Determined. Fierce. Driven. Passionate. Kind. Trailblazer. Giant. Mentor.
By CATHY STROBEL-AYERS
These are just a few of the words that come to mind as I remember Karen Clark. And even those words don’t seem like enough to capture her tireless drive to make a better world for communities that had to fight for a place at the table.
Karen was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1980 and served through 2019 representing Phillips and surrounding neighborhoods. She was the first out lesbian ever elected to the state legislature. A grass roots community organizer at heart, she didn’t just work for her constituents; she worked with them to build their capacity to be their own advocates, to fuel their passion for changing the injustices they saw, and to not be afraid to speak truth to power.
She always believed anything was possible and seldom took no for an answer. Over the course of her career in the House, it soon became known that if she was passionate about a piece of legislation, one best not fight her but instead to find a way to accommodate her. Even if it took multiple legislative sessions and small pilot programs to prove its worth, Karen stuck with it. And along the way she introduced her community to other legislators and to the legislative process. Likewise, she showed her colleagues that while her community was often labeled as poor and crime ridden, its people had dreams and needs and desires to improve their community.
Some of the most rewarding work I did during the eight years I worked for her was teaching constituents the legislative process, how a bill gets to be a law, how to be citizen lobbyists, how to testify in favor of a bill, how to organize a campaign to pass a bill and mostly how to believe in the legislature process.
Some of them went on to lead organizations and initiatives created from their advocacy. Some became leaders and grass roots organizers with many of their efforts still visible today. The Green Institute, Youthbuild, the East Phillips Roof Depot, restorative justice, childhood lead poisoning prevention, lead abatement, transitional housing just to name a few.
Throughout her life and career, she was a vocal advocate who fought for representation and rights for LGBTQIA2s+, Indigenous and low-income communities as well as for migrant workers, welfare recipients, renters, immigrants, dislocated workers and more. In addition to gaining increased funding for affordable housing, she was instrumental in passing banking reforms, toxic exposure right-to-know laws, increased cancer surveillance, urban agriculture programs, and green zone laws for communities over-burdened by pollution.
Outside of her legislative life, she and wife Jacquelyn, founded the Women’s Environmental Institute, an environmental research, renewal and retreat center designed to create and share knowledge about environmental issues and policies relevant to women, children and others affected by environmental injustice.
By far, her most well-known efforts were authoring the 1993 human rights amendment to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Minnesotans from discrimination and in 2013 authoring the bill to allow same-sex marriage. Both were remarkable achievements, but same sex marriage was more so considering that the republican controlled legislature passed a bill that put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban same sex marriage in the 2011.
At the time 60% of Minnesota voters supported the amendment. The mood was grim, but after the vote Karen grabbed her colleague, then Representative Scott Dibble, and stepped out of the House chamber to address the crowd. She pronounced that this is not over, that love wins over hate, and that “we’ll love this sucker to death” with a massive organizing effort. The amendment was defeated and same sex marriage was made legal in the next legislative session.
I think this particular effort best describes the core of who Karen was. She understood that if you wanted change you had to believe it was possible and that you could help make it happen. This quote from her truly captures this and are the words I will take with me going forward to honor all she accomplished in her life.
“I think resistance in a very strong form is what we need right now and we’re gonna need it for a while. I just know that we need to have hope, and hope is probably one of the most revolutionary, radical things we can do – and with that, change is possible.”
Karen Joy Clark
Rest well Karen. You earned it. We’ll take it from here. You showed us how.
