How Minneapolis Got That Way--The General Strike of 1934—From Strike to Class War Part II

 

The strike kitchen run and managed by wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts fed thousands daily and was part of a carefully planned and organized mass strike.

After the surprising and relatively easy victory which secured recognition from Minneapolis’s coal yards for little Teamster Local, drivers and warehousemen from other local industries flocked to the union clamoring to join.  The Trotskyist-led union responded with an intense, but necessarily secretive organizing drive. 

They went public on April 15, 1934 at a mass rally attended by 3,000 at a rented theater downtown.  In addition to rousing speeches by leaders Vincent R. (Ray) Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant, and Swedish born Carl Skoglund, the Central Labor Council made up of the city’s conservative AFL craft unions sent messages of Solidarity and Farmer-Labor Party Governor Floyd B. Olson sent a high ranking aide to read a message of support and encouragement—“It is my counsel, if you wish to accept it, that you should follow the sensible course and band together for your own protection and welfare.”  Workers in attendance voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike if the city’s powerful and rabidly anti-union Citizens Alliance, which represented the employers, did not agree to recognize the union and enter negotiations on a contract.

The Citizen’s Alliance flatly refused any dealings with the Teamsters.  After they formally rejected a union proposal, a second mass meeting of May 15 voted for an immediate strike.  All over the city drivers and helpers walked off the job in the early hours of May 16.

What would make this strike so different than any other mass strikes in American history was the detailed preparation that had been made before a single worker left the job.  First, many of the 100 or so members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) who were not members of the Teamsters were rallied to organize support from the city’s unemployed.  There were nearly 30,000 of them in a city still deeply wracked by the Great Depression despite the beginning of a modest recovery in the second year of the New Deal.  Organizers found their work well received.  An organization of the unemployed was founded which pledged support of the Teamsters and any strike.  Several large marches of the unemployed served notice on the Citizens Alliance that there would be no mass pool of scabs and strikebreakers.  As the strike progressed many unemployed workers joined the pickets, provided support, and even rose to leadership.  

Earlier Teamster support of the National Farm Holiday producers' strike paid off as the NFHA reciprocated when the strike was on in Minneapolis and donated  tons of food to the strike kitchen.  Trucks carrying milk,  eggs, and produce from NFHA members were alowed to operate and supply their own Farmers' Market for the duration.

The Teamsters also secured critical support from the National Farm Holiday Association (NFHA) an organization of militant farmers who declared a strike of their own in 1932 to which many truckers lent active solidarity by refusing to move milk, produce, and grain to buyers in the Twin Cities in protest of collapsed farm prices.  The dramatic strike attracted nation attention—and the fierce resistance of major forces in Citizen Alliance like Pillsbury, General Mills, and the Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association which marketed butter under the brand name Land O’ Lakes.  The NFHA became an enthusiastic backer of the strike, raising thousands of dollars from their members for the strike fund and contributing tons of food to the strike kitchens.  In return the Teamsters let trucks belonging to NFHA members enter the city to supply their own Farmer’s Market for the duration of the strike.

Getting women, the wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts of strikers was hardly a new idea.  Mother Jones had done it in the coal fields, and it was a regular feature of major IWW strikes, including the bitter struggles on the Iron Range in which some of the union leadership cut their teeth in earlier years.  It had been long recognized that when the women were left at home to stew and worry about missing pay packets and listening to hungry children while their husbands risked injury or death on picket lines was a recipe for a strike that falls apart.  By enlisting them side-by-side with the strikers they became equally engaged—and often even more militant.  The Teamsters organized an active women’s auxiliary. 

Not only did the women organize and staff a modern industrial scale kitchen that at the height of the strike served as many as 10,000 strikers and their families in a single day.  The also staffed a well-equipped dispensary which after the strike took a violent turn resembled a combat field hospital patching up scores of injured workers a day.  They performed clerical and courier duties, organized their own demonstrations and marches, and pressured landlords to forgo evictions.  Some women served with the scout pickets who roamed the city looking attempts to run trucks and move goods.  Others even volunteered with the flying picket squads that were dispatched from strike headquarters when the scouts reported the need.

Teamster Flying pickets intercept a driver and counsel him.

All of this was made possible because the Teamster leadership rented a huge vacant garage as strike headquarters.  It was large enough to easily accommodate up to 1,000 people, most of them assigned to the flying picket squads that worked around the clock.  In addition to the kitchen and dispensary, the building accommodated a large machine and repair shop which kept a fleet of 100 trucks and cars of the flying squadrons in repair and eventually housed a daily newspaper that circulated 10,000 copies a day.  

Four phone lines were constantly monitored taking calls from the scouts reporting from the many pay phones that were in almost every establishment and in free-standing phone booths on many corners.  A call would come in, a courier would run the message to one of the dozens of flying squads waiting, and they would be speeding off in automobile or trucks within minutes.  When the strikers discovered the four phone lines were tapped, they quickly employed codes that changed daily.  The strikers also had a shortwave radio that was able to monitor all police calls.

All of this was up and running from the first day of the strike.  Regular pickets were maintained at all of the main freight terminals, especially in the critical Market District and forty roads into the city were monitored.  The roving scout pickets included many on motorcycles.  Employers were stunned at how completely effective the Teamster picketing system worked.  Virtually nothing was moving in the city but the trucks of the Farm Holiday Association and already unionized coal and milk delivery. 

The first days of the strike were as peaceful as they were effective.  Pickets and flying squads were unarmed and instructed to prevent trucks from moving by swarming them with scores of bodies.  The Citizen Alliance leaders seemed dazed by how tightly the city was shut down.

But the bosses made preparations as well.  They already employed a small army of spies and the usual plug-uglies who could always be hired to beat on workers.  They had a cooperative Police Department which swore many of them in as special police.  The bosses set up their own strike headquarters and their own flying squads.  As the conflict quickly deepened, they sent out a call for a “mass movement of citizens” to oppose the strike and began organizing their citizen army or militia.  Merchants, professional men, managers, other “respectable” white collar workers and their sons flocked to the banner.  They were well armed and equipped and put under the command of officers and World War I combat veterans, including some who held high positions in their companies and on the Board of the Citizens Alliance.

Seldom was the class war so stark, with the employers not just hiding behind the police and the usual hired thugs but fielding an ideologically driven army of their own kind.  With both sides now well organized an explosive confrontation was inevitable.  When it came it would change the face of the strike and the conflict.

Early on Saturday, May 19 one of the Alliance spies lured a flying squad made up of both male and female pickets with a false phone report that trucks were trying to unload newsprint at the loading docks of the two daily newspapers.  It was a well-planned trap.  When the flying pickets arrived on the scene, they were surrounded by a large body of police, special police, and citizen militia and were brutally beaten inflicting several serious injuries.  Abruptly the whole character of the strike changed.

At union headquarters strikers spent the weekend making saps, clubs, and cutting lengths of pipe.  They were preparing not only to defend themselves, but to go on the offensive.  The union learned that the Police and Alliance forces planned to seize the whole Market District on Monday and sweep aside the mass pickets who had blocked most of the warehouse docks.  Union leadership planned for a confrontation.

First they quietly moved up to 600 strikers to the Central Labor Council headquarters on Eighth Street, moving them in small groups at night.  They avoided detection.  Meanwhile at the headquarters garage, the flying squads assembled as a single force augmented by many other militants.  As many as 1000 were in the building waiting to attack.

Workers go on the offensive--Teamsters armed with clubs and pipes charged and scattered police.

Early Monday, May 21 as many as 500 Citizen Alliance special police and volunteers attempted to break picket lines at the Market.  Reinforcements from Strike Headquarters arrived, and a general club wielding melee broke out.  Photographs of the strikers assaulting police and volunteers with clubs shocked the country which had never seen workers physically fighting back before.  It was a pitch battle during which the pickets slowly drove their enemies to one side of the Market and then cut the Police off from the Citizen Army.  Then on signal, the 600 armed strikers poured out of the nearby Central Labor Council building, clearly an overwhelming force.

As the strikers expected, the panicked police began to draw their guns.   At that point a truck driven by a hand-picked striker and filled with the toughest, most reliable men barreled out of the union ranks and bore directly down on the police, who had to scatter.  The strikers in the back of the truck leapt from the bed and began wailing on the police, who could not now use their pistols for fear of hitting their own men. 

Fighting continued most of the day, but was not decisive on either side, although more than 30 police had to be treated for injuries.  The workers took casualties, too, which kept the dispensary busy, but not on the same scale.

On May 22, up to 30,000 strikers and supporters swarmed the Market District precipitating the Battle of Deputies Run.  At the end of a long day of street battles strikers had complete control of the streets.

Overnight more workers joined the fight.  And the Citizen Alliance had 500 more men sworn in as Special Police.  The next morning more than 30,000 showed up for a march on the market.  The march was peaceful until a merchant tried to move some crates of tomatoes and pickets threw them through his store window.  General fighting erupted again.  This time, armed with clubs the strikers drove the police and Citizen Army out of the Market and chased them through the city. By night the police had completely withdrawn from the city streets and strike marshals were directing traffic.  Two special police, including a member of the board of directors of the Citizens Alliance, were killed in the fighting.

The riot on May 22 became known as the Battle of Deputies Run.  A joint delegation of Teamsters, Central Labor Council, and Building Trades Council leaders offered Chief of Police Mike Johannes a 24-hour truce to allow negotiations to start on the understanding that no trucks would move during negotiations.  Governor Olsen and Federal Mediators urged authorities and the Citizen Alliance to take the deal.   Reluctantly the Citizen Alliance signed it.  But Johannes immediately announced that his police would attempt to move trucks as soon as the 24 hours expired.  The union responded by ordering a resumption of picketing.

The battle was on again.

Tomorrow—Escalating violence leads to a General Strike.

How Minneapolis Got That Way--The General Strike of 1934—Of Teamsters and Trotskyites--Part I

 

After Minneapolis Teamsters stuck city-wide in 1934 police try to move a scab truck using force against unarmed pickets.  Police and Citizen Committee thug violence and mayhem would soon both spread the strike defiantly and cause workers to take up clubs and brick bats to battle it out in the streets.

Note:  The epic story of the events in Minneapolis in 1934 is too much for one entry.  We will cover it in three parts.

Before 1934 Minneapolis, Minnesota was a conservative, anti-labor bastion.  A railroad and river transportation hub for the upper-Midwest breadbasket and a significant manufacturing city, the local elites organized in the Citizens Alliance in conjunction—or collusion—with local authorities long kept the city relatively free of unions except for some traditionally well-behaved craft unions, members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).  All of that began to change dramatically when a successful strike by Teamsters Local 574 closed down sixty-five of the city’s sixty-seven coal yards during the midst of one of the notoriously brutal Minnesota winters earlier that year causing the employers to capitulate and recognize the union in only three days.

Impressed, drivers, warehousemen, and dock workers in other industries flocked to the victorious union setting up a city-wide cartage strike which began on May 16.  Superbly organized, the strike effectively shut down the city with a system of peaceful and unarmed flying squad pickets.  

                                             

                                                            A Teamster Local 574 dues button issued during the strike.

The character of the strike changed dramatically on May 21 when a mixed flying squad of men and women pickets was lured into to a trap and severely beaten.  That transformed the walkout into a general strike with the support of even the Building Trades and Central Labor Council and workers in all industries, many of them unorganized, downed tools and joined the strike.  Strikers also armed themselves with saps, clubs, and lengths of pipe determined to battle it out with police and special deputies in a “citizens militia” organized by the Citizen Alliance.  Intensely violent confrontations erupted, and virtual open class warfare gripped the city for months before a stunning union victory.

At the heart of the strike were the Teamsters, nationally one of the largest unions in the AFL but gripped by the conservative leadership of President Daniel Tobin who opposed most use of the strike.  The union’s members had a reputation for solidarity in respecting the picket lines of other unions’ strikes.  But strict allegiance to craft unionism meant that divers, warehouse men, and dockworkers were divided into small locals by occupation and also by industry—ice deliverymen, milk drivers, movers, general cartage divers, etc. each in separate locals.  It was a perfect recipe for a weak movement.

In Minneapolis however, Local 574 had a somewhat unusual and loose charter from the international union covering general cartage, which new leadership quickly defined as all traffic that moved by truck or wagon.  In 1933 the local had only about 100 dues paying members and it represented workers at only a handful of employers.  But the new leadership changed that.

Vincent R. (Ray) Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant, and Swedish-born Carl Skoglund were all veteran unionists and former members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  They were conditioned to think of labor struggle as class war and had a commitment to industrial rather than craft unionism.  Elected to leadership in Local 574 they chose immediately to ignore the strictures against strikes by the national leadership and to make the local a union of all workers engaged in transportation, delivery, and support across industries.  When unorganized workers in other industries joined the fight they were readily welcomed in the spirit of the One Big Union in which they had all cut their teeth.

Local Teamster leaders were militant former IWW members, dedicated industrial unionists, and Trotskyist Left Communists.

But all of them were also Communists.  In fact, they were leading members of the Party’s Left Opposition which recently split after the purge of Leon Trotsky and founded the Communist League of America (CLP) which would later become the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SLP).  The prominence of the Trotskyists in the leadership of the strike, which soon included young Farrell Dobbs who had joined as a rank-and-file coal driver in 1933 and quickly rose to prominence during the strike, has always colored views of the history of the epic struggle in Minnesota.

It would cause many labor historians sympathetic to the role of Communist Party militants in the development of industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) to downplay the Minneapolis General strike in comparison with other important militant strikes in 1934—the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike let by CP member Harry Bridges and the Toledo Auto Lite Strike led by the independent socialist American Workers Party.  Many AWP members later that year joined the CLP, but others switched to the CP giving it some bragging rights in the Toledo struggle.

The Teamsters look on the Minneapolis strike as the pivot point in their history, transforming them into a modern, militant union and eventually leading to their domination not just of local delivery services, but cross-country trucking.  The Trotskyist leadership developed in Minneapolis was key to the spread and success of the union with new locals growing up side by side with SWP chapters.  But by the early ‘40s Teamster national leadership purged the Trotskyists and most other radicals including Dobbs, who had become young Jimmy Hoffa’s mentor and right-hand man.  After that they rewrote their history of the Minneapolis strike to minimize or erase the Trotskyist leadership.  

Farrell Dobbs was a young rank-and-file driver during the 1934 Minneapolis strike and later rose in Teamster leadership, was purged and a Red, and became the head of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party,  His history is controversial and frankly partisan, but it is the best detailed day to day account of the struggle and a major American working class classic.

After emerging from prison for violating the Smith Act, which made it illegal to “conspire to advocate the violent overthrow of the United States Government,” Dobbs became a major figure and eventually leader of the SWP.  His histories of the Minneapolis strike and the spread of the union, Teamster Rebellion and Teamster Power tried to build a mythology around the Trotskyist leadership and resulted in a backlash by other labor historians.

Of course, conservative historians have always discounted the significance of the virtual rebellion in Minneapolis or characterized it as evidence of a Communist conspiracy to incite violence and subvert order.  It is in their interest to minimize, if not erase, such a major event from the public memory.

Whatever you think of the Trotskyists, the story of the Teamsters and the Minneapolis general strike is important to working people and replete with valuable lessons.

Tomorrow—we begin to examine all of the events in detail.

Remembering George Floyd and Minneapolis—National Poetry Month 2026

During the trial of former cop Derek Chauvin accused on kneeling on George Floyds neck and killing him. Despite massive security and media-stoked fears of a rampage demonstrations were angry, massive, and determined, but peaceful.  

The latest Resistance movement in Minnesota defending immigrant neighbors from ICE and Border Patrol agents and protesting the murders of Renee Nichole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti has inspired and instructed the world.  But that movement was made possible by the experience of the death-by-cop of George Floyd and the lessons learned about communal solidarity and rapid community mobilizations.

Floyd was an African American man who was murdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis,  during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected he used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020. One of four police officers who arrived on the scene, Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd's neck and back for over nine minutes, fatally asphyxiating him. After his murder, protests against police brutality, especially toward Black people, quickly spread nationally and then globally. His dying words became a rallying slogan: "I can't breathe".

The initial response was spontaneous, explosive and marked by rioting, rampaging, and violent clashes with the police.  But the anger struck nerves around the U.S. in the wake of a series of police shootings, murders, and atrocities.  Protestors in the street began organizing themselves.  

The New York Times described the events in the wake of Floyd's murder and the video that circulated of it as "the largest protests in the United States since the Civil Rights Era." Calls to defund and abolish the police were widespread. The protests became the first civil disorder event to exceed $1 billion in losses to the insurance industry.

The Black Lives Matter movement dominated urban streets and the national debate until the Coronavirus national shut down.  Minnesotans learned how to respond by lessons learned back then.

Poets, of course, commented on George Floyd’s murder and the broken system it exposed from the beginning here are just three examples I picked from hundreds.

Tori Derricotte.

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan on April 12, 1941.  Her family life was marked by death, abuse, pain, and racism.  Her Roman Catholic schooling and light skin often made her feel alienated and guilty. She received her B.A. from Wayne State University and an M.A. in English Literature from New York University.  She is a professor of writing at the University of Pittsburgh and won a 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, a summer workshop for African-American poets.  Derricotte’s books of poetry include The Empress of the Death House (1978), a collection that draws on her early experiences at her grandparents’ funeral home in Detroit; Natural Birth (1983), Captivity (1989), Tender (1997), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Undertaker’s Daughter (2011).

Why I Don’t Write About George Floyd

Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
Something is stuck in my throat
Something is stuck like an apple
Something is stuck like a knife
Something is stuffed like a foot
Something is stuffed like a body

 

—Toi Derricotte

Olive Senior.

Olive Senior shared poems on Twitter (X) throughout the Coronavirus pandemic in a series called Pandemic Poetry. You can check those out at @olivesenior. B for Breathe was first published as part of Pandemic Poems.

Senior is a Jamaican-Canadian writer and the author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature. She is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and her collection Over the Roofs of the World was shortlisted for the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. In 2019, Senior delivered the prestigious Margaret Laurence Lecture. Her children’s picture book Boonoonoonous Hair was illustrated by Laura James.

B for Breathe

It takes one’s breath away: a man dying during a pandemic that

takes away one’s breath, no ventilator but one brave spectator,

recording 

 

his last breath, his need please

 

somebody

 

taking the knee on the neck from men who from birth breathed in

tainted air, imbibed a foul history, burning crosses

 

still smouldering

 

i can’t breathe

 

like the hot breath of anger consuming the cities

that inhaled this before

this white heat this

burning sensation in the throats of

the numerous ones held down and 

 

mama

mama

i can’t

 

Come on, George Floyd, breathe in the timeless rhythm of Mother

Earth waiting for you, for all her lost children, for justice

 

I’m through

I’m through

 

—Olive Senior

Jonathon Peterson a/k/a  JP da Poet

Jonathon Peterson is an Alabama spoken word artist and poetry slam performer who was profiled in the Montgomery Advertiser for this poem when the murder of George Floyd seemed like the straw that broke the camel’s back.  He writes and performs under the name JP da Poet.  As the father of a son the accumulated pain of injustice after injustice is more acute.

If Black Lives Mattered

Before I wrote this poem, I sat with my pen in my hand for eight minutes and 46 seconds,

Then second guessed myself like maybe I got the time wrong cause this just seems too long for a man to have a knee on his neck,

I checked time again on impulse, pulse racing, chasing a logical explanation for the asphyxiation of another Black man at the hands of the men in blue who swore to protect and serve.

I heard him sayin’ he can’t breathe.

To me, logically that meant air wasn't properly reaching his lungs, he hung on as long as he could,

But when the weight of the world's wicked ways weighs on your throat you would choke, too.

The situation is so sad, rest in peace George Floyd.

And it seems it happens too often.

They offed 10 in the last two months.

An aunt, Atatiana Jefferson, we learned her name after shot in her home playin’ video games in front of her nephew who had to watch his loved one killed by someone he thought were the good guys.

I try to imagine how an EMT asleep in her home shot after shocked a no-knock warrant warranted police to force entry in her home in the middle of the night,

I fight to find the logic in justification of the situation. Breonna Taylor, gone to soon.

It’s messed up we live in a society where in so many cases like Kalief Browder were treated guilty until proven innocent.

With no evidence even evident somehow we’re still prime suspect.

The system is backwards and broken,

And I’m not joking or jivin’ when I say simply for ridin’ with an improper signal can give off a signal for a cop,

To hold you for an hourlong traffic stop.

Enough is enough when I saw my sister body-slammed in handcuffs,

And yes, I can attest with Sandra Bland's family,

That that was such an unnecessary tragedy.

But you see,

But you see, when in broad daylight for a broken taillight a brother named Walter Scott can be shot in the back on video with evidence planted. 

Should finally show what we perceived as straight is actually slanted,

And as crooked as some of these politicians.

And through repetition time and time again,

We’re losing our Black men to the pen not for the offense,

But at the hands of a great conviction rate.

Prosecutor turns persecutor,

If you don't have enough money for bond then you are merely a pawn in this game when we are the weakest pieces.

 

You see Black lives mattering started tiptoeing on that fine line around the time they introduced court fines and minimum sentencing guidelines.

And how is it that the time we get is always what we deserve?

But the same predicament, different pigment, gets them off with time served is just not fair.

But you see fairness,

Fairness took its last breath asking for reprieve using the words “I can't breathe,” by George Floyd or Eric Garner,

Another brother whose only crime was selling short Newports, no weapon.

Mike Brown gunned down.

Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice,

Whatever they did, they were still some kids who deserve to live,

If Black lives mattered,

Then why are our hearts being shattered as our ashes are being scattered into the winds of injustice.

I want you to take a second and close your eye,

For real do it close your eyes.

Now imagine you've been confined to a 8-by-5 for the last 30 years of your life.

Now take a deep breath.

What if I told you your sentence was death for a crime you did not do.

 

Look up the story, it's really true.

Right here in Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton could have been anyone of you.

And that’s as real as the man’s missed appeals for not copping to a plea deal,

If Black lives mattered.

If Black lives mattered then Laquan McDonald wouldn’t have received one less bullet in his body than he got the number of candles on his last birthday cake.

And as we lay in the wake of the Flint water tragedy,

These modern-day catastrophes from Freddie Gray back to the Jena 6,

It literally makes me sick to even know I have to pen this.

But let me ask you a question, 

If Black lives matter then please tell me why our hearts are still being shattered as our ashes are still being scattered into the winds of injustice?

 

—JP da Poet

Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for February 6, 2026

At the ICE Out Now! roadside rally in McHenry las Sunday. 

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.    

Last Friday’s ICE Out Nationwide Shut Down and weekend and Minneapolis inspired ICE Out Now!  rallies and marches across the county, including the roadside rally in McHenry sponsored by Indivisible McHenry ramped up intense pressure on the Trump/MAGA administration.  At the same time claims and charges against victims of ICE aggression nationwide were being debunked by video and other evidence almost hourly while depredations continued and spread to rural areas thought to safe for operations.  Support for the hyper-militarized and constraint-free policy of raids, retaliations, kidnappings, and violence against witnesses, protestors, bystanders, and neighborhoods plummeted as did support for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump himself, set of a panicked, confused retreat and various ass-covering edicts and X posts.  It now seems sure that Democrats in Congress will at least establish “rules of engagement” including body cameras, unmasking, agency and individual identification, requirements for court orders and writs for stops, searches, and arrests.  But Trump may still get all or part of the funding for his personal domestic army.  Will he obey the restraints?  Who knows, but history gives us little confidence that he will.  The situation is fluid.  Be alert for rapid response calls to action. 

McHenry County NOW 2nd Annual Black History Celebration Event—Thursday, February 19, at 6:00  pm at the Cary Area Public Library, 1606 Three Oaks Road.  “The evening will feature a compelling documentary followed by an engaging group discussion exploring Black history. This is a chance to learn together, share perspectives, and strengthen our community through conversation.”  Register here: https://mchenryconow-celebrates-black-history.eventbrite.com  

Third No Kings nationwide protest sponsored by a broad coalition that includes Indivisible, 50:1:50, and scores of other organizations calls for its third big national action on March 28.  “In 2025, millions of Americans came together in nonviolent protest to oppose the growing authoritarian actions of the Trump administration and affirm that this nation belongs to its people, not to kings. The No Kings Coalition is activating an immediate and ongoing nationwide digital organizing effort leading up to our next mass mobilization on March 28, including a flagship event in the Twin Cities. 

Compassion for Campers 

Congressman Bill Foster stopped by Tree of Life/Compassion for Campers/Jail Breakers table at the People in Need Forum on Saturday.

Compassion for Campers is at Community Resource Days at Willow Crystal Lake, 100 South Main Street on the first and third Friday of every month from 10 am to 2 pm. C4C is one of over 25 agencies at Willow.  C4C’s next distribution will be this Friday, February 6, and then Friday, February 20.  Please come and see what we are doing.   

Compassion for Campers will be hard pressed to resupply many and accommodate new commers who continue to be displaced from their homes and apartments.  Cold overnight temperatures and wet conditions signal new clients and shifting needs like rain ponchos, tarps and sleeping pads, hand warmers, and Mylar blankets.  We can always use donations of supplies like clean and serviceable tents and sleeping bags in original bags for easy transport, clean blankets, tabletop grills, wrapped toilet paper and paper towels, and non-perishable food.  Money donations are always welcome.     

We need people to share leadership tasks including shopping, transportation, acknowledging donations, coordinating with other agencies and religious groups. These tasks can take a few hours a week.  People with flexible schedules with some day-time availability are ideal candidates.  A good way to start is to volunteer for our distribution a time or two to see if we are a good fit and stir your passion for justice and service.  Interested?  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org