How white advocates of emancipation abandoned African American causes in the dark days of Reconstruction, told through the stories of four Minnesotans White people, Frederick Douglass said in a speech in 1876, were “the children of Lincoln,” while black people were “at best his stepchildren.” Emancipation became the law of the land, and white champions of African Americans in the state were suddenly turning to other causes, regardless of the worsening circumstances of black Minnesotans. Through four of these “children of Lincoln” in Minnesota, William D. Green’s book brings to light a little known but critical chapter in the state’s history as it intersects with the broader account of race in America. In a narrative spanning the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lives of these four Minnesotans mark the era’s most significant moments in the state, the Midwest, and the nation for the Republican Party, the Baptist church, women’s suffrage, and Native Americans. Morton Wilkinson, the state’s first Republican senator; Daniel Merrill, a St. Paul business leader who helped launch the first Black Baptist church; Sarah Burger Stearns, founder and first president of the Minnesota Woman Suffragist Association; and Thomas Montgomery, an immigrant farmer who served in the Colored Regiments in the Civil War: each played a part in securing the rights of African Americans and each abandoned the fight as the forces of hatred and prejudice increasingly threatened those hard-won rights. Moving from early St. Paul and Fort Snelling to the Civil War and beyond, The Children of Lincoln reveals a pattern of racial paternalism, describing how even “enlightened” white Northerners, fatigued with the “Negro Problem,” would come to embrace policies that reinforced a notion of black inferiority. Together, their lives—so differently and deeply connected with nineteenth-century race relations—create a telling portrait of Minnesota as a microcosm of America during the tumultuous years of Reconstruction.
The complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers' strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics When viewed from our turbulent times, the Minneapolis of fifty years ago might seem serene, but Minneapolis schoolteachers of the day remember it quite differently. It was, author William D. Green said of their recollections, as if they'd been through war. This book recreates twenty days in April 1970 when a then-illegal strike by Minneapolis's public school teachers marked a singular moment of cultural upheaval--and forever changed the city's politics, labor law, educational climate, and the right to collective bargaining. Since the inception of public education in Minnesota, teachers were expected to pursue their vocation out of civic spirit, with low wages, no benefits, and no job security. Strike! describes the history and circumstances leading to the teachers' extraordinary action, which pitted the progressive and conservative teachers' unions against each other--and both against the all-powerful school district, a hostile governor and state legislature, and a draconian Minnesota law. Capturing the intense emotions and heated rivalries of the strike, Green profiles the many actors involved, the personal and professional stakes, and the issues of politics, law, and the business of education. Informed by interviews, firsthand accounts, news reports, and written records, Strike! brings to life a pivotal moment not just for Minneapolis's teachers but for the city itself, whose government, school system, and culture would, in a complex but inexorable way, change course for good.
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