Start here at Aug Blog 1
Three board members were not in attendance at the start of yesterday’s meetings. Alanna and Rosie were at a conference put on by the State School Board Association but Alanna decided to hotfoot it back for as much of the meeting as she could attend.
Like the rest of us she was taken aback by the new set up with tables stretched twice their normal width. This was done to make it possible to record our Board meetings which Art, Alanna and I had pushed hard for in recent weeks. The tables were set up as an experiment before we officially make this permanent and were set up so that the three permanent cameras in the room could capture the entire front of the Board Room.
If we make this permanent the public will have the chance to watch our committee meetings and Committee of the Wholes live-streamed on TV or afterward on Youtube. I’d check now to see if that meeting was up but at the moment my Internet is down as it has been off and on since the big windstorm last week.
Alanna found much of the conference worthwhile and is one of the few school board members eager to bring her knowledge back to the rest of the Board. I believe that somewhere in our Board policy is a recommendation that we Board members do this but frankly this has mostly been honored in the breach since I was first elected in 1995.
Well Alanna sent us all an email with several attachment including a power point she found particularly enlightening on the history and performance of minority children in our public schools. It had some surprises for me and a link to a Trib column I remember not reading a number of years ago which had a fascinating bit of information related to last weekend’s cinematic project.
Robin Washington, the Trib’s former editor, wrote a review/commentary a few years back on a book “The Klu Klux Klan in Minnesota.” I wasn’t quite willing to pay $12 for a used copy and wait a week to get it so I checked and found that it was available at the Mt. Royal library. I plan to give it a look but Robin mentioned one of its several factoids that are pinballing in my head – that Police Officer, Oscar Olson, was a member of the Duluth Area klan in the 1920’s.
I’ll get to another of the pinballs shortly but Oscar. Oh geez!
One of the few good guys in Michael Fedo’s Book about the lynching was Oscar. He was an honest cop who fought off a mob of an estimated 10,000 fellow Duluthians to make sure the law took its proper course. He was a hero and, as I said, one of the few good guys in the villainous events that took place in June, 1920.
In fact, the author of the script “Hatestorm” took the literary license to presage the lynching by summoning up a fictional scene in which Oscar demonstrates that there was goodness in our fair city. After all, Only ten of our hundred thousand citizens rushed down to take the law into their hand and murder black men and Oscar certainly took his lumps trying to keep Clayton, Jackson and McGhie out of their bloodthirsty hands.
In the teaser we took a scene in which a few of the principals were good guys, including my invented “Mike” the café owner. I’m sworn to secrecy beyond that but learning about Olson’s Klan involvement was a bit of a shock. And yet perhapsin retrospect, its not all that unusual.
Neither was the information passed on by the speaker at the School Board Conference – that in the 1920’s two Duluth School Board members were Klan members.
What struck me as ironic was another factoid that was news to me. Even though Minnesota women did not have the franchise to vote in federal or state elections, Minnesota had put a law on the books decades earlier allowing them to vote for representatives of local school boards. So, the women of Duluth in the 1920’s didn’t prevent Klansman from getting elected to the Duluth School Board. That’s something worth pondering on this election day.
