of self hatred. The physical shackles were removed but we still have shackles on our minds.
Interviewer: 02:19 I agree with you, by the way. What do you feel caused the changes?
Miss Jackson: 02:21 Oh gosh. Some would say it was all the transplants from Gary, Indiana. Some would say it’s the transplants from south side of Chicago. I am not sure. I don’t know if it’s specific to Minneapolis and north Minneapolis as much as it seems to be different pockets of the country, be it Chicago, be it New York, be it Los Angeles etc. I think part of what makes it seem like it’s more is that with social media you get it faster, quicker, all at once. One of the things that seems to be different is I always tell my scholars, it wasn’t as though we didn’t fight and duke it out with one another, but if you and I had an issue, you beat my behind, I didn’t run home and get Pookie and Mom and them and a gun and come back and try to kill you.
Interviewer: 03:10 To kill you, right.
Miss Jackson: 03:11 Typically, it was done. So you beat my behind and so be it and we shook hands and we went on.
Interviewer: 03:17 And that’s it.
Miss Jackson: 03:20 And I don’t know if this is different either but I think this whole thing of babies having babies, they haven’t been raised so how are they going to raise another little person. And so therefore you pick up all of those bad habits, non-habits, and so with the work that I do I always try to incorporate home visits because I can think about what it might be like but, oh my gosh, once I get into the home it’s like, okay, know what’s wrong. And certainly I’m not researched or haven’t studied it but these are just some of my observations.
Interviewer: 03:53 Okay. And what makes you feel that way?
Miss Jackson: 03:58 One, I think integration did us in. I think that in yesteryear we were forced more to get along and be along because all we had was one another.
Interviewer: 04:12 Exactly.
Miss Jackson: 04:12 Now we figure that we had the civil rights movement and we fought for equal rights and now on the one hand you have too many of us trying to be like them and outdoing them at being themselves, ie. Europeans. And on the other hand you have this whole sense of hopelessness that I’m not sure where it came from.
04:30 I just asked one of my third grade scholars the other day, I said, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” And he said, “Miss Jackson, I want to be alive.” Oh, okay so where, when, and how because in our darkest days as slaves we still wanted to do better. We wanted to learn how to read and write. Today we’ve got to drag our kids to school to get them there, get them there on time and get them there without them throwing chairs through windows and those kinds of things. So, it’s pretty complex, it’s pretty complex.
Interviewer: 05:01 Okay, so we are gathering these stories to increase understanding between the city of Minneapolis and the community on the impact of historic discriminatory government policies and practices in areas like housing, transportation, economic development and more. Examples include housing and employment discrimination in the early 20th century, the war on drugs in the 1990s and others. What impact has these policies or others had on the community in general?
Miss Jackson: 05:27 That was a mouthful. Was I supposed to remember all that?
Interviewer: 05:31 Basically, what changes have you seen in the housing, transportation, economic development since back in the day until now?
Miss Jackson: 05:40 Well, it’s only been recently that they have removed legal language saying that we can’t purchase property.
Miss Jackson: 05:47 People are very surprised by that, white and black. It’s only been recently that the language has been removed in terms of redlining in the district. So I don’t know how soon you would say that’s happened. Are we talking 2018, we’re talking about 1990, etc.? Because, again, I think all of what ails us is this whole thing of racism at its best, sexism at its best, white folks and black folks think we’ve truly arrived. We have not. And the Willie Lynch syndrome is alive and well.
Miss Jackson: 06:22 And I think that’s kind of the underpinning of everything that ails us and I don’t think even with affirmative action at its best that we’re going to catch up. I’m not going to see it. I’m not sure if you all are going to see it either. My child, the one I birthed at 27, oftentimes she says, “You know what? It’s an upstream battle.” And I don’t that even me or my children will be around to see it.
Miss Jackson: 06:46 And as dismal as that sounds that doesn’t mean we work any less hard in terms of change. And again, it still goes to that whole thing of how you feel about folks because even with laws changing and written information changing, attitudes are slow to follow. And so it may be another 200 years before they even allude to the civil rights movement. I mean they still have on the books that we’re not allowed to vote. That’s still on the books.
Interviewer: 07:14 I didn’t know that
Miss Jackson: 07:14 And then on the one hand as a long time head election judge I have to drag my folks kicking and screaming to vote, to register to vote, to pledge to vote, to know where your polling place is. Folks will get to the polls at 7: 50 the polls close at 8:00, you’re at the wrong poll, then you cuss me out going out the door because you can’t get to the right poll. Well come on now, come on.
Miss Jackson: 07:38 So it’s a lot of that. I had one of my 5th grade scholars two years ago tell me, “Well Miss Jackson my daddy says it’s stupid to vote.” Now I ain’t going to take on what his daddy said but I made note, okay there’s some other things I have to do with this little 5th grade scholar of mine in terms of getting him to
see things differently. But it’s hard because I have them, what, 3 or 4 hours a day? Then they still gotta go home to whatever madness that is.
Interviewer: 08:01 Yup, that is true.
Miss Jackson: 08:03 Did any of that make sense?
Interviewer: 08:03 Yeah, that did. I understand it completely.
Miss Jackson: 08:05 Okay. The other piece with housing, with the foreclosure piece that hit a few years back and I lost my house as a result of it. One of the things that I keep telling people that they need to do in terms of policy is that at the end of what I went through, and I fought a hard fight but I lost after about 6 years, they still said they wanted $300,000 from me for my house right around the corner, 1618 Freemont Avenue. But then they turned around and sold it to the white boy for $40,000. What’s wrong with that picture? What is wrong with that picture?
Interviewer: 08:37 Are you serious?
Miss Jackson: 08:39 Serious. And it wasn’t as though he was going to come and move into the community. What he did is he carved it up to rent it out-
Interviewer: 08:46 To make-
Miss Jackson: 08:46 To make more money for a whole lot more than he should have been charging, that’s about policy.
Interviewer: 08:53 That’s crazy.
Miss Jackson: 08:53 You know. And even now the other thing, there seems to be a whole lot more vacant houses as well than there used to be and that’s another policy piece. The city finally heard us a year and a half ago with some listening sessions that we did. We said okay so, what do we do with these vacant houses, these vacant lots? So they said oh okay well we hear you, let’s come up with this system. And I don’t remember all of it verbatim but it was $75,000, I think, if you were a first responder, you could get free money, $50,000 if you were in education, $25,000 if you were a resident in the community. What’s wrong with that? Flip it!
Miss Jackson: 09:29 Flip it! That is policy. And they didn’t even have that before we had these listening sessions a year and a half ago. That’s all policy. That’s the city of Minneapolis.
Miss Jackson:09:40 So.
Miss Jackson: 09:40 I get animated sometimes. Forgive me.
Interviewer: 09:43 It’s okay. We need that. So what impacts have that had on you or your personal family?
Miss Jackson: 09:53 Well, part of it’s my fault and/or part of it’s the system but I have spent most of my darned near 70 years really embracing my community, doing for my community which meant that most of my life I’ve either totally given it away for free or for little or nothing. And so for me if I walked out this door and I broke a hip or whatever I’d be expected to live off of $900 a month social security. What do you do with $900 a month social security? Not much. But, it’s still on me. From that perspective I’m kind of a sick puppy, if you will, because people that volunteer at my level for that length of time got three, four sugar daddies somewhere paying the bills.
Miss Jackson: 10:35 But at the same time, I think that it’s important and it’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it so when I think back on the Miss Black Minnesota pageant that I produced and directed for 15 years, a founding mother for Twin Cities Juneteenth, founding committee for the Minnesota Freedom Schools’ Children’s Defense Fund, founding committee for the National Night Out, at some point part of my legacy will be there she lay, but look at all this good stuff she left behind.
Miss Jackson: 11:02 But in the meantime it would be nice to be able to make a decision and be able to write a check and make it happen as opposed to fundraising and seeing who I can submit a proposal to, so.
Miss Jackson: 11:15 They say God looks out for babies and fools. I think I fall in the fool category which God has decided that, with that, he has given me my health. And so we have figured out that for the next decade, I have until I’m 80, to make up for that social security piece. Because I still have my health and when you have your health you can attain the other stuff or get it back.
Interviewer: 11:39 So what changes have you seen in this community that raised your level of stress or concern about its future?
Miss Jackson: 11:44 Well, recognizing that the police have never been our friend, it seems as though they have become a lot more blatant and I tell the chief and all of the boys in blue often, “Y’all are sharp shooters.” So you mean to tell me I’m supposed to believe that he’s running away and whatever level of his black face, you can’t shoot him in the legs and stop him or tase him or something? It’s always shoot to kill our folks, especially our black boys and the young black men.
Miss Jackson: 12:13 So that seems to be more overt and it’s scary to the point of when I found out I was pregnant I said, “God don’t give me a boy. I don’t want a boy.” Because I did not want to have to think for the next 21 years that knock on the door in the middle of the night that my child- Although, I got a girl, I’m not good with hair either because I have none, but she’s had the police pull guns on her. So it’s not specific just to the sexes.
Miss Jackson: 12:44 So that seems to be a little worse. That’s probably the main thing just in terms of the police and the way that they- I mean I’ve even had them tell me- because you hesitate to even call them, even if you need them, and I’ve had them tell me when they’ve gotten there, “Well, just move out of the neighborhood. Well, you decided to live here.” They don’t do that out in their neck of the woods.
Miss Jackson: 13:08 And I don’t think that more police are necessarily the answer to that because many of them are still, and even with our new police chief, he’s still got this horrible system that he’s stuck with. And so I just heard something recently of how we finally allude to moving forward is we’ve got to have the Thurgood Marshall’s, you all know who that is, right?
Interviewer: 13:27 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Miss Jackson: 13:28 Which I just found out today he had 32 cases of which he won I mean, yeah. So he was saying that you have to have those like him that deal with the system but you still have to have the Martin Luther King Jr.’s who can speak it, who can mobilize, who can organize. And until we have a consistent, incestuous like relationship between those two strategies, I don’t know, it’s going to be a hard time coming. And a long time coming.
Interviewer: 13:56 All right. True that, true that. What part does the city of Minneapolis need to play to relieve that stress?
Miss Jackson: 14:05 For me personally?
Interviewer: 14:05 Yes ma’am.
Miss Jackson: 14:07 Part of it has to do with, and I’ve gotten pretty creative. When you don’t have the check book, so I know where all the food shelves are, I know where the food distributions are, I even know where there’s a free clinic where we can get free acupuncture, free chiropractic, free massage, free counseling, etc.
Miss Jackson: 14:24 And so for me part of relieving my stress is to know that it’s not going under the knife. It’s not taking another pill. It’s dealing with some of these other strategies to help me with my mental and my physical. As a matter of fact, we’ve actually decreased my meds for high blood pressure in half by the acupuncture.
Miss Jackson: 14:43 If we could have more of that I think that that would help because, one of the things that I said is if the real revolution happened tomorrow, we’re such a sick people you wouldn’t be able to carry me and I wouldn’t be able to carry you. Let alone pick up a gun and do it at the same time. And so I think those are a few of the things and then just this whole thing of, this whole unity thing. One of my other hats is I’m the current lifetime national Miss Kwanza and part of my platform is teaching Kwanza, the Kwanza principles as a way of life.
Miss Jackson: 15:15 KMOJ, 50 years ago started with unity, umojah, etc. But we are such a far cry from that at this point and we’re still like crabs in the barrel etc. so I think it’s a combination of us coming together as a people and us figuring out what we have to do in terms of our mental and physical mindset.
Miss Jackson: 15:38 The other part of the unity piece is we got to organize and mobilize and get, and yeah, I’ve said it to them, these Asians that we continue to give our money to that treat us like you know what. But years ago we had a black salon down here Reverend Charles and Marie Graham, Marie Graham sings with the Sounds of Blackness, they didn’t last because we didn’t support them. But we run to the other folks to give them our little bit of money. So that’s another piece that’s sorely lacking.
Interviewer: 16:10 Okay, okay. Moving on to the next question. What gives you hope for the future of this community?
Miss Jackson: 16:17 You young folks. You youngins. I think part of what’s going to help too is with the energy of the young folks and the wisdom of us old folks, if we could truly come together it would make a difference. I don’t know if any of you were involved with the fourth precinct occupation?
Interviewer: 16:33 Mm-mmm (negative)
Miss Jackson: 16:34 Well, a lot of my community children were and the one that I birthed was also part of that. But it was us old folks that did those young people in. What they did is in the middle of the night they ran downtown to [mossa 00:16:45], the city bureaucracy, and literally dismantled it in the middle of the night. Yeah, that’s how it happened.
Miss Jackson:16:55 And I’ve said that to some of those old folks, as well, because what I say, I say it to the source as well. So that’s a huge piece, this whole divide and conquer and I got more education than you and my eyes are lighter than yours and my hair’s straighter than yours and it’s crazy. So until those things begin to change, it’s not going to change. So it’s on y’all. But we have to have the good sense to give you what we know, give you the baton and get the hell out of the way so you can do what you need to do that we’ve trained you to do. Oops, bleep. Okay. The helicopter out of the way. Sorry.
Miss Jackson: 17:34 But there are the John Brown’s too though. You all know who John Brown was right?
Interviewer: 17:39 I do.
Miss Jackson: 17:39 Okay, so he led any number of the insurrections during the slavery times, white boy. And I say that because even during my time with my foreclosure, there was a young Jewish guy that had walked with us through that whole process and what we did is we strategized and we said so when the sheriff gets here and they come, we know that they will react differently to your white face than my black face. And so I’m not saying that it all has to happen with all black folks. There are some white folks too that we need to also coalesce with.
Interviewer: 18:24 Yeah. What part does the city of Minneapolis need to play to create that more hopeful future?
Miss Jackson: 18:30 I think it’s all of the city because too often people think well, it’s them. No, it’s all of us. And I think that all of the city has a part to play When they did Rondo in, in St. Paul, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that story or not.
Interviewer: 18:44 Mm-hmm (affirmative). I heard about that.
Miss Jackson: 18:44 Well initially when that was on the drawing board it was going to be Rondo and Prospect Park. Now the white folks in Prospect Park had the wherewithal and the resources to fight so it didn’t happen to them, whereas we did not and we saw what happened, so. So all of us are affected, contrary to popular belief but, yeah.
Interviewer: 19:14 When you think about this area today, what impact do you still see from these historic government policies?
Miss Jackson: 19:17 Ask me that again.
Interviewer: 19:27 The impact of the discriminatory policies that have been in place historically.
Miss Jackson: 19:31 Oh, okay.
Miss Jackson: 19:34 Well when you look at so often, white folks and black folks, “Just get over it. That was then, now is now.” Well you can’t just get over it because it continues. So that when my significant other says that excuse me but we’re going to this wedding and it’s a young white couple and the parents have given them their house, we don’t have that to bring to the table, let alone be in a position to give it to our children.19:59 And so that kind of policy continues on. People don’t recognize that when they say, “Well it’s not me.” Well of course it’s not you, it’s institutional racism, it’s institutional sexism, it’s all that institutional madness that Trump and the Trumpettes are solidifying and undoing all of the things that Obama did.
20:20 Now the flip of that in terms of hope. I mean I jump for joy. All these young folks we’ve got on city council, get these old folks out of the way. Now, will they have all the answers? No, but at least it’s new blood and it’s young blood and so far I’ve been very impressed with Phillipe and Jeremiah and Andrea’s not as young but, nevertheless, he brings another perspective. I think that’s what’s going to help.
Miss Jackson: 20:48 Did that answer?
Interviewer: 20:49 Yes. How would you describe the relationship between the city of Minneapolis and the northside community over the years?
Miss Jackson: 21:00 It’s been up and down, mainly down. Again, the system looks at us as less than human. The system looks at us in a paternalistic way when they do, it’s like, “Well I know what’s good for you poor slobs over there.” The system thinks of us as a detriment. Everything is always in the negative. An yeah there are issues but there are issues everywhere, there are issues everywhere and I don’t know what it’s going to take to change that.
Miss Jackson: 21:29 And, again, we’ve got a new young mayor, St. Paul has not only a young mayor but a young black mayor and a young black male mayor. Matter of fact he taught my child her first story. He was getting ready to go to college and she was still in middle school? Yeah, middle school. Elementary school. Whatever. So I think the new blood is going to help.
Miss Jackson: 21:48 But what happens is even when you come in with all of these ideas, you too can get caught up in the system. Even with Obama, I told people he wasn’t going to be the Messiah, but I voted for him because he looked like me. I didn’t care what his policy was. He looked like me and that was a historical moment.
Miss Jackson: And you saw what happened. But lord of mercy I’ll tell you he has proven to be the most gracious, and they couldn’t even dig up anything on him in terms of sexual scandal, and I am so pleased, you’d think he was my own child.
Miss Jackson: 22:17 But, ultimately it may happen and then again it may not. But even with the real revolution, I can’t think of a historical revolution where it’s been a real revolution and then the folks that overturned the previous folks didn’t turn out to be like the previous folks they overturned. So, what do you do?
Interviewer: 22:37 Okay. What are your expectations of the city of Minneapolis related to this community?
Miss Jackson: 22:44 Well, I mean, they need to either do it or get off the pot. You all know that expression, right?
Miss Jackson: 22:51 Okay. But we also have to force the issue. People still tell me, “My vote won’t count. Why should I vote? Well I don’t like who’s on the ballot.” And I try to tell folks then if that’s the case you at least get to the polls, register to vote, you pledge, you know where it is, you get to the polls, and write in your own name. Write it Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck because then people know that you at least exercised that a right that we have as Americans because what we don’t realize is when we do vote, we jump to the top, to the presidential. More times than not, the stuff that’s going to affect us is the local. How often are the streets plowed? Who gets the nicer looking parks and those kinds of things. But it’s continuing to try to educate, re-educate, un-educate.
Interviewer: 23:37 I understand that. I agree with you there too. To what extent do you trust the city of Minneapolis to deliver those expectations?
Miss Jackson: 23:54 Oh, that’s funny. Let me first say that there has been changes let me recognize that but the more things change the more they stay the same. And power is not given, you have to take it and people have to be in a position and willing to make the sacrifices to take it. I don’t trust them to just say, “Oh, here’s your part of it.” I mean when they took out Martin Luther King Jr. why was that? Because he started talking about economics. Economics. Hit them in the pockets. I’m still waiting for my 40 acres and my mule, not with bated breath but nevertheless. But that gives you an idea. And everybody has gotten the reparations except for black folks. Well the Natives have been done in too, but everybody else has got- And when we talk about reparations it’s like all of a sudden we’re talking Chinese. But everybody else has gotten them.
Miss Jackson: 24:44 So I don’t trust them to do a doggone thing. That doesn’t mean though that I don’t continue to work because someone still has to be at the table because I tell my scholars, “If you ain’t at the table you’re going to be on the table.” And when they get to slicing and dicing- So I don’t know that we’ll ever get our fair share.
Interviewer: 25:04 What part do you feel you can play in creating that more hopeful future?
Miss Jackson: 25:08 Working with the babies, working with the young folks. Trying to train the young folks, trying to help them with empowerment because once you have the empowerment piece, you have a sense of who you are, you’re unapologetically black, you ain’t trying to do Michael Jackson and change all of that then the more apt you are to say, “Hey, this isn’t right. I’m standing my ground. I’m going to fight.” And even with my foreclosure and some other things that I’ve gone through, [claw in 00:25:35] the case is back against the wall but fighting back.
Miss Jackson: 25:39 I had to sue a former employer. Everybody said, “Ahhh,” and I won’t mention their names because y’all know who they are but everybody kept saying, “You’ll never win.” Whether I never did get one thin dime, and I did win, and they had to write a check, and it was substantial but I knew that I had the- I won’t use that word, I was going to say I had the testicles to fight back but, I guess I could have used another word but I didn’t, but I at least stood my ground and if I had not done one thin dime. They knew that I stood my ground and I had the backbone to do it. And more people have got to do that and we’ve got to stop thinking this whole I, me thing. It’s all of us, it’s a collective.
Interviewer: 26:14 Yeah, a team. Well that’s the end of the interview and we do appreciate you taking time out here to come talk to us. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
Miss Jackson: 26:23 Thank you. So what’s the next step? What will y’all do with all this valuable information?
by David Beckford | Jan 14, 2020 | Uncategorized, Voices from Recast
Interview of Jenese Thomas
Jenese Thomas: Jenese Thomas. J E N E S E T H O M A S.
Interviewer: Alright and reference to this map, do you, or have you ever lived in or near any
of these parts of North Minneapolis and if so, how long.
Jenese Thomas: Yes, the North Community High School area and 4 years.
Interviewer: Alright. Thinking back from when you first came to this area, to today, what changes have you seen? Positive and negative.
Jenese Thomas: The reconstruction of Plymouth, Penn, Broadway, and no positive change.
Interviewer: Okay. Why do you say there’s no positive change? What makes you say that?
Jenese Thomas: Cause the education is still horrible, the violence is still horrible. Well, the only positive changes are different community centers, You Rock, Oak Park. Different places where you can go.
Interviewer: Alright so more youth, just more things for youth to do, like stay off the streets.
Jenese Thomas: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Interviewer: More important. I see that. Next questions will be, what do you feel caused the changes in this area over the years and why do you feel this way?
Jenese Thomas: The violence caused most of the change. I feel this way cause it’s getting out of hand.
Interviewer: Yeah, Absolutely. I can see that. We are gathering information for the City of Minneapolis and they want to know how these policies, for example: housing, transportation, economic development and others, and employment discrimination, how these policies impacted you and your family personally.
Jenese Thomas: Like I said, I really never had a problem getting a job, I don’t have a felony. Nothing on my backgrounds.
Interviewer: No discrimination during employment?
Jenese Thomas: No.
Interviewer: Okay. That’s good.
Jenese Thomas: As far as education, I believe my kids are in good schools, but who to say when they get in high school it will be the same. Because suburb schools are learning more and graduating faster than our schools in the cities. As far as housing, I was homeless for seven months, but I really didn’t have a problem finding anything it was just finding something based on my income. Income is scarce.
Interviewer: Yeah. Absolutely.
Jenese Thomas: Section 8 for black families in North Minneapolis is not a go-to thing. You giving people section 8 vouchers but they’re not being able to find places because a lot people are not accepting section 8 now, or they’re accepting it and they raise the rent.
Interviewer: Right.
Jenese Thomas: It’s a lose, lose situation for a lot of other families in the North Side.
Interviewer: How do you feel about the war on drugs policy. Do you feel like that policy…
Jenese Thomas: The what?
Interviewer: The war on drugs.
Jenese Thomas: War on drugs?
Interviewer: Yes, that’s the policy that basically tries to, trying to think of the right words, it tries to compact on drugs and crack in the black communities and tries to make sure that ..
Interviewer: Targeting black people.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Jenese Thomas: For example the 100-1 ratio, crack to cocaine.
Jenese Thomas: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Interviewer: You know about that. That’s pretty much the war on drugs. Has that effected you or this community in any way that you can think of?
Jenese Thomas: I don’t think it changed. This neighborhood right here that we in now is horrible with drugs.
Interviewer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jenese Thomas: I don’t think anything changed with that. There’s still a lot of crack heads, still a lot of whatever, drug dealers and people on drugs. It’s just different drugs coming out now.
Interviewer: Right, it seems like your saying that it effected the community a lot.
Jenese Thomas: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewer: What changes have you seen in the community that raise your level of stress or concern about it’s future? And what do you think the City of Minneapolis can do to relieve that stress?
Jenese Thomas: The violence has raised my stress. I’m not sure what the community can do or what the city could do about the violence, cause I don’t think they ever was able to control it. They can’t control the people that are supposed to be in position to stop it, cause they doing it to. I don’t think anything happened.
Interviewer: How would you describe the relationship between the City of Minneapolis and the community?
Jenese Thomas: Horrible.
Interviewer: Horrible.
Jenese Thomas: Not good.
Interviewer: I do believe that I agree with you. What are your expectation for the city of Minneapolis? Relative to this community.
Jenese Thomas: My expectations are that they keep us safe, are we talking about as far as police, law enforcement?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewer: All the higher powers, government officials, all of the above. What can our elected officials and people that are supposed to protect us and anybody that’s supposed to protect us, what can they do to help us? Or to help this community.
Jenese Thomas: Just try to keep us safe and not kill us.
Interviewer: That’s real.
Interviewer: It is.
Interviewer: To what extent do you trust the city of Minneapolis to deliver on those expectations?
Jenese Thomas: Say that question again.
Interviewer: How much do you trust them to actually follow through with that?
Jenese Thomas: I don’t.
Interviewer: I believe it.
Jenese Thomas: I don’t, there’s been too many of black men dying in the hands of them. Half the time it’s the things that are happening is not okay. These black men, most of them ain’t got guns on them, ain’t got no weapons on them and you shooting to kill. Like, no. You can shoot em, my thing is you can shoot them in the arm, shoot them in the leg, you can shoot them anywhere. You shooting to kill. You shooting in the head, you shooting in the chest where the heart is. You shooting to kill.
Interviewer: A lot of times, it’s multiple shots.
Interviewer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jenese Thomas: Right.
Interviewer: Not just one or two.
Jenese Thomas: You had to shoot him twice you had to shoot him three or four times.
Interviewer: Had to shoot him 30 times.
Jenese Thomas: Right.
Interviewer: Doesn’t make sense.
Jenese Thomas: Yeah. I don’t trust them, I don’t think they can do anything, like get some new cops? New government officials. Definitely a new president.
Interviewer: A whole new policy.
Interviewer: Yeah. What part do you feel that you can play in creating a more hopeful future?
Jenese Thomas: Doing my job, staying at home. Going to work. Teaching my kids right from wrong. I also want to put out there, when I was going to school they had D.A.R.E. What happened to D.A.R.E?
Interviewer: Now that you say that I remember that.
Jenese Thomas: McGruff, McGrath from Chicago Illinois 60612. They had all them programs, they don’t have non of them in school no more. They took them out completely.
Interviewer: Seems like especially with D.A.R.E, I feel like that was definitely to letting people know, of course they know they’re not supposed to be doing these drugs, they’re not supposed to be doing these things but it just, it still just enforces it like keeps it fresh and lets you know like at school you know.
Jenese Thomas: If you’re teaching your kids this, they coming home like mom, you’re not supposed to be doing that. It helps.
Interviewer: It’s going to influence you to stop doing.
Jenese Thomas: Mom, I know that they said that you’re not supposed to do this, this is not what you’re supposed to do. So it’s like why did they take these programs out of school. I believe some of the reason why they took programs out of school, they really want to have us be the first teachers. We’re supposed to be teaching our kids good touch, bad touch, all this, all these different things.
Interviewer: That’s true, you’re supposed to be teaching your kid that but when they come to school, and they’re at school what, eight hours out of the day, by the time you get home your tired, you’re ready to go to bed, you feeding them and taking them and putting them to bed. You’re not gonna sit down to talk to them about things you know, you’re trying to take care of your household. It’s the teacher job to teach. To enforce things and to let them know, what is, what’s good and what’s bad as well. That’s going to be their second home, they’re in school for 12 years you know.
Jenese Thomas: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Interviewer: It’s levels to it, but I feel as if, you know.
Interviewer: That’s all the questions we have for you. We appreciate your time.
Interviewer: Thank you so much for answering our questions.
Jenese Thomas: Thank you.
