Minnesota

dflprincess

(28,506 posts) Sun Jul 5, 2020, 07:33 PM Jul 2020

Curt Brown's column in today's Strib remembers when Molly Ivins was on the police beat here

Worth reading the whole column, not just the snips I put here.

https://www.startribune.com/two-voices-spoke-up-during-minneapolis-riots-in-1969-they-both-carried/571630612/

Police carrying riot sticks descended on north Minneapolis for a second straight night in August 1969, as two very different lives briefly intersected near the corner of Plymouth and Queen avenues.

Molly Ivins was a 24-year-old white Texan who covered the police beat for the Minneapolis Tribune. Bryant Page, an employee at the Minneapolis-Moline tractor plant, was a 37-year-old Army veteran and father of seven. And like many of the roughly 100 people gathered in front of the G&K Grocery and Letofsky’s Delicatessen that night to protest police brutality, Page was Black.

About 12:30 a.m., Minneapolis Deputy Police Inspector Edwin Schonnessen declared the assembly unlawful and gave the crowd two minutes to disperse. Fed up, Page spoke out...

...Bryant was among eight arrested — five Black, three white — who were charged with unlawful assembly and failing to obey the police. Hennepin County Municipal Judge Neil Riley promptly acquitted him and four others of all charges, later lashing out at the “completely erroneous recital” of key facts put forth by police and prosecutors. Only one man was found guilty....

...It was one of the seeds of distrust planted long ago that erupted six weeks ago with George Floyd’s death at the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. More than 50 years later, Bryant Page’s words to Molly Ivins still resonate.

“I guess I was having a fit of bewilderment or insanity,” Page told her. “Seems like you see the police doing this all over the world and then to see it right here. There was a time when I could have ignored that thing, but something inside me snapped.”