Archive for January, 2025
A Correction to Last Month’s Article on Air Quality
30 Seconds at State Legislature Stopped Promised 5.7 M LETTER TO THE EDITOR Thank you to Kaylee Miron and Maddie Young for last month’s excellent article about air quality in Phillips Neighborhood. However, although as stated in the last paragraph, EPNI and the City of Minneapolis did agree in Sept. 2024 to a one year extension to the purchase agreement for the Roof Depot site, the need for the extension was not that activists failed to raise their $3.7 million portion of the agreement. It was the $5.7 million that the state legislature had agreed to provide that failed to pass when the vote on the bill containing our funding went 30 seconds beyond the constitutionally mandated midnight deadline at the chaotic end of the 2024 State Legislative session. That is what necessitated the extension. EPNI is working with the Minneapolis delegation to secure the necessary funding in the upcoming 2025 session.Thank you to the alley and journalists for covering these issues for our [...]
Hester Patterson: Freedom Seeker
from the series Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery... By SUE HUNTER WEIR 230th in a Series Hester Patterson was a remarkable woman with a remarkable story. 150 years after she died, her story, and those of a handful of others, earned the Minneapolis Pioneers & Soldiers Memorial Cemetery a place on the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. The cemetery is one of two listings in the State of Minnesota. There are many gaps in her story, but in some ways, it’s amazing that we know as much about her as we do. There is little formal documentation about her—no birth certificate or census information, the types of documentation that are commonly used in genealogical research. But there is something even better: a memoir written by Dr. William E. Leonard, who was eight years old when Hester joined his household.Hester was born in Mississippi in the early 1800s and was enslaved on a cotton plantation until she was about 60 [...]
