Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

January 18, 2010| Posted in Uncategorized

In 1886, a time when unwed mothers were largely denied hospital admission, Dr. Martha Ripley established this maternity hospital and opened it to any woman regardless of financial or marital status. Dr. Ripley was also an early president of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association. She died in 1912, eight years before women won the right to vote.

In 1915, on the 6th floor of the Plymouth Building, Lena Olive Smith opened her office as the first African-American woman realtor in Minnesota. At night, she attended law school one flight up. In 1921, she became the third black woman lawyer in America, and for the next forty years she battled discrimination as a founding member of the Urban League and the first woman president of the Minnesota NAACP. She lived to the age of 81: just long enough to see the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In 1971, not long after he organized the first Vietnam teach-in at the University of Minnesota, Brian Coyle came out. He spent the next twenty years of his life fighting for civil rights, as a tenants’ rights activist and a tireless advocate throughout the 1980s for a domestic partnership ordinance in Minneapolis.

For more than a century Minnesotans have put themselves on the line to break down discrimination and to deliver on America’s promise of equal opportunity and equal justice. But that fight is far from over.

We can’t rest until every Minnesotan is protected against discrimination. None of our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, should be treated differently because of a disability, their sexual orientation, their religion, their age, their gender, or their race. I will advocate for marriage equality and will proudly sign legislation that reinforces America’s ideal that all are created equal.

As a young lawyer, I served as a public defender, fighting to make sure that Minnesota lived up to its ideal of equal justice under the law. I founded the organization Access For Persons With Disabilities to break down barriers to understanding and opportunity. And I represented families fleeing violence in their own countries and seeking asylum here in the United States.

But I know that good laws on the books are meaningless without practical results in the community. I will work with you to make sure that we close the achievement gap. I will continue my fight to eliminate disparities in health and in housing. And I will keep working with you to root out youth violence that is tearing communities apart.

The work of Minnesotans like Martha Ripley, Lena Smith, and Brian Coyle is ours to finish. Together, let’s get the job done.