On my steamy cycle ride, I noticed a newcomer to South Minneapolis: the Debre Selam Medhanealem Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. While I work with Muslim Somali adult learners who lived in refugee camps in Ethiopia, I don’t recall ever meeting Ethiopian Christians. Because they first arrived in the Twin Cities in the 1960s, they are generally more established and dispersed than the Somali community, which first arrived in the 1990s.
Category: South Minneapolis
Malala and a melt
After an ELL session on Malala Yousafzai with an adult learner, I went to the nearby Minneapolis American Indian Center for a bison melt. Lawn signs out front promoted candidates in the upcoming tribal elections.
Graveyard grazing
Yesterday at the National Cemetery, I was impressed by the work it must take to keep the grass short around tens of thousands of grave markers. This morning, across the road from the school where I volunteer, I spotted these deer, grazing in the oldest cemetery in Minneapolis, the Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery. Some of those headstones mark the graves of Civil War soldiers.
A modest home with a story
Cycled through South Minneapolis with a friend on a route loosely themed around racial justice, stopping here at the former home of Harry Davis, Sr. He was a civil rights advocate in a racially divided Minneapolis from the 1940s and throughout the turmoil of the 1960s, and in 1971 became the city’s first Black mayoral candidate. The city is applying to have this house added to the National Register of Historic Places.