Historian revisits a pivotal moment in city history

More than 50 years after Minneapolis teachers walked off the job in an illegal strike that reshaped labor relations in Minnesota, historian William D. Green believes that event remains widely misunderstood. 

While the 20-day walkout in April 1970 is often remembered as a labor dispute over pay and working conditions, Green argues it also expressed deeper tensions over race, class, and political power that challenged Minneapolis’ carefully cultivated image as a progressive city.

“The teachers strike brought in so many other issues that the city wasn’t prepared to talk about at all,” Green said in a recent interview. “And that is race. That is class.”

Green, a professor emeritus at Augsburg University and former superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools, explores those themes in his new book, “Strike! Twenty Days in 1970 When Minneapolis Teachers Broke the Law.” The book examines a pivotal moment in Minnesota history when public school teachers defied state law and launched a strike that helped transform public-sector labor relations across the state. 

At the time, strikes by public employees were illegal in Minnesota. Teachers who joined the walkout risked losing their jobs, pensions, and professional standing. The strike lasted 20 days and became a turning point in the movement for collective bargaining rights for public employees. It also helped lay the groundwork for the Public Employment Labor Relations Act, or PELRA, which later granted public workers collective rights and limited strike protections.

For Green, the story began with conversations he had years later with teachers who participated in the strike.

“I always found it interesting that they would refer to the strike almost as if they had been to war,” he said. “I could still see the wounds in their eyes.”

Those memories led Green to investigate why the experience remained so emotionally charged decades later.

Part of the answer, he said, involved fractured relationships and difficult choices. Teachers found themselves divided not only from administrators and elected officials, but sometimes from colleagues and friends.

“It was a question of survival,” Green said. “Some teachers did not feel proud of the decisions that they made in order to survive through that period.”

The strike unfolded during a turbulent period in American history marked by labor unrest, anti-war protests and growing social movements. Yet, Green said many Minneapolis residents were shocked to see teachers, normally viewed as selfless public servants, engage in militant labor action.

“People were surprised that teachers could be militant,” he said.

That reaction, Green argues, reflected broader assumptions about both teachers and Minneapolis itself.

For decades, Minneapolis enjoyed a national reputation for political moderation and tolerance. The debut of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1970 helped reinforce an image of the city as friendly, optimistic and largely free of the turmoil affecting other urban centers.

But Green said that image often obscured ongoing struggles over race and inequality.

The strike occurred just a few years after unrest on Plymouth Avenue in north Minneapolis highlighted racial tensions that many residents had preferred to ignore. At the same time, Minneapolis schools faced increasing scrutiny over racial segregation patterns and educational inequities.

“The strike wasn’t really a race issue,” Green said. “But it did kind of lance the boil of tension that was growing along lines of race.”

Although Minneapolis schools remained overwhelmingly white in 1970, Black and Native American students were concentrated in certain schools, a pattern that would later become central to debates over school desegregation. 

Green said those issues are part of a larger story he plans to explore in future research on Minneapolis school desegregation during the 1970s.

The book also examines the changing role of women in education. Teaching was a profession dominated by women, yet many educators were expected to embrace sacrifice rather than advocate for higher wages or improved working conditions.

“You don’t demand things for yourself,” Green said, describing the expectations many women educators faced at the time. 

As more teachers challenged those assumptions, tensions emerged within schools and communities about professional identity, labor rights and gender roles. 

Many of the concerns raised during the 1970 strike continue to resonate today, Green said. Issues such as classroom resources, teacher workload, preparation time and student support services remain common topics in education debates. 

When Minneapolis teachers staged their first strike in more than 50 years in 2022, many of the concerns sounded familiar to those who remembered 1970. Green said that continuity reflects a broader challenge facing public education.

“Teachers have felt ignored and abandoned by the community,” he said. 

He hopes readers will view the strike not simply as a historical event but as a reminder of society’s ongoing responsibility to public schools.

“Education has to be more front and center,” Green said. “It has receded into the closet of our public consciousness.”

Green also emphasized the importance of historical records that documented perspectives often overlooked by mainstream institutions. He credited Black newspapers, including the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, with preserving stories about race and community life that might otherwise have been lost. 

More than five decades after teachers first carried picket signs into the streets of Minneapolis, Green believes the strike still offers lessons about education, democracy and the stories communities tell about themselves.

“History,” he said, “is often about the things people choose not to remember.” 

For more information on William D. Green’s new book, Strike! Twenty Days in 1970 When Minneapolis Teachers Broke the Law, visit www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912956/strike/.

Alaysia Lane is a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. She welcomes reader responses at aal7008@nyu.edu.