‘Miscellany’ Archives
Hennepin County elections
Questions answered by candidates for County Commissioner & Sheriff By JOHN CHARLES WILSON With the help of my friends Lee Leichentritt and Peter Molenaar, and our editor Harvey Winje, I developed a questionnaire for candidates for Hennepin County Commissioner District 4 and Hennepin County Sheriff. Each candidate was asked to pick two topics from a menu of four or five, and explain how they intended to handle them if elected to office. Topics for Commissioner Candidates: Housing for low income persons, senior citizens, and persons vulnerable due to mental illness. Public transportation in the Twin Cities metro area. Diversity in hiring Hennepin County employees. Mentally ill people being held in the County jail. (more…)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, activist, writer, educator extraordinaire
DICK BANCROFTTed Means, Pat Bellanger, and Bill Wahpepah standing at the podium where speeches and over a hundred testimonies of abuse and exploitation were given at the 1977 UN Geneva Conference. Roxanne was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939 and grew up in Central Oklahoma, daughter of a sharecropper and a mother that Dunbar believes to have been partially Native American. Dunbar”'s paternal grandfather, a settler of Scots-Irish ancestry, was a landed farmer, veterinarian, a labor activist and a member in Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World, “Wobblies.” Her father was named after the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World””Moyer Haywood Pettibone Scarberry Dunbar. Her father”'s stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism. Married at 18, she and her husband moved to San Francisco three years later, where she has lived most of the years since, although the marriage ended. Her account of life up [...]
