AIM Leader Describes Police Harassment in the 1960s

Background: Dennis Banks was one of the many Ojibwe living in Minneapolis in the 1960s. He helped start the American Indian Movement in 1968, becoming a prominent spokesperson at many of the national demonstrations and occupations. In 2004, Banks wrote a memoir with Richard Erdoes in which he chronicled his life experiences and his work with AIM.

Every year, the arrival of spring meant the opening of a season for hunting Indians, who provided slave labor for both the Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota. Together with the first robin came the annual renewal of the “quota system,” which meant that the police had to arrest a certain number of Indians—usually about two hundred every week—to provide unpaid labor for the work house and various city projects. Every Saturday night at nine o’clock, the police arrived to conduct their manhunt. You could set your watch by the arrival of the paddy wagon.

The cops concentrated on the Indian bars. They would bring their paddy wagons around behind the bar and open the back door. Then they would go around to the front and chase everybody toward the rear. As soon as you went through the back door, you were in the paddy wagon. The cops’ favorite targets were Bud’s Bar on Franklin Avenue and the Corral, which was less than a hundred yards away. They rounded us up like cattle and booked us on “drunk and disorderly” charges, even if we were neither.

During the early sixties, I got caught in that dragnet maybe twenty-five times. Monday mornings I would sometimes end up at the work house or they would put me to work on a farm. Once this happened to me three weekends in a row. I would go back to the same bar and get caught again. We were sent out to clean up stadiums and the convention center, which would take two or three days. Then they would tell us, “Okay, you guys, you can be released now.” It took me a while to realize that the police only raided the Indian bars and never the white ones.

For Indians, doing time in jail is almost a traditional rite of passage. About one percent of the Minnesota population is American Indian, but more than one-third of all prison inmates in the state are Indians. We wind up in the slammer because we are Indians, because we are too poor to raise bail, and because we cannot pay for an attorney.

Source: Dennis Banks with Richard Erdoes, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), p. 59.