East Side Freedom Library

"Booth Girls: Pregnancy, Adoption, and the Secrets We Kept:by Kim Heikkila, PhD  

"Booth Girls" is a thoughtful, multigenerational story of contested motherhood, equal parts biography, oral history, history, and memoir.  

Kim Heikkila’s mother had a secret: in 1961, two years before her  marriage, she became pregnant. After several months hidden in her  parents’ attic bedroom, she gave birth to a daughter at the Salvation  Army’s Booth Memorial Hospital, a home for unwed mothers in St. Paul,  and surrendered her for adoption. Kim’s older sister reunited with her birth family in the 1990s. 

Kim’s  mother wrote about these experiences, but after she died, Heikkila still had questions. Using careful research and sensitive interviews with  other “Booth girls,” she tells the stories of the Booth hospital and the women who passed through it—and she learned more about her own  experience as an adoptive mother.  

Kim Heikkila, PhD, is an independent scholar and president of Spotlight Oral History. She has also taught courses on US history, US women’s  history, the Vietnam War, and the 1960s at colleges and universities in  the Twin Cities area. She is the author of "Sisterhood of War: Minnesota  Women in Vietnam." To purchase titles from the History Revealed series, or other books of  interest, see our partner, Subtext Books at https://subtextbooks.com/.

View the video here: https://youtu.be/0ixCE5DqqlI

The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a special evening with Mary  Moore Easter and her new poetry collection Free Papers: Inspired by the Testimony of Eliza Winston, A Mississippi Slave Escaped to Freedom in  Minnesota in 1860.  

Mary Moore Easter is the author of The Body of the World (Minnesota Book  Award in Poetry Finalist, 2019); Walking from Origins; From the Flutes of Our Bones (Nodin Press 2020), and Free Papers: poems inspired by the  testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave, escaped to freedom in Minnesota in 1860. (Finishing Line Press 2021) A Pushcart  Prize-nominated poet, Cave Canem Fellow, veteran dancer /choreographer,  and emerita professor of dance at Carleton College, Easter is the mother  of two daughters and four grandchildren.  

Poet Danez Smith writes: “Mary Moore Easter’s Free Papers is dreaming in  the archives. Through poems that document and redocument the life of  Eliza Winston paired beside poems that reach across time to unite Black  women in their quest to rapture the self from the prisons of nation and  whiteness, Easter has built a hall of mirrors where one can come out of  the other side free, transformed. Here, documents morph like a mind  suddenly free from its last shackle. The poetry, freedom’s promise,  knows no bounds.”  

As a special treat, for “Winslow House: A Script for Three Voices,” Mary  will be joined by her daughter Allison Easter (Based in NY, Allison  Easter was the first American woman in Stomp and has performed with  MacArthur awardees Susan Marshall and Meredith Monk, in Law & Order  and in Will Pomerantz’s adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities.) and  Siddeqah Shabazz (Originally from Oakland, CA, with degrees in theater  from the University of La Verne in Southern California and the Guildford  School of Acting in England, she has worked in the Twin Cities with  Climb, Shadow Horse, Gadfly, Chain Reaction, Freshwater, and 20%  Theaters, Exposed Brick Theatre, Savage Umbrella, Aniccha Arts,  Intermedia Arts, Artistry, Underdog Theatre, Transatlantic Love Affair,  and Full Circle Theatre.)

View the video here: https://youtu.be/6OxPEAWlDG0

Join the East Side Freedom Library April 1 for the second iteration of  The Kaleidoscope Project (MN), which includes public readings of poetry  inspired by deep reflection on empathy, solidarity, and intercommunity  healing.  

TKP, developed by creative writer/interdisciplinary artist Rebecca  Nichloson, engages creative writers from historically marginalized  communities in immersive virtual experiences centered on building  solidarity and empathy between different communities across Minnesota.  The methodology utilizes a human-centered design approach to foster a  deeper understanding of the challenges each community faces and  generates social justice/social equity-informed poetry that supports  community-engagement and social change.  This cohort includes readings by: Rebecca Nichloson, Anthony Ceballos,  Wilt Hodges, and Duaba Unenra.  

Anthony Ceballos received his BFA in Creative Writing from Hamline  University in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2016 he was selected to be a Loft  Literary Center Mentor Series mentee. His poetry has been featured in  Yellow Medicine Review, Midway Journal, Sleet, Writers Resist and  upcoming from Great River Review. He lives, breathes and writes in  Minneapolis, Minnesota. He can be found penning staff recommendations at  Birchbark Books and Native Arts.  

Duaba Unenra is a survivor of the reconstruction process in New Orleans  following Hurricane Katrina. He is an artist, community organizer, and  scholar who looks at how forces of neoliberalism took advantage of  openings created by environmental disasters in Haiti and New Orleans to  reinforce anti-Black, anti-poor, anti-woman, and anti-queer living and  ways of being. Unenra engages in mutual aid and building counter-sites  as social tools for self-determination and healing in Black, Indigenous,  Brown, and other communities, including in institutions of higher  education.  

Wilt Hodges is a poet, essayist, and community reporter. He received his  degree from Columbia University. A past Minnesota State Artist Grant  recipient and Givens Fellow, he resides in Saint Paul.  

Rebecca Nichloson (She/Her) is a creative writer, singer/songwriter,  playwright and theatre maker. She is the author of numerous creative  works, including Mara, Queen of the World (an acapella musical), The  Wild, Bold Enlightenment of Velvet the Mistress, Cooking With Keisha (or  Anatomy of Pie), and Jill, Jack & the Martian Lady, among others.  She holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Columbia University, an M.A. in  English Literature, and a B.A. in Business Administration. She was also  the recipient of a 2020 Commission from the Cedar Cultural Center for  which she created Multicolored Musings: Jewels of Love, Loss, &  Triumph and received a 2020 honorable mention from the McKnight  Foundation (Spoken Word). www.RebeccaNichloson.com.

View the video here: https://youtu.be/uMotuxjgCBM

Join us for a celebration and exploration of Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify, Carolyn Holbrook’s long-awaited collection of essays. She will be in conversation with three women who have read her book.  

Carolyn Holbrook is the founder and director of More Than a Single Story. She is a writer, educator, and a long time advocate for the healing power of the arts. Her essay collection, Tell Me Your Names and I  Will Testify (U of M Press) is a finalist for a 2021 MN Book Award in the Memoir and Creative Nonfiction category. She is also a co-author of Dr. Josie Johnson’s memoir, Hope In the Struggle. Her essays have been published widely, most recently in A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (MNHS 2016) and Blues Vision: African American Writing from  Minnesota (MNHS 2015). She was the first person of color to win the Kay Sexton Award for contributions to Minnesota Literature from the MN Book Awards and the Friends of the St. Paul Public Libraries (2010).  

Najah Davis is a senior at DeLaSalle High School. She enjoys making fun memories with her friends and her loving family. She also finds time to  discuss social issues that affect certain groups in America. She believes that any change begins with conversation.  

Zenzele Isoke is a Black feminist theorist, urban ethnographer, and  political storyteller. A mother of two Black women, Zenzele designs and  teaches university courses that integrate mindfulness of body and breath techniques with Black feminist thought to teach about race, gender, and  empire for undergraduate students. She is the author of Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance (Palgrave 2013). Zenzele also leads  the BIPOC meditation at the Yoga Room in North Minneapolis.  

Marquita Stephens is the Director of Education Programming and Policy for the Urban League Twin Cities and the principal of Marqui Coaching  and Consulting. She is an active member of the community, most notably Black Women Rising, executive leadership, and League of Women Voters –  Roseville. Marquita enjoys swimming and is an avid movie goer.

View the video: https://youtu.be/Zro7MjvM6XY

The Hillcrest Golf Course is a major redevelopment project that will begin in the near future on the East Side. What is going to happen at the site? Join us for a follow up community conversation to our presentation on the development.

To view video: https://youtu.be/svgR8DQOjqk

Alan Berkman (1945–2009) was a medical student and doctor who became  radicalized by his experiences at the Wounded Knee takeover, at the  Attica prison uprising, and at health clinics for the poor. He provided covert care to members of revolutionary groups, participated in bombings  of government buildings and was eventually captured and served eight years in some of America’s worst penitentiaries. After his release in  1992, he returned to medical practice and became an HIV/AIDS physician,  teacher, and global health activist. He worked to change U.S. policy, making AIDS treatment more widely available in the global south and  saving millions of lives around the world.  

Using Berkman’s unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and  hundreds of interviews, Susan Reverby sheds fascinating light on  questions of political violence and revolutionary zeal in her account of  Berkman’s extraordinary transformation from doctor to co-conspirator for justice. Reverby has had a long and productive career in the Women’s & Gender  Studies department at Wellesley College. Her 1987 book, Ordered to  Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, brought the perspectives of the  “new” labor history to nursing. She continued to explore the American  medical system, editing Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee  Syphilis Study (2000) and writing Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous  Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (2009).  

She will be engaged in conversation with three members of the ESFL community who have read Co-Conspirator for Justice:  

Colette Hyman teaches US History at Winona State University and is the  author of Staging Strikes: Workers’ Theatre and the American Labor  Movement in the 1930s (1997) and Dakota Women’s Work: Creativity,  Culture & Exile (2012).  

Art Serotoff is a long-time anti-racist activist based in south  Minneapolis.  

Sara Olson spent seven years in a California prison for charges related  to her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s. She  is an activist with the Women’s Prison Book Project.  

Fred Peterson worked as a bush doctor with Oxfam UK in Zimbabwe in  1981-82. He was a participant in the Twin Cities Committee for the  Liberation of Southern Africa, and worked as an ER doc in St. Paul for  many years.

History Revealed Series, in partnership with the Ramsey County  Historical Society and the Roseville Library.  

Examining how women won the right to vote in Minnesota and the Midwest  reveals how Midwesterners changed their conceptions of citizenship in  the early twentieth century. Women earned the ballot during World War I,  when demonstrating patriotism became an expected part of the war  effort. Mobilizing for the war, which so many midwestern suffragists did  quite willingly, served as a testament to their loyalty to both  community and country. They also leveraged that mobilization against the  alleged disloyalty of immigrants in the region whom they attacked as  slackers. Suffragists claimed that exercising the right to vote was an  expression of duty, rather than just a natural right.

The East Side Freedom Library invites you a special version of our Labor History Film and Reading Group for March 2021.  

The Uprising of ‘34, the award-winning documentary by George Stoney, is the subject of a conversation on March 16, via Zoom, with the film’s  editor Susanne Rostock and labor historian Mary Wingerd, author of the  essay Rethinking Paternalism: Power and Parochialism in a Southern Mill  Village (Journal of American History, 1996). The film is available for  rental on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/uprisingof34.  

For Women’s History Month, join ESFL in an exploration of the lives,  work, and struggles of southern textile mill workers. The Uprising of  ’34 is a startling documentary which tells the story of the General Strike of 1934, a massive but little-known strike by hundreds of  thousands of Southern cotton mill workers during the Great Depression. The mill workers’ defiant stance — and the remarkable grassroots  organizing that led up to it — challenged a system of mill owner control  that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades. Mary  Wingerd’s essay not only explores this system of control, but also  unearths the under-the-radar forms of resistance which made this strike  possible. And she encourages us to consider other times and places where  such control and resistance informed working class life.  

The Uprising of ’34 offers a penetrating look at class, race, and power  in working communities throughout America and raises critical questions  about the role of history in making democracy work today. More than a  social document, the film is intended to spark discussion on class,  race, economics, and power — issues as vital today as they were decades  ago. “The thrust of this film is to give the workers their chance to  speak,” said editor Rostock. “We’re very proud of the fact that here’s a  film in which they speak for themselves [with no narrator].”   Our conversation will feature Susanne Rostock the film’s editor and  Minnesota historian Mary Wingerd. Rostock is a director as well as an  editor, perhaps best known for her presentation of Harry Belafonte’s  life in Sing Your Song (2011). In an HBO project, she is currently  directing Another Night in the Free World which documents the lives of  three young women activists from 2012 to the present. Wingerd is the  author of Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in  St. Paul (2001) and North Country: The Making of Minnesota (2010).  Please join us.

View the video here: https://youtu.be/1Qg3FmtSX-w

The Hillcrest Golf Course is a major redevelopment project that will  begin in the near future on the East Side of Saint Paul. What is going  to happen at the site? How has the community been engaged? How might  this connect to reparations work? J

Join us for a presentation between our  housing justice program and our reparations reading group followed by a  community discussion led by Ben Werner and Trahern Crews.  East Side Housing Justice Working Group is a coalition of organizations  who share a commitment to democracy and equity as central to resolving  East Siders’ long historical challenges when it comes to housing  security. The Reparations Reading Group has been meeting monthly to  explore the historical development of institutional racism in the United  States and, particularly, in St. Paul.

View the video here: https://youtu.be/mcd0h7-hiZQ

The East Side Freedom Library and the Ramsey County Historical Society  invite you to our March 2021 “History Revealed” program:  "The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson" A Conversation Between Author Donna T. Haverty-Stacke and Reader/Discussants Greg Poferl, Linda Leighton, and Mary Wingerd  

On December 8, 1941, Grace Holmes Carlson, the only female defendant  among eighteen Trotskyists convicted under the Smith Act, was sentenced  to sixteen months in federal prison for advocating the violent overthrow  of the government. After serving a year in Alderson prison, Carlson  returned to her work as an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party  (SWP) and ran for vice president of the United States under its banner  in 1948. Then, in 1952, she abruptly left the SWP and returned to the  Catholic Church. With the support of the Sisters of St. Joseph, who had  educated her as a child, Carlson began a new life as a professor of  psychology at St. Mary’s Junior College in Minneapolis where she  advocated for social justice, now as a Catholic Marxist.  "The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist" is a historical biography that examines the story of this complicated  woman in the context of her times with a specific focus on her  experiences as a member of the working class, as a Catholic, and as a  woman. Her story illuminates the workings of class identity within the  context of various influences over the course of a lifespan. The long  arc of Carlson’s life (1906–1992) ultimately reveals significant  continuities in her political consciousness that transcended the shifts  in her particular partisan commitments, most notably her life-long  dedication to challenging the root causes of social and economic  inequality. In that struggle, Carlson ultimately proved herself to be a  truly fierce woman.  

Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, Professor of History at Hunter College of the  City University of New York, is a historian of working-class and radical  politics. She is interested in the intersection of that history with  nationalism and collective memory, national security and free speech,  gender identity, and Catholic activism. Her first book was "America’s  Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960" (NYU Press, 2009)  and her second, which she discussed four years ago at ESFL, was  "Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the  Age of FDR" (NYU Press, 2015).  

Greg Poferl is a lifelong labor and Catholic social activist and a  generous collaborator at ESFL. Last year, Greg wrote his memoir,  "Turning Points: Never Give Up on Anyone, Especially Yourself" (East  Side Freedom Library, 2020).  

Linda Leighton is a lifelong labor activist who has played a major role  in maintaining local memory of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes.  

Mary Wingerd is Emerita Professor of History at St. Cloud State  University and the author of "Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and  the Power of Place in St. Paul" (Cornell University Press, 2001) and  "North Country: The Making of Minnesota" (University of Minnesota Press,  2010).

To view the video: https://youtu.be/Q0-pA3w88dE