The day after the massive action, federal agents killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and ICU nurse. Organizers are calling for further walkouts on January 30. And there are signs that the city’s massive show of solidarity could mark a turning point in the resistance to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
How did the coalition of unions, community groups and faith leaders pull off such a stunningly large action in so little time? In 2024, Sarah Jaffe reported for In These Times on the “Minnesota model” of organizing, which has brought together otherwise disparate issue groups to pick — and win — bigger fights than they could on their own. That spring, unions representing 15,000 workers from different sectors held joint rallies, pickets and marches and aligned their strike votes under a campaign that asked, “What Could We Win Together?”
That very recent history helped lay the groundwork for the city’s highly organized resistance this winter, but Minneapolis organizers are also drawing on more than a century-long tradition of labor and social justice organizing in the city, including a 1934 general strike that began with a spark before quickly erupting into a conflagration.
In These Times asked community archivist and activist Isaac Silver to help put Minneapolis’ mass demonstrations in historical context. From his two-decade-long hobby of collecting buttons from organizing campaigns, Silver has built a project called “Buttons of the Left,” employing historical buttons to educate audiences about the history of peoples’ movements. Silver’s collection is housed at In These Times, where he also occasionally curates shows.
“Part of having something in the realm of possibility is knowing that it has happened there before.”
Before popular outrage against ICE boiled over, Minneapolis had “a really strong local ecosystem of organizing that bridges different union struggles, the immigrant movement and the Black Lives Matter upsurge around the murder of George Floyd,” Silver says. “Even further back, the Twin Cities have a really rich history of radical and working-class organizing that stretches to the beginning of the 20th century.”
Even in the United States, “where there’s the active forgetting and erasure of history,” according to Silver, many organizers in Minneapolis know the legacy of these struggles.
“Part of having something in the realm of possibility,” Silver adds, “is knowing that it has happened there before.”
Silver gave In These Times a tour of more than 60 buttons documenting key moments in Minneapolis’ radical history. His edited comments follow.