A Visual Tour of Minneapolis’ Radical History

How did the coalition of unions, community groups and faith leaders pull off such a stunningly large action in so little time? In 2024, Sarah Jaffe reported for In These Times on the ​“Minnesota model” of organizing, which has brought together otherwise disparate issue groups to pick — and win — bigger fights than they could on their own. That spring, unions representing 15,000 workers from different sectors held joint rallies, pickets and marches and aligned their strike votes under a campaign that asked, ​“What Could We Win Together?”

That very recent history helped lay the groundwork for the city’s highly organized resistance this winter, but Minneapolis organizers are also drawing on more than a century-long tradition of labor and social justice organizing in the city, including a 1934 general strike that began with a spark before quickly erupting into a conflagration.

In These Times asked community archivist and activist Isaac Silver to help put Minneapolis’ mass demonstrations in historical context. From his two-decade-long hobby of collecting buttons from organizing campaigns, Silver has built a project called ​“Buttons of the Left,” employing historical buttons to educate audiences about the history of peoples’ movements. Silver’s collection is housed at In These Times, where he also occasionally curates shows.

Before popular outrage against ICE boiled over, Minneapolis had ​“a really strong local ecosystem of organizing that bridges different union struggles, the immigrant movement and the Black Lives Matter upsurge around the murder of George Floyd,” Silver says. ​“Even further back, the Twin Cities have a really rich history of radical and working-class organizing that stretches to the beginning of the 20^th century.”

Even in the United States, ​“where there’s the active forgetting and erasure of history,” according to Silver, many organizers in Minneapolis know the legacy of these struggles.

“Part of having things in the realm of possibility,” Silver adds, ​“is knowing that it has happened there before.”

Silver gave In These Times a tour of more than 60 buttons documenting key moments in Minneapolis’ radical history. His edited comments follow.

These buttons represent some of the origins of the radical labor movement in the Twin Cities. The Finnish Socialist Federation was founded in 1904. Even in rural parts of the state, there were communities of immigrant workers who were very radical, and that persists to this day.

In 1916, there was a huge strike in the Mesabi Iron Range in the northeastern corner of the state, organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Many of the workers in the Iron Range were Finnish.

Minneapolis was one of a number of cities that elected a socialist mayor around the time of World War One. Thomas Van Lear, a machinist, was elected in 1916.

At the time, Minneapolis was a financial center and processing center for the grain of the Dakotas and the forest products of the Northwoods and the Minnesota Iron Range. It was an outpost bastion of capitalism on the frontier of these big extraction industries. Even though it’s now under attack by Trump because it represents this left-wing enclave, it had the reputation of being a really anti-union, capitalist-dominated center.

That was the context where all of this organizing was happening. It was not by any means low-hanging fruit for workers to take action there.

These are all buttons that represent the efforts to form a Farmer-Labor Party or Progressive Party, which began in the Upper Plains states in the early ​‘20s. There was a lot of joint activity between farmer’s organizations in rural areas and unions and different labor federations in the cities. They identified common opponents in the local business associations, who were politically represented by the Republican or Democratic parties.

Minnesota had the strongest representation of Farmer-Labor politics in the ​‘30s, and Floyd Olson was the governor. Throughout the 1930s, there were successive terms of state politicians from the Farmer-Labor Party.

At the beginning of 1934, Minneapolis was considered an open shop town, meaning that no employers had contracts where all employees were in a union.

This Minneapolis drivers union, Local 574, staged a strike at a coal-yard at a strategic time: the coldest part of the year. They won, and they acted really quickly. It was kind of like a signal flare to other workers in that industry in the city that there was a union that was ready to organize. The political winds were shifting, and the mood and confidence of workers was much more aggressive than it had been in the early years of the Depression.

They signed up thousands of members over the next few months, and knew that they would need to have another bigger, all-out strike for recognition throughout the trucking industry. In order to win that, they knew that they would have to build a coalition of other labor and farmer organizations. So in a very grassroots, rank-and-file way, they built connections with members of other unions.

There were the farmers organizations, like the Farmers’ Holiday Association. And they worked with unemployed organizations and created a women’s auxiliary.

When the strike was called in May of 1934, they were ready to have really strong unity on their side in essentially shutting down the city: no traffic.

These are some buttons from the Vietnam anti-war movement and the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was founded in Minneapolis. The Vietnam War was, by the late ​‘60s, a lightning rod for politicizing a whole generation of young people.

There was kind of a ricochet effect between these different movements. Young people in the 1960s saw a connection between the civil rights movement and anti-colonial struggles in Vietnam, Africa and Latin America, and then that stimulated the appearance of Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation moving into the early ​‘70s. One of those liberation movements that was inspired by the general ferment of the times was the Red Power Movement.

Minneapolis has always had a significant urban Indian population. Local 574 had a number of members who were Indigenous. By the late 30s, there was a fascist, anti-union armed street organization. Local 574 had defense guards, and the key organizer was one of the Indigenous members: Ray Rainbolt.

There’s always been a presence of Indigenous people in the movement, but especially in the 1960s, there was a new generation of Native people living in cities. In this context, people began to organize a pan-tribal Red Power Movement that had some similar dynamics to the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and the Brown Berets — groups that were fighting around housing, around police brutality.

These buttons show some of the rich organizing and cross-pollination during the last few decades in Minneapolis.

Anti-Racist Action was quite strong in the Twin Cities in the ​‘90s. And prior to Starbucks Workers United, Minneapolis was one of the places where there were efforts to organize Starbucks workers through the IWW in the early 2000s.

Bikers Riding Against Police Brutality is one of the organizations that formed during the George Floyd uprising. And then there are also campaign buttons, for [U.S. Rep.] Ilhan Omar’s campaign, as well as [Minneapolis City Council member] Aisha Chughtai, another local left elected official.

The Minneapolis and St. Paul teachers unions have done really great work at building coalitions with parents, students, and community members. Other buttons show the broader cross-union solidarity efforts, such as one from Workers United supporting the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.

There was a recent effort to coordinate the contract campaigns of a number of different unions. A lot of groundwork has been done, getting them in a position, when there’s an emergency moment like the one we’re in now, to be able to call for a dramatic and inspiring escalation.

Silver maintains an active presence for his project, Buttons of the Left, on social media. Follow @buttonsoftheleft on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.