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GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Good afternoon. It's 12:06 o'clock from the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom, I'm Greta Cunningham. Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson met with President Clinton this morning as part of the annual National Governors Association meeting. Carlson spoke out today in favor of school choice. President Clinton disagrees with Carlson's position.

State health officials say a rising number of cases of whooping cough in Minnesota are the result of better diagnosis. According to preliminary figures from the state health department, the 518 cases last year represent the highest number since 1955.

Vaccines have been effective in preventing the illness among children, but research indicates it's much more prevalent among teens and adults than previously believed. A study by HealthPartners pediatrician James Norton found 28% of people between 10 and 19 with a persistent cough tested positive for whooping cough.

JAMES NORTON: I think the thing that was the surprise to me, but as you think about the way the population lives, it shouldn't have been, was that there was so much more of it in adolescence than there was in adulthood. What's probably going on here is that every September, all the adolescents get back together in groups of 20 to 30 and cough on each other.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Norton says physicians are increasingly aware of the possibility that whooping cough is the reason for a persistent cough.

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman is expected to officially enters the governor's race this hour. Other candidates competing for the DFL nomination are former State Auditor Mark Dayton, former state Senator Ted Mondale, attorney general Hubert Humphrey, and Senator John Marty of Roseville.

The forecast for Minnesota calls for cloudy skies and scattered showers today, high temperatures in the 40s tonight. Some clouds in the Northeast with lows ranging from 20 to 30 degrees. Around the region at this hour, light rain reported in Duluth and 38. It's raining in International Falls and 39. In the Twin Cities, Cloudy skies, 45. That's the news update. I'm Greta Cunningham.

GARY EICHTEN: 8 minutes now past 12 o'clock.

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And good afternoon. Welcome back to midday here on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. February, of course, is Black History Month. And today on our Voices of Minnesota series, we're going to hear from two African-Americans who've really been pioneers in the area of public service in Minnesota.

Later in this hour, we're going to hear from Hennepin County Judge Pamela Alexander, Minnesota's first African-American female judge. First, though, we're going to hear from James Griffin. Mr Griffin was the first Black deputy police chief in the city of St Paul.

James Griffin has lived most of his 80 years in St. Paul, where he saw firsthand the discrimination against Blacks in employment, education, and athletics. James Griffin talked with Minnesota Public Radio's John Biewen about being the first Black deputy police chief on the St. Paul force.

JOHN BIEWEN: You joined the St. Paul Police force in 1941. Is that right? Now, people--

JAMES GRIFFIN: August 6.

JOHN BIEWEN: Now, people have said to me, James Griffin was the first Black cop in St. Paul. Now, that's wrong, by what, 50, 60 years?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Yeah. I was not. The first Black police officer in St. Paul was in 1881. His name was Lewis Thomas.

JOHN BIEWEN: You rose although you were a long way from being the first Black officer. You rose through the ranks, and I believe you were the first deputy chief, Black deputy chief in Minneapolis. When did you become--

JAMES GRIFFIN: No, in St. Paul.

JOHN BIEWEN: I mean, sorry, in St. Paul. When did you become deputy chief?

JAMES GRIFFIN: 1970, '72.

JOHN BIEWEN: And there's a story behind that, I believe. You had to fight a little bit to get that promotion.

JAMES GRIFFIN: I've been to fight for everything I got in the police.

JOHN BIEWEN: What happened?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Well, they gave an examination for deputy chief of police, Civil Service examination. I finished number one on the test. And they appointed the guy who was number two.

And I thought that was an injustice. So I contacted Doug Thomson, who was St. Paul's leading attorneys and asked him, would he take the case. I had just been assigned to the courts for a while, and I knew a lot of lawyers. And he said, yeah, he'd take it.

One thing I never will forget when he said he would take it after we talked a while and so forth, I knew I had the right guy because he said to me, Jim, he says, I don't make this statement very often, but he says, I'll guarantee you I'll win this case. So I felt pretty good about that. And he was right.

JOHN BIEWEN: Now, was it traditional to-- you were a sergeant at the time or--

JAMES GRIFFIN: No, I was a captain.

JOHN BIEWEN: OK. And was it traditional for the person who did the best on the test to get the job?

JAMES GRIFFIN: For over 30 years, the number one person getting on the job or on a promotion list always got the job. And so I was the first guy that they passed by, and that was what Doug Thomson said we're not going to use our race issue on this. He said, we're going to go that they broke from precedent.

We had a hearing before the Civil Rights for St Paul, city and state, and Civil Service Board and so forth, and it got to be quite a public issue. Papers were full of it. TV and radio were full of it, and people were starting to took sides. And people were starting to write into the opinion pages for the Pioneer Press and dispatch.

And believe it or not, most of the-- it was surprising, most of the people in those articles they were writing in the paper took the position that the guy that got the highest grade should have the job. So I felt pretty good about that. And we had hassled for about three months. And finally, they decided to make a fourth deputy chief.

And of course, some of the people said they would mean the job for me. But my lawyer says, Jim, a lot of people will say that. But he says, I know it and you know and most of the people know that the reason they made the fourth deputy chief so they wouldn't have to cut this guy back. So that's what happened.

JOHN BIEWEN: James Griffin, you were born in 1917, right here in St Paul.

JAMES GRIFFIN: Yep, July the 6th, 1917.

JOHN BIEWEN: Now, I was looking at some census data. The Black population of St. Paul in the '20s and '30s was 3,000 or 4,000.

JAMES GRIFFIN: That's right.

JOHN BIEWEN: About 1% of the city's population.

JAMES GRIFFIN: Correct.

JOHN BIEWEN: We've heard a lot about what it was like to be Black in that era in other places, in other places where there were a lot more Black people, particularly the Jim Crow South. What was it like to be Black in St. Paul at that time?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Well, of course, we as Blacks have always been discriminated against. But the one thing that happened in Minnesota, we were probably far ahead of the rest of the country on civil rights. And so, we didn't have segregated schools. You could go to the parks and library and all public places.

The toughest problem we had was in restaurants and hotels. Otherwise-- and of course, the schools were not-- they passed a law in 1868 there would be no segregated schools in Minnesota, the state legislature. So the things that we did around here in comparison to other places was far above.

But there were still some of the things in there, like the University of Minnesota would let you stay on the campus. They were discriminatory practices. I know they tried to keep Blacks from going to the theater. That went to court, and the courts ruled in favor of that Black person.

And there was a girl, there was a family of Murray's. They lived in the same block with us when we were small, and they were discriminated against the theater in downtown. And they took it to court, and the court ruled in their favor.

JOHN BIEWEN: What about the major employers in that era?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Well, the major employers in St. Paul were just like every place else. The employment problem has been a problem for we as Blacks for centuries. And the big companies, I don't care that it was St. Paul, Minnesota or Atlanta, Georgia, or New Orleans or Chicago or anything, they discriminated against in employment.

At one time, they wouldn't even let Blacks work on the line in Detroit when they were making cars at places like Ford and Chrysler. And this was a railroad center. And at one time, they used to say that one out of every family in St. Paul made a living from the railroad industry. But the only thing that we as Blacks were allowed to do in the railroad industry, we could be waiters and train porters on the railroads. And you could be a sleeping car porter for the Pullman company.

Clerical jobs and salespeople, we didn't get those kind of jobs. There was always a few token jobs, a few Blacks working in the post office. And the city and the state always had a handful of white collar workers and so forth. There was always a lawyer, a couple of doctors around, but the employment situation was the toughest.

And the biggest blow we had when the Depression came along, at one time, all the hotels in St. Paul used hired Black waiters. In about 1931, the hotels got rid of all the Black waiters and hired waitresses. And the only thing they kept was the room service waiters. They kept Black males on that.

But for years, places like the St. Paul, and the Lowry, and the Ryan, they had black waiters until 1930s. That was when the Depression hit us hard. And of course, the Depression hit the low person on the totem pole always gets hurt the worst. And it used to be a thing, and it still goes, we always the last hired and the first fired. So that was the way it was.

GARY EICHTEN: James Griffin, St. Paul's first Black deputy police chief. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota here on our midday broadcast. Later in the hour, we're going to hear from Hennepin County judge Pamela Alexander, who was Minnesota's first Black female judge.

Griffin has seen a lot of changes in St. Paul in his 80 years, especially in the Rondo neighborhood where he was born. Let's return to his conversation with John Biewen.

JOHN BIEWEN: Tell me about your family. What did your parents do?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Well, my dad was a dining car waiter with the Northern Pacific. And my folks came to-- my grandparents came here in 1906. And they lived on Rondo and Farrington when they first came here.

But you see, at that time, Rondo was mostly white. But there was a small black community in that area. And then as the thing grew, the largest percentage of Black people lived in the Rondo area, and that's the way it was. But we were in such a small number of groups. And I think a lot of people, as our population grew, as the years to come, the people who came here came from the south and came from big cities.

It was hard for them to understand. And most of them didn't understand how small our Black population was, 1%. And one of the reasons why you can tell that we had an integrated city a few years ago, there was an article written by a Black person too, that Blacks were only allowed to go to three public schools in St. Paul.

Well, that was not very accurate. So a fellow by the name of Dr. George Berry, who was the first Black to serve on the school board and a guy named Martin Weddington and I, we laughed about that. And we sat down and started just for the heck of it and test our memory.

We talked about in the '20s and the '30s where Black kids went to school. And we use elementary schools. And we came up with a list of 25. So let's go to 25 schools, you had to be pretty well spread out.

JOHN BIEWEN: You lived in the Rondo neighborhood.

JAMES GRIFFIN: I lived in Rondo neighborhood for over 40 years. And I was born in the house. I was born in the hospital. I was born at 587 Rondo.

JOHN BIEWEN: Now, Rondo has often been described as a very, very tight-knit community. Was it that simple?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Well, to me, that's not very true. All of that cohesiveness was in one group, the people who attended the churches and were interested in their homes and so forth, there was a cohesiveness in that group. But the people who were a little bit lower and then, of course, you see the people who were dining car waiters always felt superior to the people who were working for the Pullman company or the packing house.

JOHN BIEWEN: Now, you have been very active in sports throughout your life. You served on boards of directors of several youth athletic programs. You wrote a sports column for the St. Paul Recorder newspaper. James S. Griffin Stadium at Central High School is named after you in 1987. You were an athlete at Central in the '30s, I take it.

JAMES GRIFFIN: No.

JOHN BIEWEN: You weren't?

JAMES GRIFFIN: I was never eligible to play in the scholastic sports. I played mostly in the city leagues around here, and Hallie Q. Brown had football and basketball teams, and I played with them. But I never was-- I was on the basketball team, and I got dropped because of poor grades. A guy named D.D. Hahn was the coach at that time. He went on to be the dean of UCLA.

But I played on some of the teams that won city championships and stuff like that. And then a guy who used to play for University of Minnesota, a guy named Ellsworth Harpole, he took an assistant coaching job down the West Virginia State College, and I ended up down there. I played a little sports down there and--

JOHN BIEWEN: What sport?

JAMES GRIFFIN: --met my wife. I was on the football team. And I was on the squad. I wasn't a regular because the first year I went down there we were national Negro champions. Then the Depression years, they didn't have baseball at West Virginia State College. A lot of the small colleges in the '30s didn't have baseball.

We had a softball team, and I played on that. And we were undefeated down in our area. And I got to be a-- after I left there, I got involved as an official. And my first time, I ever officiated the high school game I was a sophomore, and I was in physical Ed was then on the campus. They had a high school on the campus. And of course, it was an all-Black school.

And the guy who had been the big star on the football team in 1936 had graduated and he was the football and basketball coach there at the high school there. So I'm laying up in my room one day in the afternoon, he came in there. He said, get up and get your clothes on. I said, for what? He said, I want you to referee a basketball game for me.

I said, you and Spike Corbin, knows a guy who lived right down the hall from me named Corbin, and he was from up in Massachusetts. I said, well, when? He said, right now. I said, you kidding. He said, no. He said, I know he got fouled up on the officials. So I went down this guy, and I went down and refereed this game and went real well.

And this guy saw this work and he hired us. And when they played the return game at Montgomery, West Virginia, and that was the first time in my life I'd ever been to a segregated high school. And that went pretty good, and they hired us for another game down there. So I got interested in it.

And then I jumped up and got married, ran out of money. In those days, money was short. And so I came back home. And I tried to start officiating around here. And I had a lot of trouble. But there was a guy by the name of Jimmy Lee. Jimmy Lee playground is named after him.

He was a-- we were older him, and he was a top official. And he opened the doors to officiating. And after that things got started. I followed behind him. A few years went by and Minnesota State High School League established a Hall of Fame here about 10, 12 years ago. And they voted me in the first Hall of Fame class. There was 10 of us.

There was another Black guy named Bill McMoore. He was the athletic director. He played football for Minnesota and was the athletic director in Minneapolis Public Schools. So he and I were voted in there. And since that time, they voted two other guys in there, two other Black guys in there.

And my hobby was Blacks in sports for years. And one of the things it was easy to keep up with the Black athletes in the Big Ten schools because most of those schools wouldn't let them play. They had an unwritten rule in the Big Ten until 1944, '45 when it was broken by the University of Iowa, no Black basketball players. A lot of people don't know that, but that's true.

But Minnesota had let guys play other sports. They played football and Baseball here at Minnesota. As matter of fact, the first Black football player was a guy named Bobby Marshall. And of course, most of the time the small colleges would let you play.

Now, to give you an example, Gustavus, Dr. George-- no, Lloyd Hollingsworth. He's the athletic director and the football coach there. We tell him when he first came back, he went off to certain-- he was a colonel or something in the army. And he said when first came back to Gustavus after he got out of the war was coaching, he had a couple of Black football players. They were going to go down to Kansas to play.

And he said, I told the manager to get down there and get us a reservation for the team and they got all that taken care of. And the guy said to me, you got any niggas on that team? And the guy said, well, we got a couple of colored fellows on that team. Well, he says, you can't stay at this hotel.

So he said, well, I'll tell you. The coach isn't going to go for that. And he said, what do you mean? He said, if those guys can't play, he said he is not going to stay at this hotel. And they had to go to 50 miles from where they were going to play to get accommodations where everybody could play because Lloyd Hollingsworth said, no, he wasn't going to practice that kind of discrimination.

And if all of the players on his team couldn't play, then they wouldn't play-- they wouldn't stay at that hotel. So there were always people who made a stand on that. And of course, the Minnesota years ago had done some things that weren't so hot either.

When my buddy, who I grew up with named Dwight Reed, played for Minnesota in the '30s. Well, in the '30s, Minnesota was always in the top 10. And they played the University of Texas and Dwight Reed was on the team, and they wouldn't let Dwight play right here and over there in Minneapolis.

JOHN BIEWEN: Because Texas wouldn't play with him?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Texas said that if he played, they wouldn't play.

JOHN BIEWEN: So the Minnesota coach kept him out?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Kept him out.

GARY EICHTEN: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. Today, we're hearing from James Griffin, St. Paul's first Black deputy police chief, who, of course, was also one of the state's first Black sports referees.

Griffin is an elder statesman among the Black people in St. Paul and Minnesota, and his resume of club affiliations and volunteer work is a long one. Here's the final part of his conversation with John Biewen.

JOHN BIEWEN: Now, you're retired, obviously, but you're keeping busy. How are you spending your days?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Well, I'm on several boards around town. I'm on the board of Minnesota Historical Society. I'm on the board of the Sterling club. That's the oldest Black men's club still in existence. I'm on the board there.

I have served on the board of a dozen different organizations. I was on the board of the Hallie Q. Brown. I was on the Red Cross, and I was on the board of Big Brothers, all those kind of organizations.

We first had a police union at one time. I was the vice president of the police union. And for about 20 years, I was on the board of the St. Paul Police Benevolent Association. That's a little private insurance, such of a deathbed that we had in the police department.

And I was on the Board of Education for 17 years. And so I was present at St. Paul Officials Association. And I was the commissioner of basketball officials in the Northern Intercollegiate Conference that made up of schools out of state, like Winona and Moorhead and Bemidji and schools like that. And I was the head of the official. I assigned all the basketball officials in that league for 14 years.

So I had a wide variety of things. When he gave me that job, assigned those officials in that league, that was unheard of for a Black guy having a job like that. And so I traveled around some places. I'd tell guys what I did in there. I'd tell the Black guys they wouldn't believe it. So those are the things that happened. And there were so many things that happened around in Minnesota that just weren't done in other places.

JOHN BIEWEN: You're a history buff. You mentioned you're on the board of the Minnesota Historical Society. You are one of those people that people like me, reporters, go to when we want to know something about, particularly Black History in Minnesota, but in St. Paul in particular. What would you want people to know about St. Paul history that they don't seem to know if you could name one thing?

JAMES GRIFFIN: Well, I think that they should know about early St. Paul because if they learned about early St. Paul, the other things will fall into place. And as I say, I think they should know that we had people doing things here in Minnesota that they weren't doing other places.

When the founders of the NAACP came from St. Paul. And we had a guy in the state legislature in 1899. We had a Black schoolteacher in 1890. We had Black policemen in 1881. We had a guy named John Quincy Adams, a Black guy who was assistant city clerk in 1899 in St. Paul.

And then back in 1966, we had the first Black elected officials in St. Paul. We used to have a job, and it's been abolished, now called the clerk of district court. And a guy named Weston Freddy Weston was elected clerk of the district court in 1966 with a landslide vote. He beat the guy. He ran and got in the finals 3 to 1. And at that time, it was about 1% of the people in Ramsey County were Black.

And when I was on the board of education, I used to lead the ticket all the time. And we ran for citywide, and I was appointed to fill an unexpired term of Dr. Berry. Then I had to run for election, and that was in 1974, I believe it was, yeah, 1974. And Cohn was a mayor. He only got 715 more votes than I did as a member running for the school board.

Well, the next year, I dropped the second. And the next two elections that I ran, I led the ticket and that was citywide. It wasn't my district. And so I feel pretty good about that because I used to go to the National School Board Conventions, and I used to go to the police conventions. I'm a life member of the IACP, the International Association of Chiefs of Police. I used to go to their conventions and the school board.

And one of the things that I found out in traveling around there, I met a guy in Texas. He said he was on the school board there. And he said, I was on the school board down there. I forgot the name of the town in Texas. He said, I was on the school board for two years before I ever made a motion to get a second.

So those are the kind of things. And I used to go to places and people would say to me, how did you get on the school board with that little small population you've got there? Same thing about deputy chief. They said, how did you get to be deputy chief with such a small black population? And I said, well, that's the way it the way it was.

And I just think that one of the biggest reasons for that was the small black population here. And then we didn't have a lot of transients. It was cold here. You didn't get a lot of transients come to Minnesota, Black or white, in the winter time. We still don't. And so those are things that are realities of life.

So I had my confrontations with them. But overall, I think I got along pretty well. And as I say, I think, as far as I'm concerned, St. Paul's one of the better places in the country. I don't say it's the best, but I'd say it was one of the better places. And I said, I'm pretty satisfied, and I feel fortunate to have the opportunity of growing up in St. Paul.

GARY EICHTEN: James Griffin spoke with Minnesota Public Radio's John Biewen. James Griffin was St. Paul's first Black deputy police chief. This is Midday on Minnesota Public Radio, and you're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interviews.

Minnesota's first African-American female judge was Pamela Alexander, a Minneapolis native who served on the Hennepin County District court bench for 15 years now. She talked with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson about juvenile justice and her decision at age 12 to become a lawyer. Conversation began with Judge Alexander's view of the Minneapolis Police Department's new policing strategy.

DAN OLSON: Police are putting into effect-- have put into effect their new policing strategy, the Code 4 strategy, which, among other things, calls for much closer questioning of not only the suspects, but people just standing around in a so-called crime hotspot.

One of the concerns, obviously, is that this is going to target young Black men and place them further in harm's way. Do you share that concern?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: I share a couple of concerns. But the police can go do any strategies that they want, but the court is going to have to figure out those strategies, and how it really plays out when it comes to people's constitutional rights. So we'll be looking at the cases to make sure that the stops were constitutionally permissible, that there was really probable cause in dealing with them as they come in on a case by case basis.

Obviously, though, until they get into court, we're not going to really know. We did institute, a few years ago as a result of the racial bias, task force report, jail reviews every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, because we noticed a pattern of people being arrested and released and being held for two or three days without ever being charged.

And so we do have the safeguard of the judicial review right away so that the judges can look at those cases to see if the people really are being held on legitimate charges. And with that safeguard in place, I'm not that overly concerned about this new effort because we do have judges reviewing those on a daily basis.

DAN OLSON: And if indeed, there are a lot more people arrested and coming through the system as a result of Code 4 is the chain of justice, the system of justice, able, have enough people to handle that, ranging all the way from the city attorney's office to support staff and Hennepin County District court system, jail space all the way?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Yeah, the courts can handle it. We have initiated additional calendars at times, given the volume. We're pretty well set. I think with the 58 judges that we have that are available to work all the time, and we do, it's not really a problem for us. We are thinking, however, of adding more judges in the juvenile area just because those numbers continue to increase.

And we have increased those numbers of judges very rapidly over the last five years because we went from having one judge, as you know, 10 years ago, to now having 10 judicial officers in the juvenile court, seven judges, three referees, and we are probably going to increase that again.

DAN OLSON: The criticism of the legal system is that the people arrested are being turned loose. Of course, that's the case. Some are not charged and never brought to court. But for those who are charged for those cases that make it to court, even some convicted, concern is still that too many people are being released, not put in jail to serve time. Is that a valid criticism?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: No, I don't think it's a valid criticism. I think that we do incarcerate people at a fairly standard rate. The thing is, though, is that I believe what citizens really want is maybe more say in what happens, which is why we're going to some restorative justice models.

We're looking at having a community court where people can come in and actually give their view about what happens to a particular offender, and how it's really affected the community. And it also gets the judges out of downtown and into the community, which I think is a real good outcome of that.

DAN OLSON: Yeah, you should say a word about restorative justice. I suppose there would be cynics who would say, well, that sounds like a slap on the wrist. How does restorative justice work?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: It works in a number of different ways. In the juvenile area, we're looking at circle sentencing, which would basically mean having the sentencing actually done in the community where the people who were harmed or anyone else who wants to come in can come in in the sentencing circle and talk about what they feel needs to happen to the offender, tell the offender how their actions affected the community, not only the actual victim, but whoever else in the community who may have a stake in that. And then tell the judge what they think is appropriate.

DAN OLSON: Are these hard core, big time criminals who are in the restorative justice process?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: We're picking them. We're starting slowly. We're thinking of property offenders first. But we can go the whole gamut, the whole range. The model that we looked at is one that they do in the Yukon in Canada. And they've had the full range. We haven't-- We're going to start a little differently than that. We're going to start with property offenders and then see where else we go to see how well the community responds to that.

DAN OLSON: Is there Damocles hanging over the offenders that if they don't pull their weight in the restorative justice part of it, they will go to jail?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Absolutely. That's always the-- judge will always have the sentencing authority to do whatever. If they don't follow whatever the community wants them to do or has been suggested to them, then there's always-- the threat of incarceration is always there.

GARY EICHTEN: Hennepin County judge Pamela Alexander. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interviews on Midday. Judge Alexander made headlines back in 1990 when she ruled that longer sentences for selling crack cocaine compared to powder cocaine. Those longer sentences were discriminatory. Let's return to her conversation with Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: One of your big cases ended in a ruling that Minnesota's sentencing law requiring longer sentences for people convicted of having crack cocaine as opposed to the powder form of cocaine is discriminatory. You were upheld in that ruling. That sentencing somebody to a longer sentence for crack is unconstitutional. That's been changed at the state level. Is that right?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: That's correct.

DAN OLSON: But we still have federal sentences that are longer for crack cocaine users than for powder cocaine users.

PAMELA ALEXANDER: That's correct.

DAN OLSON: Why hasn't that changed, do you think?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Well, because I think Congress and the Senate on the national level are a little harder to change, although the federal sentencing guidelines commission did suggest that they should change it and they rejected that.

However, the attorney general, who is also not convinced that is the right thing to do, hasn't really backed it, although she is now talking about making those sentences more equal. What we did here in Minnesota was, of course, raise the penalty for both powder and crack cocaine to be the same.

It didn't lower the penalty. It raised the penalty. So I think that people always get that kind of confused that, obviously, you're soft on crime or you're this or that. My ruling was just basically cocaine is cocaine is cocaine. And so if you go to jail for one form of cocaine, you should go to jail for the other form.

DAN OLSON: Why is it discriminatory, in your opinion, to have a longer sentence for crack?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Well, because in Minnesota, 90% of the individuals charged with possession of crack cocaine were African-American, and 90% of those charged with powder cocaine were not.

And it seemed in a state like Minnesota, which has such a small minority population, that there was something very wrong with that. And the Supreme Court agreed. And we've now raised the penalties. And what has happened is that it's equally applied to everybody.

DAN OLSON: We've put a lot of people in state and federal prisons for narcotics charges, and we made a decision to do that as a country, put people away for quite a long time for sale and abuse. Has it worked? Has it been the right course?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: I don't know. I think that a number of people could be served some jail time and then should get treatment, because we do have a lot of addicts that are there. We do have a lot of very young people. And the problem, though, as I see it, is that we're spending a lot of money in terms of incarceration on drug offenders, and we're not able-- we could put that amount of money into rehabilitating these people.

The problem is, is that they're going to come right back into the community, and they haven't been-- had any sort of rehabilitation in terms of dealing with their drug use or dealing with a drug problem or what led them to have the drug problem in the first place.

And then we really don't have enough room in our prisons for extremely violent offenders that we do need the space for. So it then becomes a balancing act between are we really putting away the right people, given the resources that we have.

And I think the public sometimes doesn't understand that we do have a limited amount of resources in which to house people, and it costs about $40,000 a year to keep a person in prison. And could we use those resources better. My view is that with some of these drug offenders, treatment and incarceration in local jails would probably work as well as incarceration in state prisons.

DAN OLSON: Have we reached the kingpins in our zeal to prosecute and imprison people who sell and use drugs in this country? Have we reached the kingpins, the people who control the drug trade?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: I don't think we've reached them. That's what they should really be looking at on the federal level and not these little street dealers. They should be looking for the big kingpins. They should be looking for the boats of narcotics that are coming into the country, the big buys, the people who are really the big dealers. They've caught a few. But there's a lot more out there. And they can get them just as easily.

DAN OLSON: I think, in your biography, I see you've been assigned now to every area of the Hennepin County bench or the district court. Is that right?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Just about every area. The only area I have not worked in is the mental health court.

DAN OLSON: Judge for 15 years.

PAMELA ALEXANDER: 15 years, yes.

DAN OLSON: And now currently assigned to the juvenile court system.

PAMELA ALEXANDER: That's correct.

DAN OLSON: In the area of child protection, will the kids, will the children now get more protection as a result of more of the cases being opened to public scrutiny?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Well, the problem is not particularly the quality. I think the lawyers do an extremely good job. What I'm hoping that will come out of this, especially the pilot project, is that people will see that we're trying to do a whole lot with very limited resources that children need a lot that we have to invest more in our children because they are indeed our future.

And I really think that people will see the gravity of the problems. Even though I've worked in this system now for going on 20-some years, I didn't have a real good sense of how immense the problems were. There are actually children who come into the system who have no families. I couldn't even grasp that concept of not having a family, not having a mother, not having a father, not having anything. And we have children like that.

DAN OLSON: How has that happened?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: We have some children who are coming here from other countries that are refugees that are coming in the country, and they have no mother and father. They have no grandfather. They have nothing here.

We also have kids whose parents are either dead or incarcerated, where these kids have no one. They're out there on their own. And the problem is, is that when you take a child that's been totally and absolutely abandoned, where do you put that child to get the love and the nurturing that they need? And we have very limited resources in order to find places for these young people to be.

DAN OLSON: When you say resources, a lack of foster families, a lack of homes?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: That's correct. A lack of people who are coming forward to try to help us care for these children.

DAN OLSON: I guess I didn't know that. I don't know if many people know that. I suppose the assumption is that we have lots of people because there's money behind this to pay families for foster care. Is that not enough of an inducement?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Well, the thing is, is that there's a perception that there's all of this money. Well, the problem is, is that there isn't all of this money. And we do have kids who have been in 10, 15 different placements. That's ridiculous. No kid should have to be bounced around from family to family.

And these children are coming with very, very special needs. There are some of these kids that are born physically handicapped, some of them that have to be hospitalized all the time, that they have to have respite care all the time. They have to have all kinds of different things for them to order to just get by. That takes a very special person to want to care for a child like that.

And then we get kids, and it's becoming almost commonplace. The kids that are born cocaine addicted. There's a lot of those kids out here. Those are very difficult children, even as infants, because they cry incessantly. They have all kinds of physical problems that a lot of foster parents are not willing to go through. Everybody wants to take a healthy child, but there's not a lot of people who want to give that extra mile.

Now, we do have some that do a phenomenally wonderful job taking care of some of these children, but the resources are not everlasting and ever out there. And the legislature does need to come up with some money to try to help us deal with these issues.

Then we have another group of kids, I'd say between 12 and 16, where these kids are not adoptable, which basically means that they're going to be wards of the state. What happens with these children?

DAN OLSON: Why are they not adoptable?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Generally, people don't want to adopt kids that are over 12. And they don't want to adopt kids with multiple siblings. And we have a lot of those.

GARY EICHTEN: Hennepin County judge Pamela Alexander. Judge Alexander says she herself grew up in a secure South Minneapolis home. Her mother was a preschool teacher. Her father was a bus driver. Judge Alexander says an assault of a friend convinced her to be a lawyer. She says white flight during urban riots caused many of her white classmates to leave in 1968. Here's the remainder of her conversation with Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: The white parents of the White students took off. They were concerned because of what?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Pretty much racial unrest at the time. It was just those times. And there was a lot of unrest, and people were very frightened.

DAN OLSON: What was your reaction to their departure?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Sad. These were a lot of my friends. There were people who I lived around and went to school with for many years. And I was very saddened by their departure because they weren't going to be a part of our graduation. You wanted everybody to be around you. And they were gone.

DAN OLSON: It was literally that sudden, that traumatic.

PAMELA ALEXANDER: It really was. It really was. We went from a fairly large student body population to a pretty small one.

DAN OLSON: A lot of listeners, of course, did not live in South Minneapolis at that time, so do not know, do not remember anything about the atmosphere, the environment. What was it like?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Well, we did have the National Guard in our hallways at school. I remember. I remember going to school wondering why they were there and who was afraid of whom and why all this was really happening.

And my parents were concerned and down at the school as well as a number of other parents were. Mine were very involved with what was going on with all of us and were there quite a bit. And I think that it was hard to understand. It was just hard to figure out why people just couldn't get along, and why it was necessary, and why anyone would really be afraid of us.

And it gave us a sense of trying to figure out who we were and to turn inward and look at ourselves a little bit, and then try to map our lives in terms of what we were going to do to give back to the community. And I think as I look at the people I was in school with and the strides that we made, basically coming from relatively modest beginnings, we actually did fairly well. And I think a lot of it was because we were able to focus on what our future was going to be.

DAN OLSON: Did you already, as a teenager, have an interest in the law, or when did that come about?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: I decided I wanted to be a lawyer when I was 12, and that was as a result of unfortunately, being a witness to the rape of my best friend, who was 13 at the time, and which happened right across from the junior high on 38th and Third Avenue.

And the only reason nothing happened to me is because they thought I was a boy. I was really thin, and I had on a baseball cap which kind of hid my hair at the time. And I went to court. I testified. I remember thinking-- I was very frightened by having to go in there and go through the testimony process.

But I was also fascinated by watching the lawyers. I'd never seen any real lawyers. I'd seen Perry Mason, and that was about it. And I was just very fascinated by the job they did and the things they were doing. The judge was extremely kind and very nice to me.

And I was thinking, I could do this. So I told my mother on the way home, I think I want to be a lawyer. And she said that's a good goal. You work toward that, and I did.

DAN OLSON: She didn't say a thing about it's very hard for African-American women to get into law school?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: No, she didn't say that at all. She told me, work hard, set that goal and work toward it. Then I was fortunate enough to meet an African-American woman lawyer by the name of Joyce Hughes, who lived in the neighborhood and was the older sister of a classmate of mine.

And she sat down and talked to me about what it was like being a lawyer and what I needed to do. And I said, fine. And she was always there to answer questions for me and was real instrumental in keeping me focused on my goal.

DAN OLSON: You weren't turned off by the justice system the first time you saw it. Then did your friend get justice?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Yes, she did. She did. However, she never totally recovered from that. Her family moved from Minnesota, and she's never returned. And I think part of that was just because of that experience and the fact that she felt relatively isolated. I've kept in contact with her, though, and she's been-- she's still a friend and just an all around good person.

DAN OLSON: Was it the case, in fact, that it was a close call for you getting into law school because you're an African-American woman?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: It was a close call. I was actually not accepted at first. At that time, my mentor, Joyce Hughes, was a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. And I called her and I said, oh no, I got deferred for a year. And she said, well, let me see what I can do to help. And about a week later, I was accepted. So I was very fortunate to get in.

DAN OLSON: How many others were there, African-American women?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: There were four. Yeah, there were four African-American women at the time. There were actually 10 African-Americans overall that were accepted at the U that year, and two of us graduated.

DAN OLSON: So what was your reaction among-- what was the reaction among your colleagues on the Hennepin County bench when they saw Minnesota's first African-American woman judge coming to work, looking for a parking spot?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Yeah. I think they were curious. I also think that-- I was also the youngest judge. And they--

DAN OLSON: How old were you at the time?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: I was 30 at the time. And so I was pretty young, although I had appeared in front of the majority of my colleagues. And I think they had the respect for my abilities as a lawyer. But I think that they said, OK, well, you prove yourself. And I worked real hard, and I did.

DAN OLSON: Later on, Senator Wellstone nominated you to be a federal judge, and you withdrew two years later. Do you think your decision on crack cocaine versus powder cocaine was that a big stroke against you in the eyes of some people in Congress or on panels in terms of how they felt about having an African-American woman be a federal judge?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: I think that it worked against me, yes. I think it was not a decision that was unfortunately thought of as a good one by the attorney general. The attorney general's office was the first office that I had to get through. And they were not happy with that decision, felt it was not a correct one and so did not look at me favorably.

But I also think overall on a seven-member bench, there was concern in the community that perhaps they didn't want to have two African-American judges on that bench. And so I got a lot of opposition.

DAN OLSON: Is it enough to say now that affirmative action has worked? We can put it away. We can put it on the shelf.

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Well, I wish I could say that. And I truly am an affirmative action baby. I got into college and into law school on affirmative action programs. And I think one thing that people don't understand is that all you do really want is an opportunity. Once you get in there, you have to prove yourself and work as hard as anyone else. And I don't-- I think that that's lost in the debate.

I would like to think that it made no difference and that you could get in because you had the proper skills. But that's not altogether true. There's always been preference programs. There's been preference in colleges for alumni's children. There's been preferences for people who are large donors. There's always been preferences. But when it comes to race, people seem to have a problem.

I'm concerned, especially in professional schools, because now as a backlash, there are some law schools that have no African-American students at all. And I'm not willing to say that there are none that are qualified to be there. I don't think that that's really the case at all. I think that there are a lot of qualified people. But now people are just going to shy away from applying.

And that really is too bad because I do envision in the next go-round, the next 10 or 20 years, there's going to be a large group of individuals who the doors are not going to be open for, the group that I would have been in that is not going to be able to make their lives any better.

DAN OLSON: For your two daughters, I gather they-- are they teenagers already?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: No, they're not. My daughters are very tiny.

DAN OLSON: They are.

PAMELA ALEXANDER: They're 9 and six years old.

DAN OLSON: So does the absence of affirmative action in some quarters materially affect their lives, do you think, in choosing what they want to do?

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Well, I think that my children will probably be in a bit better position because I'm in a better position. And I can actually afford to send my children to college where my parents could not afford. And I had to find other ways.

So the kids who are going to come from the working class families, like I came from, are not going to have an opportunity. And kids like mine who come from an upper middle class background are going to have the same opportunities as they would have had anyway. So I really think we're going to become very elitist and very classist in how we look at individuals, and it's not going to be a good thing.

DAN OLSON: Judge Pamela Alexander, nice to talk with you. Thank you.

PAMELA ALEXANDER: Thank you.

GARY EICHTEN: Hennepin County District judge Pamela Alexander talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson. She was Minnesota's first African-American female judge. Our Voices of Minnesota interview series is a regular part of our Midday program. The producer is Dan Olson with help from Sasha Aslanian.

That does it for our Midday program today. Gary Eichten here. Glad you could join us. We'd like to remind you that programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Shandwick. your company's reputation is an asset. Managing it is the role of Shandwick Public Relations.

Next week, of course, is precinct caucus time across the state of Minnesota, next Tuesday, to be exact. That's when people are supposed to go to their party's precinct caucuses and start the selection process, ultimately deciding, among other things, who the next governor of the state of Minnesota is going to be.

Well, tomorrow, as part of our Meet the Candidates series, we're going to be joined by DFL gubernatorial candidate Mike Freeman. He is the only candidate in the DFL, a crowded DFL field, who says that he'll abide by the convention endorsement process. The other candidates say they're going to move on to the primary.

Mike Freeman will be here tomorrow, and he'll have an opportunity to call in with your questions and comments. Hope you can join us. Thanks again for tuning in today.

LORNA BENSON: I'm Lorna Benson. On Monday's, All Things Considered a profile of Republican candidate for governor, Norm Coleman. That story on the next All Things Considered weekdays at 3:00 AM on Minnesota Public Radio K-N-O-W FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

GARY EICHTEN: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. We have a cloudy sky. It's 43 degrees at K-N-O-W FM 91.1, Minneapolis and St. Paul. It's supposed to clear off a little bit this afternoon. High temperature could hit 50 degrees. Partly cloudy tonight with a low from 25 to 30, and then partly cloudy tomorrow in the Twin Cities with a high 40 to 45.