Spreading the Minnesota Way

Harry Boyte in the Pioneer Press

January 24, 2011

A new report authored by our Center for Democracy and Citizenship in partnership with the congressionally mandated National Conference on Citizenship, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship, and the CIRCLE research group shows that the Twin Cities is the most civically engaged community in the nation. Miami is the least civically engaged. The report helps to shed light on why. The report, entitled “A Tale of Two Cities: Civic Health in Miami and Minneapolis-St. Paul,” analyzes factors that make up “civic health” such as volunteering, community engagement, voter turnout, and one-on-one interactions with neighbors. The Twin Cities is well above the United States average, and Miami is well below. While the two metropolitan areas differ in many ways, including the demographics of their populations, demographic differences do not explain the disparities. Thus in both communities and nationwide, people with more education and income engage more in civic life. But individuals in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the lowest income group are more likely to be civically involved than are people in the wealthiest tier in Miami. One question that will be asked is, so what? From the vantage of the East Coast pundit class, the Twin Cities (like Minnesota generally) holds few lessons for a society in the midst of rapid change. As an Ivy League academic recently said to me, “What does the Twin Cities have to do with the future? More than 50 percent of Americans will be people of color in the year 2050. Minneapolis-St. Paul is ‘white bread,’ homogeneous, and staid.” I thought the same thing when I moved here in 1976. My formative experience as a southern college student in the 1960s was the civil rights movement. My father, after a career in Red Cross, worked as a special assistant to Martin Luther King. I was a field secretary for King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SCLC. SCLC formed on Jan. 10, 1957 to spread lessons from the famous “Montgomery bus boycott” across the South. The bus boycott was a successful nonviolent movement of black people and their allies to desegregate city buses which had stunned the nation and the world. SCLC spread not only organizing lessons about boycotts but also hope. A “Crusade for Citizenship,” launched by Ella Baker, first executive director, in 20 communities across the South, aimed to convey the idea that battlers for racial justice, growing in numbers, were not alone but rather part of a rising tide. I asked myself when I came, What does the Twin Cities know of racial conflict, social turmoil, and the agonizing process through which a region slowly comes to believe in the very possibility of change? Almost all blacks and whites in the South where I had grown up in the 1950s had thought segregation was there to stay. I discovered the Twin Cities to be full of civic treasures unknown to the nation. None of the flood of immigrants who poured in during the boom years of the late 19th century, when the population doubled again and again and again each decade, thought of themselves as “white bread.” Minnesotans were a motley crew, fiercely clannish Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irish Catholics escaping destitution, mingling with Yankees from back East and black refugees from the segregated South. In the 1900 census, 29 percent of Minnesotans were listed as foreign born; most of the rest had one or two foreign-born parents. In some cases they came as bitter enemies; in others, they simply were ignorant about each other’s cultures and beliefs. Over time Minnesotans forged a set of civic institutions and public spaces – schools and businesses, religious networks, trade unions, cultural groups and arts organizations, parks, libraries and nonprofits – where people built relationships and learned to work across differences. These are the foundations of the open, empowering civic culture that makes the state and the Twin Cities tops in civic engagement, and generates a belief that we can shape a common future. Though examples of prejudice and bigotry certainly can found, the distinctive feature of the Twin Cities is that people’s backgrounds, beliefs, and heritages are not scorned but rather embraced as a source of strength and energy. Further, government here, more than most places, is partner, meeting ground, and resource for an independent, self-reliant citizenry — government “of the people and by the people” – not mainly the source of “solutions” to public problems nor services to citizens conceived as needy “customers.” Such patterns are not simply survivals. Strong examples of civic revitalization can be found. As Bill Doherty, director of the university of Minnesota’s Center for Citizen Professionalism, puts it, “Government institutions are beginning to realize that there will never be enough financial and professional resources to handle our health and social challenges unless they engage people as citizens and not just as clients or patients.” Doherty sees a new wave of civic revitalization coming, forced partly by scarcity of resources, but animated by a new vision of “we the people” tackling our problems together. In an America experiencing rapid social, economic, and cultural diversification, struggling to regain confidence in our ability to shape our collective future, the Twin Cities is not on the margins. It is at the heart of America’s democratic possibility. And “Spreading the Minnesota way” is one way to describe the key to America’s civic success. Harry C. Boyte is director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a senior fellow at the Humphrey School for Public Affairs at the U of M.