One of my earliest memories was playing basketball on the asphalt court behind Eliot School, my elementary school. I am guessing I was seven or eight years old. And there was a boy, not Jewish, getting beaten up for some playground violation by one of my neighbors, Keith Roberts, who also was not Jewish. The boy, who was getting the bejesus beaten out of him, started shouting at Keith, “You dirty dhew!” He had a lisp. He wanted to deliver the worst insult he knew to Keith—“dirty Jew.” Keith just laughed at him and said, “I’m not Jewish.”
I’m sure they both quickly forgot about the incident. I never did. Even then I could figure out that this kid didn’t know a Jew from a Gentile, but he clearly had learned this at home and dragged it out as a kind of all-purpose insult on the playground.
I quietly applauded Keith’s beating the crap out of him.
Paul Linnee, who graduated from St. Louis Park High in 1964 and later became a local policeman, reminded me that Toledo Avenue, which ran right alongside Highway 100, was known when he was growing up as the “Gaza Strip,” with a large percentage of the population east of there being Jewish and a large percentage west of there being Gentile.
It would take much longer for African Americans to have even a block of their own. Paul Linnee’s sister Susan, who would later become the Associated Press bureau chief for East Africa, West Africa, and Spain, reminded me of that by retelling a remarkable incident from the summer of 1962, at their home at 2716 Toledo. She recalled:
Toledo Avenue was unusual in that the houses did not all meet the sidewalk from the same distance. Some were far back, some were flush, some had been built long before anyone thought of sidewalks. But it was—as all St Louis Park neighborhoods were at the time—very white. The Sperlings—our neighbors to the south—were the first Jewish family in the neighborhood, and there had been a campaign to muster all the homeowners to block the sale of the house—owned by super devout Christian Scientists who could not have cared less to whom it was sold—to Jews. When a resident from across the street called on my mom, Jane, and asked her to sign a petition, she was shown the door, with my mom telling her: “Finally the block is going to be interesting.”
Her dad, said Susan,
was raised a Lutheran; my mother was a non-Scandinavian Episcopalian; they switched to the Congregational Church because it was more “liberal.” Both were lifelong Democrats and my dad really agonized over voting for a Catholic for president, fearing, as many Protestants did, that “the Pope would run the White House” … We had a set of World Book encyclopedias next to the dinner table to settle any disputes that might arise—basically between my dad and me. Paul and I have talked about this several times. Neither of us can remember, other than my father’s fear of the Pope, which soon dissipated, a single racist or intolerant word, other than against Republicans, at home—or even at school.
Susan graduated from St. Louis Park High in 1960 and attended the University of Minnesota. Through her boyfriend at the time, she met an African student from Macalester College in St. Paul at a party. She remembered that “he was wearing a trench coat and a hat and looked like someone in one of the French crime movies.” So one day in the summer of 1962 she invited this exotic African and some other friends to their home in St. Louis Park—when her parents weren’t home.
One of the neighbors, seeing black men enter the house, called the police. A few days later her dad sat her down to find out what happened. Susan sent me her recollection of the dialogue:
My dad came to my room in the early evening, quite uncomfortable and hesitant. He was an old-school Swede.
Dad: “Ummmm … have you had any … err … black … visitors recently?”
Susan: “What’s this all about? Why are you asking me this?”
Dad: “Ummm … ummmm … errrr … someone called the police to say black men were visiting the house while we were away, and the police called me.”
Susan: “What? Who was it? Who called?”
Dad: “Errr … ummm … they wouldn’t say…”
Susan: “Okay, here are all the ‘men’ who came while you were gone: Fred, Kofi, David, etc., etc.…”
Dad: “Wait, who’s Kofi?”
Susan: “He’s Ghanaian, from Africa…”
Dad: “Africa, so is he black?”
Susan: “I guess so…”
Later. Mom: “Let’s invite them all for dinner!”
And so on a summer evening in 1962, the Macalester College student Kofi Annan and several of his friends drove back to St. Louis Park in a tomato soup–colored Studebaker. Yes, that Kofi Annan, who would later become a Ghanaian diplomat and then the seventh secretary general of the United Nations—but at the time was finishing his economics degree at Macalester on a Ford Foundation scholarship.
“Many people were out mowing their front lawns,” Susan recalled. “Kofi leads the group. Mom and Dad walk out to meet him. Hands are shaken. All enter the house and eat corn on the cob. My mother died at one hundred, on April 7, 2013. I asked Kofi if he would prepare something for her memorial, which he did with great aplomb. We have kept in touch over the years and would meet when he was in Nairobi after the post-election violence in 2007 and 2008. He would always ask after my mother, although they never met again.”
Fifty-four years later I asked Annan if he recalled the incident, which he did in vivid detail.
“I was quite a young student—there was a group of us, an Indonesian, an Indian, and others, and we all hung out together” at Macalester, said Annan. “On the whole, people in Minnesota were very nice and hospitable. My wife is from Sweden and she likes to say that Minnesota’s Swedish immigrants prepared me for her!” As for Susan’s mother, Annan added, “She had a lot of spirit—she had this attitude of ‘I’ll be damned if anyone is going to tell me who can come to my house or whom I can receive.’” For foreign students from Africa, India, or Indonesia, newly independent countries, this kind of racism, that a neighbor would call the cops because they saw a black man enter a house, was a bit of a shock, said Annan. “For a young Ghanaian, whose country was just a few years out of independence and [was] so proud of his country, it takes you a while to register and understand. We all came from cultures where we were the majority, where we never had this experience. When I sometimes hear societies say, ‘We have no discrimination’—I am sure they don’t, until they have someone to discriminate against.” Because of that, said Annan, “You have to respect the courage of the individual who stands up against it, and they go up in your esteem and the bond and friendship strengthens, and that is how I felt about Susan and her family. It is incredible because somebody else would have reacted differently”—and some certainly did. All in all, though, looking back on his adventures in St. Louis Park and Minnesota, Annan concluded, “It was a community, and those of us who came in from outside could feel it.”
Kofi was the second black man Susan’s brother Paul Linnee ever met. In 1962, he recalled:
I was pumping gas at Norm’s Texaco at 5125 Minnetonka Blvd., when a dingy ’62 Chevy Bel Air with Kansas plates pulled in for a tank of Fire Chief gasoline. While I was using my whisk broom to sweep out the passenger compartment, the rather large black man—who was, literally, the first black person I had ever spoken to in my life—who was driving, asked me if there was a pet hospital in town. I pointed him towards Fitch’s Pet Hospital up behind the Pastime Arena. Not too long after that I heard that he had bought the pet hospital from Dr. Fitch, opened up his practice there, and became quite successful.
That man was Dr. B. Robert Lewis, a veterinarian, who went on to run for and serve on the St. Louis Park School Board and then became the first African American elected to the Minnesota State Senate. He was also the first African American to serve on a Twin Cities school board, and one of the founders of the St. Louis Park Human Relations Council. “He also went on to become a regular customer at Norm’s Texaco. I like to think that I was the first St. Louis Park person he ever met, and I know he was the first black person
I ever met,” said Linnee.
Norm’s Texaco was a most unusual hotbed of ecumenism, recalled Linnee:
[The owner,] Norm Walensky, was an oddity. Most Jews I was aware of in the Park were professional persons or persons involved in trades, where they did not “get their hands dirty.” Norm was different … Norm hired me and about a half dozen other non-Jewish teenagers and slightly older “gearheads” to be his service station attendants–cum–mechanics. His was probably the only Jewish gas station in the Park, and, as such, seemed to be the preferred place for most Jews to have their cars fixed, buy gas, and call for a jump start on cold winter mornings. A few days before every Christmas, Norm and “his boys” would spiff up the two-stall garage to be spic-and-span, and then lay out tablecloths on the drive-on hoist’s ramp, go out and buy a real holiday spread and a few bottles of the good stuff and throw a holiday bash for all the customers and employees. I will always remember sharing holiday cheer with all of the successful Jewish doctors, dentists, and lawyers each year.
It was intriguing to me, forty years later, to hear what St. Louis Park, and this influx of Jews, looked like to non-Jews. Jane Pratt Hagstrom was in the St. Louis Park class of 1978, and grew up in the Westwood Hills neighborhood, one of the newer developments in St. Louis Park, where homes were a little bigger. “My family moved there in 1960,” she remembered. “And I still recall the Realtor telling my parents, ‘There won’t be any Jews in the neighborhood.’ My parents, who were from South Dakota and Iowa, thought she said ‘trees.’ Anyway, within a few years it was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and my parents used to joke that I was turning into a Jew because I said ‘Oy’ all the time … But I remember going to college seeing bigotry. People said, ‘You are from St. Jewish Park?’”
The discrimination wasn’t all one-way, though. I had non-Jews recall for me hearing a Jewish friend’s grandmother warning that he must never marry a shiksa, Yiddish for a Gentile girl. It is always striking to me how these little tribal asides, which you hear as a child and cannot fully understand, are remembered decades later by the person at whom they were directed.
Yes, we Jews could also be, well, annoying at times. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a local television station sponsored something called Quiz Bowl, where brainy local high school teams would compete against each other, answering math, science, literature, and history questions. It was a local version of GE College Bowl and a big deal around the state. My AP history teacher, Marjorie Bingham, was the longtime coach of the St. Louis Park team, and she told me this story:
We were doing well, but had to play St. Thomas Military Academy, which had been local champs. All the other teams would socialize before each contest, but before we went on the air, the adviser to the St. Thomas team, who was a priest, got his uniformed team in a circle and led them in prayer. Our team was predominately Jewish, and as St. Thomas finished their prayer session, the Park team spontaneously gathered in their circle and chanted—I can’t remember what—probably something from Monty Python. I’ve repressed that part! The priest glared at me, like “Can’t you keep your students under control?” But honestly, I couldn’t help feeling St. Thomas deserved it and I didn’t apologize. We won. You never knew what Park students would come up with.
Margaret Strobel was born in North Dakota, but her family moved to St. Louis Park in the 1950s, where she went through junior high and graduated from Park in the class of 1964, just before my sisters. She went on to become director of the women’s studies program at the University of Illinois, and the author or editor of six books on feminism, race, and African history. She was also the director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. She recalled:
I know that being in school with so many Jewish kids also influenced me. It was so—relatively—soon after the Holocaust. My Presbyterian youth group did a weekend overnight with a Conservative Jewish youth group that I still remember—learning the hora—and it was the same youth group that got me to go around St. Louis Park knocking on doors to raise money for some civil rights cause—what I think now must have been the Freedom Summer of 1964, though I can’t nail it down. I remember knocking on a door and the woman said something to the effect, “We should let them solve their own problems down there.” It was one of those moments in my life around race that still sticks out.
Strobel reminded me that we also had a few Japanese Americans in our school, whose parents had been sent to internment camps during World War II. “My first experience of being the only white person in a room came when my friend Diana Shimizu invited me to the Japanese American youth group she was a member of,” Strobel reminisced. “I also remember being outraged when she told me that her parents, when they moved to [St. Louis Park] from some internment camp, went around to homes in the block where they were considering buying a house and asked if neighbors would mind if they moved into the neighborhood.” There is no better teacher of pluralism than a visit to the “other’s” dinner table. “Experiential learning is so important,” said Strobel:
When I would eat over at Diana’s house they had soy sauce on the table and I thought, “Soy sauce on the table, what is that about?” My family never went out to eat … I also remember going to Judy Light’s on Friday nights and they would have a Sabbath dinner. And I remember it as sumptuous. And I remember her mom putting a napkin over her head and lighting candles and saying a prayer. And I am sure these things [all contributed to my] learning to live with the other. It was not a context of hostility. You were an invited guest into these homes.
But not everybody was.
Debra Stone, an African American woman who was a year ahead of me—her brother Melvin was in my class—gave an interview on June 22, 2012, to Jeff Norman, as part of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest’s Oral History Project. Stone’s family moved, like the Jews, from North Minneapolis to St. Louis Park. She spoke eloquently of her own adventures in pluralism there.
In 1963, said Stone, her family moved out of North Minneapolis to 1637 Idaho Avenue South, not far from where I grew up, and she and her brother attended the same elementary school as me—Eliot School. Norman asked her how they ended up in St. Louis Park and not somewhere else in Minneapolis.
“They looked in Northeast Minneapolis,” said Stone of her parents, “and because of housing discrimination and racism, they said it was easier to move to St. Louis Park.” In Northeast Minneapolis, she said, “the Realtor wouldn’t even show [my parents] a house … So they dropped that Realtor, and they found another Realtor who showed them the houses in St. Louis Park. [That second Realtor] was Jewish … As I understand it, we were the first family in that community … There were no other African American people living in St. Louis Park. We could walk down Cedar Lake Road; we could travel all over St. Louis Park; we could go to Knollwood [a shopping mall]; we wouldn’t see another dark face, other maybe than some Sephardic-looking Jews who were dark. Other than that, it was us … It wasn’t until I was in eighth grade that another African American family moved into that neighborhood.”
What was the response of their neighbors? Norman asked.
“My parents were very protective,” said Stone. “I heard that someone came and knocked on the door and said, ‘Are you the African American family moving in?’ My father said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Would you consider moving?’ And my father said, ‘No.’ Then there was a little conversation, and my mother said, ‘Your father said, “If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to shoot you!”’ [Laughs] That was it. We never had anyone else come. Everybody else was pretty nice to us after that … I played with the children in the neighborhood, played in their yards, played dolls in their houses—that was it. Jewish and non-Jewish families.”
Did she ever attend a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah?
“Yes, I have,” said Stone. “My good Jewish friend, Pam Russ—I went to her son’s and her daughter’s bat mitzvah. She grew up in Robbinsdale. I didn’t get to be friends with her until a little bit later. We were at Temple Israel,
and I attended bar mitzvahs and the parties for the kids. Pam is much more down-to-earth, so it was really kind of a nice affair—grandparents, and relatives, and friends, both Gentile and Jewish. It was a really moving ceremony, I felt—could understand why the kids would go through this process.”
So all in all, what was it like to be the only African American kid in your classes back then? Norman asked Stone.
“I didn’t have a problem with it,” said Stone. She added: “Whenever something did come up, though, we could always rely on my mom to have our backs. There was one incident in which [someone] had done this poster of this “Mammy” figure. It played a very prominent feature in the school display. I don’t remember what it was for, but I remember some of the kids snickering and stuff. I went home and I told my mom. I said, “There’s this poster,” and she said, well, that’s totally inappropriate. So she went up to the principal, and it was gone the next day…”
Stone recalled that in high school she was voted to be a cheerleader and was part of the student council for a couple of years in a row. “So, yes, it was okay,” she said. “There weren’t any hot racial incidents or anything like that. We went to school. A couple of kids might have called us ‘niggers’ and we beat them up, and that was it.”
Looking back on it all from the perspective of today, she concluded, “My experiences of living in St. Louis Park were really—as far a child growing up in an all-white and Jewish community—I would say because of the strength of my family, it was a good experience for me. I benefited from it in many ways … I was able to go to college; travel the world; do many, many things that a lot of my African American women peers have not been able to.”
Precisely because there were so few blacks, “we Jews thought we were the minority,” recalled one of my closest childhood friends, Fred Astren, now head of the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. “There were three Chinese kids, three Japanese kids, two blacks, and everyone else was either Scandinavian or Jewish. We could afford to be liberals [on civil rights] because we never really met ‘the other.’”
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