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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. Minneapolis investigators will have to wait until the weather warms up before finding out what caused a 4-alarm fire in Minneapolis over the weekend. The Saturday night blaze left 30 people homeless. Authorities say the subzero cold makes it too dangerous to investigate.

Programs which provide heating assistance to tens of thousands of Minnesotans are dangerously low on funds because of the severe weather and federal cutbacks in energy assistance. A bill has been introduced in the legislature, which would allocate $20 million for heating assistance. People can also contribute through the Salvation Army's HeatShare Program. Mike McGlone is with HeatShare.

MIKE MCGLONE: The utilities that work with us send bill inserts out, and people can give individual donations that way. We also get corporate donations through Minnegasco and NSP. Minnegasco has just given us another corporate donation to help because they realize that there's a desperate need out there at this point.

KAREN BARTA: The state got $56 million in federal funds last year, this winter it got $33 million. Snow, sleet or freezing rain is likely over much of Minnesota this week, but at least it will be warmer with highs in the 20s, 30s, and even 40 in Southwest Minnesota by Thursday. The state forecast. today, mostly sunny, except some increase in clouds in the northwest this afternoon, highs in the single digits above 0 in the north to near 20 degrees in the far southwest.

For the Twin cities, mostly sunny with a high near 15 degrees. Tuesday, snow likely and warmer with the high around 25. The chance of snow Tuesday is 60%. It's sunny around the region in Duluth at 7:00 below. Rochester reporting 0. In the Twin Cities, the windchill is minus 20, and the current temperature is 1 above. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's 6 minutes past 10 o'clock. I'm Paula Schroeder, and this is Midmorning on the FM News Station.

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Polly Mann insists she did not enjoy confrontation, but the political activist has spent much of her adult life challenging people's views on war and our US economy. Today on Voices of Minnesota, we hear a conversation with Polly Mann. Nearly every Monday at this time, we bring you a conversation with someone who has an interesting life story.

75-year-old Polly Mann lives in Saint Paul and is one of the founders of Women Against Military Madness or WAMM. Her Southern accent is explained by her growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas. But Mann has lived most of her adult life in Minnesota, including rural Minnesota. As the wife of a judge, Mann lived in Windom and Marshall in southwestern Minnesota.

A civilian job at a military base during World War II started Mann thinking about the forces which perpetuate conflict. Polly Mann talked recently with Mary Stucky.

MARY STUCKY: Did religion influence your political beliefs and actions?

POLLY MANN: I think that religion did because when I started looking at war, and I worked at an army camp and saw what was happening during World War II, and I thought, this is absolutely stupid that this goes on century after century, and we still get the same kind of answers.

And it was after the war that I found the answers I was looking for and that was in this Quaker tract. And then I realized that the Quaker tract said all the things that I had been taught in Methodist Sunday school but had never really impacted because I didn't see demonstrations, nor did I hear talk over the dinner table that said people should love one another, and that people should forgive one another and not try to get even.

And so when the Quakers explained this so clearly as a prescription for finding peace on earth, I thought at the time it was new, but it wasn't. It was an old message that I had pushed back in the back of my mind and that I now realize I believe in.

MARY STUCKY: Did you join the Quaker Church? No.

POLLY MANN: Never. No. The Quakers will tell you that they're not a church. It's a society. And I did not. But I certainly admire them, and I have been influenced by their writings.

MARY STUCKY: Was there a defining moment? You talk about seeing the troops in Arkansas going out in World War II. You talk about reconciling some political beliefs or some religious beliefs with that. Were there other defining moments like a light in your brain that led you to the kind of activism you took later?

POLLY MANN: No, it was day after day seeing those soldiers and troop trains leaving this camp and watching the people. Occasionally, I would be at the station, at the camp, and relatives and wives and children of the troops of the officers, especially would be standing there, and they would be saying goodbye.

And they knew, and the soldiers knew, and I knew some of them wouldn't be coming back. And it was-- I could still cry over seeing those men. And day after day, I thought about that and how dumb it was. And so when I began work at that army camp, I was convinced and was all through World War II that it was necessary that we had to fight World War II.

I'm not convinced of that today that we have to fight any war, that there haven't been moments when the problems that led up to the war couldn't have been solved. But it was day after day seeing that created within me this feeling that I had to do something about it if I knew what to do. But we don't know what to do. And I didn't know what to do.

And so when I read this Quaker tract, It was like that was when the light went on. And that was 1954. It was after the war. I mean years after the war. The other one incident that I think you might consider a moment like that after the war, and I had spent a year and a half in South America working for the government. I was in the apartment of a British woman in Washington. I don't know what I was doing there, but anyhow I was there and with a group of people.

And we began talking about the war. And I said something, and then she laughed at me. And she said, you know, the war is economic. The war was economic. It's all economics. It's markets, and it's selling, and it's who gets their share of what. And I was horrified because I was still so idealistic then. Even in spite of seeing how bad the war was, I felt that this was something that had to be. And I didn't attribute to the war any of these kind of gross reasons.

And I was very angry with that woman, really angry with her. I went home angry with her. And I stayed angry with her for days. And today I would say, yes, of course. But today, when I say things that make people angry, they get very angry. If I say something pretty flat that I don't think is way out of line, and they do react with anger.

And I think about that woman, and I think that's an appropriate response. That's a far better response than having somebody say, ho hum, and look out the window and fall asleep or something. So when I make people angry, and I don't do that deliberately, I never do. But then I understand because when we realize we've been lied to, that we don't have the information, that we have based our actions on lies, then we get angry.

MARY STUCKY: Tell me about the small town life, though. What lessons did you learn?

POLLY MANN: At the same time that I recognized the goodness, I still think Thomas Hardy presented the truth of small towns. And if you really want to know about small towns, read Thomas Hardy and the cruelty that is there because people know you.

In a city, you're known by your people you permit to know you. In a small town, everybody knows you. And so they think that they have a piece of you because they know your name, and they know your children, and they know all the externals. And I found that, at least, in Marshall, and I expect it's true in almost all small towns, that if your opinion does not agree with the majority, you really don't have the right to say it. You really shouldn't be saying it.

MARY STUCKY: My goodness, your husband was a judge in that small town. You must have had-- I don't know, did you have to tone down your views for his sake? For the sake, I guess, you're saying of getting along in the town, did you tone down your views, Polly Mann?

POLLY MANN: No, I really didn't. I really didn't. I never want to-- I think some people look at people who do things that they don't agree with and think they get a pleasure out of challenging. I have never gotten any pleasure out of challenging.

I would far rather get along with people and smile and be accepted, but I cannot do that at the price of what I think is the truth. And so in the small town-- the small town will accept you. As the wife of a judge what happens is once-- when we went there, my husband had just been appointed judge.

When you don't fulfill your accepted role-- and I read this in some sociology books. And said, when you don't accept your accepted role, then you lose the prestige and power that goes along with that role. OK, so as the judge's wife, I probably could have, in some ways, done some things which after I said, this is who I am, and I do what I feel I must do, and I raise my children and attend to my life, but I'm not going to fulfill any role that you might have of what I should do, then you become different from the person that they expect.

So it's a trade-off. It's a trade-off. And I'm not sorry. I mean, the things that I feel bad about are not the things that I've done but the things that I didn't do. The times that I haven't spoken out and haven't made the statement that I think would have been helpful. We eventually set up a little peace committee, and I didn't do that. There were enough people there that we did. This was during the Vietnam War.

So we wrote a letter to all the clergy in the county. I don't know how many that was. And we suggested that they might arrange to have a discussion in the church on the war. And that we were peace people, and we would like to discuss it as opponents of the war. But if they would permit it to be held, we would even recruit and find somebody who would be on the opposite side.

We got after sending out all those letters. And I don't know how many people, but you know there are a lot of churches in rural Minnesota. We got one answer from a Catholic priest who said it was disgusting that we should suggest such a topic, a controversial topic within the church.

Then I got some little feedback from one of the local churches. They were really pretty horrified that we would suggest that the war should be discussed. And then I had a discussion later with a Lutheran minister after the war was over. And he and I talked about-- he was informing me about the way to influence people, which was you don't get outside that level of acceptability. If you go too far out, then people don't hear you.

And I really then I could not keep my mouth shut. I said, that's what happened to Jesus, isn't it? He got too far out. So I don't know that should be the criteria at all for what you do. Sometimes you say things that you know are not going to be accepted because you think that it's important. And I think that people besides Jesus in all religions have made statements and have paid the price for making comments that were not acceptable by the people of their time.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Polly Mann talking with Mary Stucky. We'll continue our conversation with her in just a moment. This is Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Paula Schroeder. It's 17 minutes past 10 o'clock. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Bendix, a front-loading washer-dryer combination with water and energy-conserving capabilities, new at Independent Appliance Dealers.

Well, get out the confetti and the noisemakers and the balloons and everything. It's above 0 in the Twin Cities. It's actually 1 degree above right now with sunny skies. Let's see where are other places where we've hit above 0. Sioux falls, South Dakota, reporting 3 above right now, and it is 0 in Rochester.

The rest of you are inching up there. It's 2 below in Mankato in Saint Cloud. It's 5 below, 7 below in Brainerd. Still 18 below in Thief River Falls, but we're all going to get above 0 today. I can feel it. Well, we'll continue our conversation now with 75-year-old Polly Mann.

She's been active in social justice issues for over 40 years. She ran as an independent in the 1988 US Senate race in Minnesota. Mann survived cancer five years ago. She's the mother of three children. Well, we turn now to Mary Stucky's conversation with Polly Mann.

MARY STUCKY: You must be married to a pretty supportive man.

POLLY MANN: I am. He has supported me in everything I've done.

MARY STUCKY: What's the secret there?

POLLY MANN|: Well-- somebody said something to him one time about it, he said, I didn't have any alternative. There was no alternative. He said, what would I do? He said, she was going to do what she felt was right. And if I didn't go along with it, well, I was the one that would be lost. And he, of course, has agreed with me, but he is not me, and his temperament is far different.

He is much more laid back, and I think more reflective probably, more judicial in his temperament. But he has supported me and has never really disagreed with anything that I've done in terms of working for peace.

MARY STUCKY: You ran for US Congress--

POLLY MANN: US Senate. Yeah, that's right.

MARY STUCKY: --US Congress, US Senate in 1988. Why did you do that?

POLLY MANN: Well, I ran because I suspected that nobody was going to talk about the real issues that were facing us. And sure enough, they didn't. And I thought that by running maybe I could get those issues discussed. And it was good. I don't regret running.

What I guess I hadn't properly assessed was that the media really doesn't care about whether the issues are expressed or not, especially the print media. Well, all media because when you come to the electronic media, they don't have time to hear any real discussions of issues. And the print media covers presidential elections like ballgames or wrestling. Matches, who's going to win? Who's not? Where the strength is? Where it isn't?

And then what they told me, what some of the people from the press told me, they didn't care what I said. I wasn't going to get elected. Nobody cared what I said. And that was not true, however, in outstate Minnesota where they look for material to be in the paper.

If I could have afforded it, I probably should have spent most of my time in outstate Minnesota because they did carry my picture on the front page and stories about what I thought and what my campaign was doing. By and large, most of them did that.

MARY STUCKY: I think even more than your run for Congress, people know you as a cofounder of WAMM, Women Against Military Madness. Tell me why you founded that organization?

POLLY MANN: Well, actually, I didn't found it myself. Mary Ann Hamilton and I started talking about it. But Mary Ann had lived here, and I'd moved in from the country. And she knew a lot of women here that I didn't, women who had been active during the Vietnam War. And so she called the women together, and there were about 15 or more women, and we met for months, maybe once a month talking about what was needed.

And the reason that we started it was we thought that things really hadn't changed that much-- that was in 1981-- since the Vietnam War. That the country still could fall in the same trap that we did in Vietnam, that we would still send troops, we would still say we had to decimate the people in order to win their hearts and minds.

So the women that we talked to felt the same, and so we then founded WAMM. And we could have simply joined the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which is a wonderful organization and which politically, I find no fault with their political statements and the great work they do.

But they were once-a-month organization, and they didn't have an office. We wanted to start with an office with hired people, and we knew we couldn't lay our agenda right on top of Women's International League and say, this is what we want change. We think the concept is valuable that women can organize and protest military policy and protest what happens to the society because of our emphasis on the military.

In fact, there's not enough money for medical care, for health, not enough money for education, not enough money for poor children, not enough money for agriculture, not enough money for the structure of government for roads and everything else because the military is like an octopus eating it up.

And so that concept, I think, could be duplicated in cities all over the country. A lot of what we did, we did not understand why we did it, WAMM and organizing. We did it instinctively, which is the female way of organizing, kind of planning a church supper if you've ever been. I bet you have. You've been involved in a church supper.

The women do not draw an organizational chart, nor a flow of how the dinner is going to be served. They sit down, and they have a little conversation about, well, how's your daughter and this and that, and when are you going south. And then they talk about the menu, and who's going to do what, and it's all very casual.

But it really isn't that casual because when the time comes to do that dinner, if everybody doesn't perform and somebody shirks or doesn't turn up, that person knows about it. Maybe not in major confrontation but it goes against them. So I think that's a wonderful style, and it can be used in some ways. But women can do an awful lot in an instinctive way of organizing that I think nobody has really studied, but they probably should.

MARY STUCKY: What is your opinion of the US role in Bosnia today?

POLLY MANN: Exactly the same as it was in Vietnam, except that I have been unable to really understand Bosnia as I did Vietnam. I am still confused. What I'm not confused about, however, is that we have not been given the truth.

And just recently, I read an article in The Nation magazine in which the author states that we have not clearly been on the side of peace from the beginning, that we have not looked at the question of markets again, and that what has happened with the end of the Cold War, and that was beginning to happen in Bosnia and in Yugoslavia.

And that had been to this author a major industrial area, and that could have and did offer competition to the multinationals already in existence. And so they were not too disturbed about this country falling apart. Now, this is a view that I did not get until just recently.

Now, during Vietnam we were fed lies. We are being fed lies constantly. We're fed lies by the president. And we've been fed lies by-- every president in my recollection has told major lies. We know that the CIA lied to the Congress about its information that there were actually-- that they had a spy in their midst, and they did not want to reveal it. So they let the Congress appropriate billions of dollars for arms.

McNamara has now told us what those of us in the peace movement told us for a long time that we knew to be true, that there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident. Those ships, those American ships were not fired upon by the Vietnamese. So I cannot believe anything that the government says.

And the media, the print media, prints anything that comes from the White House as the truth because we've asked them. I just wrote an article. I suggested that we should have legislation. That when a public statement is given to the people by an office holder, if it's a known lie, that person should be subject to a penalty similar to perjury because they perjured themselves. They have told the American people lies. And if we could hold those people responsible, maybe then we could make a decision about things that are going on.

MARY STUCKY: One of your tactics to fight all of this has been civil disobedience, even so far as ending up arrested yourself. There are value in that, Polly Mann?

POLLY MANN: Well, I don't know. I don't know that anything I've done is really worthwhile in terms of making the change that I would like to have happen. I have had to do it because it's what I feel I have to do for myself. So in a sense, it's been a selfish struggle. I don't know that. I can't tell anybody that. I don't know. Every time I've done civil disobedience, I've questioned whether it was valuable, whether it really did any good.

I went to jail one time for five days. I think I was in the workhouse in Ramsey County. And I didn't have to do that, but then I do term valuable in terms of my own understanding. It was very interesting to me to see the young women who were in the jail, and how they needed things like stamps, and how they still-- some of them still had a sense of humor.

This one woman told me she had a knife. And about four or five times, she looked at me really hard with my white hair and my general demeanor. And she was young and tough looking really. I've got a knife, she said. So finally, I didn't believe it. I didn't believe it.

And there were women around that ran the place. I said, you've told me-- this is the third or fourth time you've told me you have a knife, and I would like you to show me that knife. I want to see it. And then she started to laugh. And then we both laughed. And then we ended up really good friends. And I got her some stamps, but she couldn't write anybody. And that was what she needed was stamps.

MARY STUCKY: I have to wonder how your children reacted to all of this through the years, and how they probably continue to react?

POLLY MANN: Well, my two daughters are grown, of course, and live in California, and my son lives here. And I know how they felt. They just wanted me to shut up and go to the PTA and not make waves. And it's been very hard on them, very hard on them.

MARY STUCKY: So you had to deal with that.

POLLY MANN: Mm-hmm.

MARY STUCKY: You had to incur the wrath of small town Minnesota.

POLLY MANN: That's right.

MARY STUCKY: And of probably of public opinion here in the Twin Cities to some degree. The troops still roll, the tanks still roll.

POLLY MANN: Oh, absolutely Absolutely.

MARY STUCKY: So, in the end--

POLLY MANN: What's been accomplished? Well, who knows. Who knows. I really don't know. And I don't think I'm supposed to know. what would it be like if you could say, if I could say to you, well, as a result of this and this and this, I did that. I did that. I accomplished this. I accomplished that.

That isn't really very good for you as an individual to even think that. And I don't. There's no way you can measure what your influence has been but the same with you as a mother or the teacher. And I am content with a little bitty portion of something. I don't have to do it myself.

I do believe that once you've started on the journey of seeking justice and realizing that you do not have peace when there's such tremendous injustice, you don't fall away, you keep going.

MARY STUCKY: Thank you, Polly Mann. It was a pleasure.

POLLY MANN: Thank you, Mary.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: That was Polly Mann, founder of women Against Military Madness, talking with Mary Stucky. Our Voices of Minnesota interview series is heard most every Monday at this time as part of Midmorning. The producer is Dan Olson.

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It's 28 minutes now before 11:00 o'clock. You're listening to Midmorning on the FM News Station. I'm Paula Schroeder. Well, Minnesota Public Radio's membership drive begins on Saturday, February 10th. That is this Saturday. And during our week-long drive, we want to hear from at least 10,000 of you who listen to this station.

Your help in answering telephones is urgently needed as we once again ask listeners to pay for this station with a contribution. If you have a few hours to spare during the week of February 10 through the 16th, please call our volunteer line at area code 612-290-1441.

You'll get food and something to drink, as well as answering the telephones. To volunteer, call area code 612-290-1441 anytime. I was looking at the weather forecast just a few minutes ago and really got excited because, I guess, I hadn't been paying enough attention over the weekend to realize that the Weather Service is predicting temperatures into the 40s in southern Minnesota by the end of this week. Can you believe it? That's like a 100 degree temperature range within a week's time.

Right now it is 1 degree above 0 in the Twin cities, 18 below in Thief River Falls. That's pretty much the range of temperatures that we have now, but we are expecting temps to get up above 0 all across the state of Minnesota today. Mostly sunny skies becoming partly sunny by this afternoon.

Well, Minnesota has one of the highest numbers of interracial couples in the nation. So it's become almost commonplace, at least, in the Metropolitan area, to see an African-American man married to a white woman or vice versa. But in many parts of the country, particularly the South, interracial marriages are still frowned upon and can result in either person being scorned by community and family.

In the 1950s, mixed marriages, as they were known then, were practically unheard of because they were illegal in most states. It wasn't until 1967 that the bans were lifted. The family of Scott Minerbrook's white mother turned their backs on her after she married a Black man and refused to acknowledge their children. So Minerbrook grew up never knowing his maternal relatives.

Divided To The Vein is Scott Minerbrook's account of growing up in a biracial family in the 1950s and '60s, his resentment of his mother's family for abandoning them, and his ultimate attempt to reconcile his relationship with them. Minerbrook is a graduate of Harvard University and is a correspondent for US News and World Report, but this story is a very personal one, and he's here to talk with us about it today. Good morning, Scott.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Good morning. Thank you.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Thanks a lot for coming in today.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Thank you.

PAULA SCHROEDER: This story really started with-- you were writing a journal about your childhood?

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Yeah.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And it grew out of that?

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Yes. It grew out of the idea that I think that I had come to a place in my life that any human being comes to where they realize that the habits that they have of doubting or of rage or of anger, any of the negative feelings that a person can bring into their life because of limitations really didn't work for me anymore.

And I really began to see that, in some sense, that these limitations are things that are passed along from generation to generation. I didn't want them to be passed along to my children. I have two boys. And I saw that it was perfectly possible in the same way that I'd been infected with this racial animus and could very easily be passed along to my children.

I had a kind of opposite reaction. I mean, I always felt in some sense that if there was a question of superior and inferior, I grew up really thinking that it was the Black people in my family who were superior and the whites who were not really up to snuff.

PAULA SCHROEDER: After all, your white relatives had disowned you.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Yeah, and it was really a moral question. I really didn't think of race in a genetic sense at all. I was thinking race in a cultural sense. And one of the things that I tried to test and examine in the book is really what in a person's experience is racial and what is not. And, of course, there's tremendous room for ambiguity and for examining personal history.

So I really tried to go into the history of both my parents and their families and try to understand what it is that allowed, say, the Black people in my father's family to treat race in a totally different way, in a way that really affected me. I was not rejected by them at all. I was included in their lives to a large extent.

I mean, I think that as I've grown older, I've begun to understand that there were limitations there too, but certainly not the kind of outright cold and rather emotionally destitute rejection that I experienced in my mother's family. And I think that I also grew up with a sort of bias toward poor whites that I think many people share, that I share with many people. And I really wanted to go and investigate that and take a look at it and see if it was real.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Race is, of course, a huge question mark in our society, and we blame a lot of our problems on racism and on racial differences. And yet in reading your book, and I think that you would say the same thing, it is much more complex than just the color of one's skin.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Yes, it is. And I think that race is used as a kind of a cover, as a kind of a hall card people have, and people use it as a way of defense, and people use it to mask much deeper and more complicated questions, emotional questions. You know, how do you relate to the world as an individual?

What do you bring to the world? Do you use race to make yourself superior? Why would you do that? Why do you need race to make yourself superior? Do you believe in the myths? For example, if you're a Black person, do you believe in the myths that white people say against you, and how much rage do you allow at having been told those myths to spill over into every aspect of your lives?

It's tremendously intimate part of people's lives. And it's one of those emotions that kind of is a substitute for many, many different kinds of emotions. And that's really one of the themes that I try to examine in the book is the idea that people use race to falsely mask much deeper problems.

For instance, there's a chapter-- in one of the chapters I examine the relationship that my father's mother, my Black grandmother, had with my mother, and, of course, how both of them use race. The book is really, in a larger sense, is about the uses of race and racial absurdity.

And, for instance, my grandmother, my father's mother, attacked my mother on racial grounds when, in fact, it was really just the kind of jealousy that mothers have for their daughters in law. I mean, just completely standard stuff, but, of course, she had to bring race into it, and it became racial when it really shouldn't have been racial. But it was for them.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah. You talked about what could lead people to believe that they were superior because they were white. And you write about that, of course, in the book. And I think that this is perhaps one of the passages that struck me as really a fresh perspective on this whole question is, why do people use race to divide themselves from another? Can you read a section there that explains that?

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Sure. I'd be delighted to. Well, let me set it up a little bit.

PAULA SCHROEDER: OK.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Basically--

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yes, we have gone back to where your mother is from and all that.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: --my mother is from a small town in Southeast Missouri, a very special part of the country. It's extraordinary part of the country called the Bootheel of Missouri. And, of course, I had grown up with stories from the Bootheel of Missouri about her father, who was a gambler, a riverboat gambler, actually, gambled with Harry Truman.

And her family who were really poor whites from that area of the country. Southeast Missouri is part of the northern Mississippi delta so that it was really one of the most rich cotton growing parts of the country. And it's, in fact, going back to the production of cotton because cotton is doing very well as far as the prices are concerned.

So my father's people are bourgeois, elite, and elitist Blacks from the south side of Chicago who, of course, who had their own experience of racial segregation. My grandmother, my father's mother, was actually about 10 years old when the race riots of 1919 happened in the city of Chicago, which were among the worst in the history of the nation.

So both families really came to it from a specific point of view. I wanted to know my mother's people, as you said earlier, because these were the people that I really raged against. I really raged against what I consider to be their racism. And a lot of it was racism. A lot of it I found was not. It was much deeper than that. It was a sense of their fear of the unknown. It was their fear of being identified with my mother because she'd crossed the line.

So I wanted to read this short passage. "The smallness of Caruthersville, the pressures of small town life, the way a tiny place like this defines its winners and losers, the edifice of memory and its confinements, all this was palpable to me now. I couldn't have known my family before this, certainly not from the terrible distance of what I had taken to be racial animus.

And while that was certainly part of it, many other emotions were involved. I did not know these white people, their feeling of being abandoned by progress, their idea of pride, which took on racial tones partly because of their poor education. The seductions of grievance in a place where the insiders were truly in and the outsiders were truly out. All of this was an inducement to arm themselves with false racial values.

That's the only thing they had to separate themselves from their black neighbors to whom they were not superior at all. I felt for the first time the great blessing my mother had bestowed on me simply by leaving this place."

PAULA SCHROEDER: The seductions of grievance. Yeah, I think that we hear that often. It's a way of people these days too separating themselves from another.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Yes, I think that's true. I think that people operate from a perspective that they have to have the advantage. This is part of the American experience. It's part of the pioneer experience, but it's also part of people's everyday lives. So the question for me, and I think for many people should properly be, why do we need this? What is it about the past that we feed on?

And I think a lot of people, and especially now with the political climate being what it is with Blacks under attack, affirmative action, the programs that were supposed to help Blacks being under attack, many whites feel very strongly this feeling of the seductions of grievance. They feel that they've been left out.

And if you look purely, completely at the facts, you find that whites have never been left out, and yet the political situation, the quality of leadership that we have in America today is premised on the idea that whites have been cheated by creating opportunities for other people.

And these are all very dangerous concepts, I think. I think they're dangerous for many different reasons. But the divisions that we see are ethical divisions. They're not really racial divisions, I think. I mean, it is certainly true that Blacks live separately, are forced to live separately, but I think that there are much deeper ethical questions involved here as there were for me in the book.

I mean, for me the basic questions in the book are what are the things that stand between you and your ability to form common cause with other people and for you to love your family? What is the quality of your emotional life? What are the qualities of companionship and friendship that you require of life, and how does race shape that?

So I really took this trip, and I went back to Chicago and visited my father's family. And it was a good experience for me. I think everybody does it, but I guess, I was given the privilege of being able to actually write about it.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Right. Scott Minerbrook is our guest today here on The FM News Station. He is the author of a book called Divided To The Vein, which tells his own story of growing up in a family with an African-American father and a white mother, but also looks at the whole issue of race within that personal story, as so often issues are examined most effectively through personal stories.

Much of the publicity about the book has been focused on your mother's family's rejection of her and of her family as a result of her marriage to a Black man. And yet you also write a great deal about your father's family and their wrestling with the issue of race and almost trying to supersede race. You talk about them as being elitist Chicagoans.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Well, yeah, I mean, race is one thing for whites, and I think it's quite another for Blacks. And for my father's family, they were really extraordinary people and are extraordinary people. They were really achievers. I have two-- I have an aunt and an uncle who were both PhDs are PhDs.

One named Robert Lawrence Jr. was the first African-American to be chosen to fly in the Gemini mission in the 1960s. He was killed in a plane crash. So that dream was thwarted. And so their race became a real issue. In the south side of Chicago, Blacks were really forced during the 19-- really the turn of the century to be far more independent.

And after the Chicago race riots of 1919, they really began to withdraw into their own separate communities, not necessarily because they wanted to but because for their own self-protection. They began to use the elements of capital accumulation, of using politics to promote their own interests, and so on in the same way that whites always have. And so the result is that today, economically, the African-American community in Chicago, South Chicago is a tremendously powerful one.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Ebony Magazine, Jet Magazine.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Ebony Magazine, you have a publishing empire, and so forth, Johnson products. You have just a lot of attention to the questions of accumulating wealth. Well, this was certainly the case in my father's family. And their feeling about race was that white people were just not to be considered.

I mean, white people were out there, you got what you needed from white people, and they were the enemy. And so when my mother came into this environment, I think that she felt mistakenly that she didn't really understand the Black community at all.

I think she mistakenly thought that because she was in love with a Black man and was intending and did marry a Black man that she would know something special about the Black community, which she did not. And she wandered really as a racial innocent into this community, which completely paralyzed her.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, like you said, your grandmother, your paternal grandmother set her up--

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Oh, yeah. Sure.

PAULA SCHROEDER: --quite often.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Constantly. Yeah, I mean, and they admired each other as often happens in these kinds of situations. They were very much alike. And in fact, in some ways, they were sort of mirror images of each other. And I think that was one of the reasons why my paternal grandmother was so vehement. And she used race in this way to set her up, to make my mother feel that, what do you know, white girl? You don't know anything.

And, of course, my mother didn't know anything. She thought she knew. She thought that being free spirited and open hearted was enough. And she didn't realize that there's 300 years of history that she did not understand and that she could not understand unless she was willing to give up her racial privilege.

And I think that this was something that was very hard for her to do as it is-- you get down to basic cases with a family, what are you willing to give up? You have to give something up. And these were some of the dilemmas that she had to go through.

They treated her rough, but I think that it was as an education for her, and it was an education for me. I think that Catherine was an extraordinary, my grandmother was an extraordinary woman. She had been an editor at the Chicago's Black newspaper, The Defender, which was a vehicle of freedom really.

So for Black people in Chicago, the experience of race was something that you had to overcome and that you had to use every connection that you possibly could use to accumulate the resources that were necessary to take control. And, of course, they did take control with the election of Harold Washington but that was a long process.

PAULA SCHROEDER: So 11 minutes before 11:00 o'clock. We're talking with Scott Minerbrook whose book is called Divided To The Vein. You talked about your father's family beating up your mother, well, your father really did beat her up.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Yes.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And he used cocaine. He used heroin and yet was successful in his work. You ended up growing up in a suburb in Connecticut.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: That's right.

PAULA SCHROEDER: But did you look back, at what might have prompted him to act in that way? Clearly, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger on his part.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: Yes, I think that a lot of it-- I mean, one of the central themes of the book is what in your experience, or what in my experience, what did my parents experience where it was racial, and what was not. In other words, what is the true meaning of race. And a lot of my father's frustration came just very simply out of being a Black man. Many of the frustrations that I have simply come from being a Black man.

The problem, of course, is that one person's limitations is another person's inspiration. I mean, one person's sense of being told that he can't do can inspire another man. So the question for any person is, what do you do with the gifts? What do you do with what you have?

And I think that my father the nonracial aspect of my father's life as anybody's life had to do with his relationship with his mother. His mother had raised him-- actually, did not raise him. She had him when she was 15 years old and really not really capable of raising him.

He was passed around to relatives and had a very peculiar sense of his own awareness as a man. So--

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, he was raised by women who indulged him.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: And he was raised by hotly-- well, yeah, he was raised by hotly competitive women. I mean, fanatically competitive women who were determined, utterly determined that nothing was going to stop them, strong Black women. And his biological father-- my father was born out of wedlock, but he was allowed to have his father's name. They never married. And there were all kinds of caste peculiarities in the Black community in the south side of Chicago.

She, my grandmother Catherine, had passed for white several times in her life. So all these things weighed in on his experience and his choices. And, of course, you had these indulgences that were available after the Second World II. The mafia and so forth flooded the Black community with heroin, and it was something that he took advantage of.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah. Boy, we have just barely scratched the surface. And as I said, I think I said at the beginning of this that the story that you have to tell is much, much more complex than the story of a Black man married to a white woman. But if you want to read more about it, the book is called Divided To The Vein, fascinating story, very well-written too. Scott Minerbrook, thank you so much for coming in today.

SCOTT MINERBROOK: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.

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GARY EICHTEN: Coming up on Midday, a look back at the 1940s. Hi. This is Gary Eichten inviting you to join us on the FM News Station. We'll continue our series on the history of Black radio with a look at some radio dramas that were both exciting and enlightening.

Also, we'll hear the story of the Port Chicago 50, African-Americans whose lives were permanently scarred by a tragic accident during World War II. Midday begins at 11:00 weekday mornings on the FM News Station, KNOW-FM, 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And during the 11 o'clock hour of Midday, Gary Eichten will be talking to Secretary of State Joan Growe about voting by mail, and, of course, a special election coming up tomorrow in Stearns County to fill the seat of former State Senator Joe Bertram.

Time now is 6 minutes before 11:00. And Garrison Keillor is here with the Writer's Almanac.

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GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 5th of February, 1996. The feast day of Agatha, the patron saint of nurses. It's the birthday of Madame de Sévigné born in 1626, a famous writer of letters and diaries describing life in Paris in the 17th century.

It's the birthday of a famous lady bandit, Belle Starr born in 1848. She made a living rustling horses and cattle around Briartown, Oklahoma. The first attempt to use photographs to show motion was made on this day in 1861 by Dr. Coleman Sellers of Philadelphia.

He had a paddle with blades on which he fixed a series of still pictures that could be viewed by turning a cylinder. It was called a kinematoscope. It's the birthday of the biochemist Lafayette Mendel In Delhi, New York, 1872, who studied vitamins and proteins and discovered something in cod liver oil that he called vitamin A.

It's the birthday of the writer William S. Burroughs in Saint Louis in 1914. The grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs Adding machine, best known for his book, Naked Lunch.

The publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger born in New York City on this day in 1926. It was on this day in 1922, a new monthly magazine was launched called The Reader's Digest, launched by a former book salesman named DeWitt Wallace.

He was unable to find other investors, so he published the magazine himself on a shoestring budget with only about 1,500 subscribers at first, featuring condensed versions of articles taken from leading magazines of the day.

It's the birthday of Henry Louis Aaron, Hank Aaron, born in Mobile, 1934. He began his professional baseball career in 1952 with the Indianapolis clowns of the Negro American League. Was signed by the Boston Braves, played in Milwaukee, and then, in Atlanta, where, on April the 8th, 1974, he hit his 715th home run breaking Babe Ruth's record.

Here's a poem for today by Dana Gioia entitled "Guide To The Other Gallery. "This is the Hall of broken limbs where splintered marble athletes lie beside the arms of cherubim. Nothing is ever thrown away. These butterflies are set in rows so small and gray inside their case, they look alike now. I suppose death makes most creatures commonplace.

These portraits here of the unknown are hung three-high frame piled on frame, each potent soul who craved renown immortalized without a name. Here are the shelves of unread books, millions of pages turning brown. Visitors wander through the stacks, but no one ever takes one down.

I wish I were a better guide. There's so much more that you should see. Rows of bottles with nothing inside. Displays of locks which have no key. You'd like to go. I wish you could. This room has such a peaceful view. Look at that case of antique wood without a label it's for you.

Poem by Dana Gioia, "Guide to the Other Gallery" from his collection, "The Gods of Winter," published by Graywolf Press and used by permission here on the Writer's Almanac. Monday, February 5th. Made possible by Coles Magazines, publishers of Horse And Rider and other magazines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, you can keep in touch by giving us a call at our member listener services line. If you have any questions about what you might have heard on the program this morning, some of the names of the books, et cetera, call 290-1212.

And a reminder, coming up at noon today a documentary about Black soldiers during World War II as our series on Black radio continues. Midmorning back on the air, of course, tomorrow at 9:00 AM, I'll be here, and hope you will be, too. Tune in then.

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SPEAKER: On Mondays, All Things Considered, cataloging the state's plants and animals. If you don't know it's there, how can you save it? It's All Things Considered weekdays at 3:00 on the FM News Station, KNOW-FM, 91.1.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. It's 1 above 0 at the FM News Station, KNOW-FM 91.1, Minneapolis, Saint Paul. Twin Cities weather for this afternoon calls for mostly sunny skies and a high from 10 to 15 above 0. The overnight low right around 0. Tomorrow, a 60% chance of snow. It will be warmer, though, with a high near 25.

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GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11:00 o'clock, and this is Midday coming to you on the FM News Station. I'm Gary Eichten. In the news this morning, the Minnesota Senate is debating a bill today which would grant Minnesota voters a limited right to recall elected officials. Critics have charged that the bill, though, is too--