Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/mary-turck/page/5/)
Mary Turck (maryturck@gmail.com) is a freelance writer, editor, teacher, and lifelong activist. She is the former editor of the TC Daily Planet, the Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG. She is also a recovering attorney and the author of many books for young people (and a few for adults), mostly focusing on historical and social issues. She lives in St. Paul with her husband, two daughters, and two cats.
Jeffry Martin said he expects absolutely no action from police or the City of St. Paul on the Chris Lollie case. “They [the police] think they’re 100% justified,” he explained. So there will be “no change in policy, no discipline of police.” Continue Reading
Ferguson police shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. St. Paul police tased and arrested Chris Lollie, a black dad who was waiting for his kids in a public space near their preschool. Beverly Hills police stopped, cuffed and arrested Charles Belk, a film producer and business executive, as he walked to his car, because he “fit the description” of a bank robber — “tall, bald head black male.” Continue Reading
Nicaragua is not sending waves of refugees to the United States. Instead, Nicaragua, along with Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and Belize, is receiving waves of refugees coming from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. What’s going on here? Continue Reading
Picture this: a silver bullet solution for the Achievement Gap, a single thing that schools can do to get all children reading by third-grade and college-ready by the end of high school. Continue Reading
St. Paul kids need you. With 38,000 students heading back to school, the St. Paul Public Schools Foundation is partnering with more than 20 community locations and all of the city’s libraries to offer everything from homework help to targeted math tutoring. Last year, they fielded 1600 tutors working with more than 6,500 kids. This year’s big plans include a medley of training sessions for tutors in September and October, as well as welcoming back hundreds of experienced and enthusiastic volunteers. Continue Reading
For decades, my dad complained that people didn’t understand how little of the food dollar goes to the farmers who grow the food. Every time the farmer’s price went up — for milk or corn or pigs — the grocery store price went up by even more. When the farmer’s price went down, the grocery store price usually didn’t follow in that direction. Continue Reading
Remember kaleidoscopes, where impossibly bright designs shift and rearrange as you turned the cylinder? I thought of those as I looked at the extravagantly colored and stitched quilts at the Minnesota State Fair. Hours of thought clearly go into not only the stitching and cutting, but also the artistic design and patterns. Whether they are painstakingly hand-stitched or machine-quilted, each one is a work of art.
Think that the number of students in school is declining? Continue Reading
Andy Griffith, the television sheriff of the fictional town of Mayberry, grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in the real town of Mount Airy, North Carolina. Last week, just after I visited Mayberry/Mount Airy, I listened to a PRI program about Baltimore’s new curfew, described as “one of the toughest in the country.” As I drove across the country, the radio also brought stories about the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the protests, and then the police killing of Kajieme Powell. Continue Reading
Do most white people want to just stop talking about race? That’s what this week’s Pew Research poll seems to show. While 80 percent of African Americans “say the shooting in Ferguson raises important issues about race that merit discussion, whites disagree, with 47 percent saying “the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.” Continue Reading