Soulforce: Red, Black, & Brown Power in the Twin Cities w/ Jamie Curry & Jimmy Patiño

This episode covers the radical history of the Twin Cities, which evolved in a unique and dynamic historical conjuncture in the long 1960s as a site in which African American, American Indian and Mexican American communities were concentrated in an otherwise overwhelmingly white state. The emergence of Black Power, the American Indian Movement, and the Chicano Movement parallel and overlapping in a shared urban site speaks to the socio-political context of injustice. These dynamic movements built infrastructure to confront these shared forms of repression, but through their particular communities: The Way organization in the Black community, Centro Cultural Chicano in the Mexican community, and in several independent schools in the American Indian community. These institutions—also evident in the emergence of the Black Patrol, the AIM Patrol and the Brown Berets in addressing police violence—emerged independently but with points of convergence and direct interaction.

Jamie Curry and Jimmy Patiño would also like to add the names and dates regarding the women in AIM: in May - July 28, 1968, the American Indian Movement is founded and conceived in Stillwater State Prison by Eddie Benton-Benai Jr., Dennis Banks, and Clyde Bellecourt; Alberta Strongwoman, Elkwind Dalmond, Caroline Dickinson, Fanny Fairbanks, Laura Waterman Wittstock and Elaine J. Salinas called the first meeting on the Northside. Not once did Clyde or Dennis take action or strategize without input from the women in the movement and are still the backbone today). Calling themselves (in ’68) Concerned Indian Americans (CIA), they start patrols in Minneapolis because of the school’s mistreatment of their sons and daughters, lack of decent housing, to combat weekly police brutality and racism inflicted upon and experienced by Indian people in the Twin Cities.

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