Minneapolis Has Long Been Fractured by Racial Inequity. Can a New Mayor Change That?
The Bethany Lutheran Church sits in the center of the Seward neighborhood, southeast of downtown. It’s the kind of neighborhood where a non–hierarchically run cafe jostles up against a radical bookstore and co-op grocery, and the local representative belongs to the Green Party. Before learning about Minneapolis’s deep poverty and racial inequity, this was the city of my imagination, a sort of radical utopia where the only oppression was inflicted by the winter weather.
The church, however, offers a different narrative. Bethany Lutheran serves as the headquarters for Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha, or CTUL (pronounced say-tool). Inside, there is a bulletin board covered with photos of men and women protesting; a piece of butcher paper lists the sueldos robados—stolen wages—the group recovered in 2011. While the contractors listed are mostly small and unfamiliar, in recent years CTUL has moved up the supply chain, waging a campaign against the retail giant Target, which is headquartered in Minneapolis, hoping to organize the subcontracted janitors who clean the company’s stores.
“Lots of people said these workers were impossible to organize,” says Veronica Mendez, CTUL’s fiery co-director. “Those people were wrong.”
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The seeds that grew into Minnesotans for a Fair Economy were planted out of frustration. It was the mid-2000s, a dark time for anyone in the state who cared about economic justice or racial equity. Paul Wellstone was dead, replaced by Republican Norm Coleman. Tim Pawlenty was governor. And a state senator named Michele Bachmann was planning a run for Congress.
In response, SEIU, TakeAction Minnesota and ISAIAH began to meet, holding long conversations about what it might mean to build something together. In 2011, when SEIU launched a nationwide initiative to support community/labor partnerships, those early years of building trust paid off. While many SEIU-sponsored efforts didn’t last, Minneapolis added two more partners, CTUL and NOC, and began forging an alliance based on moving an aggressive long-term agenda. “What you have are a set of very ambitious organizations that don’t just want to win stuff,” says McGrath of TakeAction Minnesota. “Republicans are not our only obstacle—our [main] obstacle is unmitigated corporate power. It’s very unifying and keeps you from getting trapped in short-term political stuff.”
