Sam Block’s Spirit: from Mississippi to Minneapolis

By Wesley Hogan
Originally posted on First Of The Month

“I’m not really a movement guy,” reflected longtime New York Times columnist David Brooks early in the second Trump administration. But a social movement, he said, “is what America needs right now.”

To understand why America’s heart requires movements, it helps to remember activists who help make it beat—like Sam Block. As a young Air Force veteran in the early 1960s, Block and other freedom riders worked tirelessly to register Black voters in his home state of Mississippi. Police responded with a campaign of physical terror. In official cruisers, they followed people home from voter registration workshops, pulled them over for made-up offenses, and beat those who insisted they had done nothing wrong. In late July 1962, police arrested a fourteen-year-old boy, forced him to strip, and beat him with a bull whip as he lay naked on the Greenwood jail’s concrete floor. “When someone came near, a buzzer was sounded, and a television set was turned on to drown out the boy’s screams,” historian Howard Zinn wrote.

This stunning cruelty ignited in Block a passion for justice strong enough to overcome his instinct to flee. He secured an affidavit from the boy, photographed his wounds, and delivered the evidence to the Kennedy Justice Department. Block turned the incident, as civil rights legend Bob Moses recalled, into “Sam versus the police,” organizing the voter registration drive around the case.

Block’s courage proved infectious. Local residents were emboldened; the number of Black citizens who came forward to try to register swelled, even as law enforcement escalated its violence. Greenwood police surrounded the civil rights office in the middle of the night. Moses called the Justice Department and was told to stay close and contact the FBI. Block crouched inside, whispering into the phone as armed men with chains gathered outside, before managing to escape through a second-floor window. Days later, the Greenwood sheriff warned Block not to be seen in town again if he wanted to live. Block calmly responded: “Well, Sheriff, if you don’t want to see me here, I think the best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave. ’Cause I’m here to stay. I’ll be here tomorrow, and the next day—and the day after that.” And indeed, he was. Block continued registering voters for the rest of the decade.

Block embodies the quintessential American spirit Brooks hopes to rekindle. Minnesota’s recent history may not repeat 1960s Mississippi, but it certainly rhymes. For almost a year now, no one has known when or where Americans would take a firm stance to protect the Constitution from Trump-era assaults. We now have an answer: Minneapolis has emerged as Ground Zero of the country’s 250th birthday, celebrating its spirit with action.

Since ICE’s execution of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Minnesotans have taken a Sam Block approach. They have built organizing networks to get groceries to people too afraid to leave their homes. They protect schoolchildren. They learn where ICE agents rent cars and stay in hotels. Borrowing from Danish and Norwegian anti-Nazi playbooks, they throw sand in the gears of Operation Metro Surge by surrounding ICE hotels, and slow-circling car rental sites when ICE tries to rent trucks. Birth center midwives hid a woman in active labor in an attic while ICE surrounded the building. Neighbors barricaded streets. Residents confronted ICE agents directly, reminding them that America stands for freedom, not tyranny.

Meanwhile, in a plot twist worthy of both Dan Brown and Toni Morrison, police chiefs in Brooklyn Park, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia publicly called out ICE tactics as unconstitutional. District attorneys joined forces, vowing to prosecute ICE agents in state courts from Philadelphia to Austin, Norfolk, and Tucson.

All of this is happening fast. And like Sam Block’s Greenwood, people are learning in real time how to protect one another. “People are showing up for each other in ways they’ve never done before, especially white Minnesotans,” reflected one young parent. “These new relationships between communities who’ve lived next to each other but haven’t known each other are going to last long after ICE is gone. It’s exponential and dizzying. It’s wild the things that exist at the end of every day that were barely a thought that morning.”

For many, the shock of suddenly moving into “encrypted platforms, Signal threads, flood lights, security cameras, safety watches, vetting, and sharing the least amount of information possible” has been disorienting—“all this just to get food to neighbors too afraid to leave their homes.” But, like Block defending a stripped and bleeding teenager, the danger feels unmistakably real. “ICE took someone on my street two weeks ago,” a St. Paul parent said. “They’ve trailed school buses.” Citizens could no longer stand by silently. They stood together—organizing safety watchers, providing food, protection, and support. One teacher talked a high school student through his terror as masked ICE agents surrounded the student’s home.

Influencers and celebrities have responded, echoing voices like Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, and Nina Simone: Kerry Washington delivered a three-minute civics lesson online; Lady Gaga and the Boss lifted up Minnesotans’ care for their neighbors. But the real American game is on the ground. “What is so important about the resistance in Minneapolis,” reflected Block’s SNCC colleague Courtland Cox, “is that people have taken the fight into their own hands, concerned not only about themselves but others whose very humanity is being denied.” Everyday Minnesotans have taken up Sam Block’s spirit—and made it their own in the fight to define what America represents.