Pictured Above: Doug Hall (left), Clyde Bellecourt (right)
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1970
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The LRC's Beginnings
Through the coordinated efforts from members of Black and American Indian activist communities, the LRC was founded as an alternative to the Public Defender’s Office in order to provide high quality representation for people who couldn’t obtain those services elsewhere. More specifically, Clyde Bellecourt from the American Indian Movement (AIM), Syl Davis - Northside Black community activist and executive director of The Way, and labor lawyer/human rights activist Doug Hall, worked together to found a law firm that was by and for the people. With the assistance of Peter Dorsey of the Dorsey and Whitney law firm, they gathered contributions in legal and philanthropic circles, and their respective communities, to start the organization. With this support, in March of 1970 they founded an organization that could provide client-centered, culturally sensitive, community-based legal counsel and social justice advocacy premised upon centering people of color: the Legal Rights Center
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Community Workers
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The LRC has always been a social organization first and a law firm second - something that is reflected in its core structure. One of the pillars of the LRC is to meaningfully actively engage people from marginalized communities. One of the ways in which the LRC addressed this value was by establishing the position of “Community Worker,” currently known as the Community Advocate/Investigator position. The roots of this groundbreaking approach had been established by AIM and The Way, both of which had previously worked directly with Doug Hall on pro bono cases, serving as investigators, locating witnesses, and finding suitable and culturally appropriate programs to help clients with needs beyond the courtroom. Therefore, the LRC founders invented the Community Worker position - previously unheard of in legal practice – to handle these very same tasks. Those hired at first (and many after) were strongly associated with AIM and The Way, and helped integrate the efforts of the LRC with the other culturally-specific institutions being built by AIM and the African American community. The Community Worker structure ensured that clients would place trust in their lawyers, a necessary component of successful representation, and not an easy accomplishment given the strong historical basis for distrust of the court system. With the growth of immigrant communities in Minneapolis, the LRC extended the coalition and hired new Community Workers, with the necessary additions to the job description of providing language and cultural translation in support of the attorney-client relationship, and delivering education about the law. To this day, our Community Advocates/Investigators continue to be the lifeblood of the Legal Rights Center.
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Notable Attorneys
An important element to the LRC was employing attorneys that did not subscribe to the idea of “blind justice,” but understood how systemic oppression has influenced the legal system. The founders of the LRC wanted lawyers from the community, lawyers that would understand the community’s needs, and lawyers that would be willing to fight on behalf of their clients full time. With these high expectations, and the LRC’s progressive hiring practices, it is no wonder that attorneys at the LRC went on to develop outstanding reputations - many paving the way for future generations by becoming “firsts” in their positions. The initial decade of LRC attorneys included Michael J. Davis, who went on to become the first African-American Chief Federal District Judge, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. In the same time period, the LRC employed Pamela Alexander, who later became the youngest and first African-American woman judge for Hennepin County Municipal Court, and first African-American Assistant Chief Judge of the Fourth Judicial District. William McGee, the LRC’s second Executive Director, was the first Black person to be appointed as a Chief Public Defender in Minnesota by holding the position of Chief Hennepin County Public Defender. His successor Keith Ellison was elected to the state legislature, U.S. Congress, and is now the Minnesota Attorney General - the first African American and the first Muslim American to be elected to a Minnesota statewide office.
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1990
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Restorative Practices
As criminalization and its accompanying devastation of communities of color hit new peaks in the 1990’s – with hysteria about “super predator” juveniles, and racially biased theory (later disproven) and practices such as pushing extreme enforcement of misdemeanors as a means to improve neighborhood safety and stability – the reliance on legal representation to protect communities against system excesses seemed to forever run uphill. In this atmosphere, the LRC joined the early advocacy for restorative justice alternatives controlled by the communities most directly affected by crime and criminalization. (The movement eventually led to a few small scale neighborhood-based projects that enabled some good alternative practices at the margins of the criminal justice world, but restorative justice has never been allowed to be structured as a form of community control, or challenge justice system business as usual).
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2000s
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Incorporating Family Group Conferencing
In the new millennium, the LRC developed its expertise in Family Group Conferencing, a restorative method well aligned with the professional skills of a legal organization, and whose purposes returned us to our early focus on defending family continuity and promoting culturally-specific support. Projects have included: supporting county efforts at family reunification after a child removal, supporting family healing in the aftermath of a juvenile delinquency adjudication for domestic assault against a family member, and guiding co-parents towards a plan for cooperative child raising.
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Click for the full report
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2010 - 2020
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Where We Are Now
Over the last ten years, the LRC has prioritized the need to demonstrate the effectiveness of restorative practices outside of the predetermined limits imposed by the juvenile justice system. Given the opportunity to simultaneously address education system disparities, the LRC adapted Family Group Conferencing as a positive and restorative response to significant violations of school behavioral standards, leading to an ongoing project with the Minneapolis Public Schools for which an extensive university evaluation demonstrated the model practice and paved the way for further utilization. To best emphasize the importance of integrating restorative practices within juvenile justice advocacy in all systems, the LRC reorganized its programs at the beginning of 2015, creating the Youth: Education, Advocacy, and Restorative Services program, alongside the long-running (but renamed) Community Defense Program. More recently, the Legal Rights Center has engaged in community-based efforts, such as supporting the Minneapolis community after George Floyd’s murder, and speaking out against the use of juvenile correctional facilities and the harms they incur.
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