Ken Tilsen: Justice for all

In a legal career spanning 57 years, Ken Tilsen has chronicled an era of social and political change. He has defended black men and women during the civil rights struggle, draft resisters during the Vietnam War, American Indians involved in the Wounded Knee occupation, farmers protesting high-voltage power lines and immigrants facing deportation.

He has been called an icon, a mentor, an elder statesman.

"Did anybody say I walk on water?" Tilsen joked last week. "Not quite. I found the rocks."

Tilsen, who turned 80 Sunday, will receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota on Thursday. The award is named for the late federal judge Earl Larson, a founder of the ACLU-MN.

Tilsen's family settled in St. Paul's Selby-Dale neighborhood before he started first grade. He graduated in 1945 from Marshall High School and served in the Navy aboard the USS Raymond.

Tilsen met his wife, Rachel Le Sueur, daughter of author and activist Meridel Le Sueur, in 1947 at St. Paul's old Prom Ballroom -- on a picket line to protest its refusal to admit black people. "That pretty much set off my career," he said.

By the time he graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1950, he and Rachel had two children. They would have three more.

Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1964, he made headlines when he refused to answer questions.

Tilsen joined what is now the Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi law firm and managed its St. Paul office before hanging out his own shingle in St. Paul in the mid-1960s.

The first case he considered significant enough to include in papers he gave to the Minnesota Historical Society involved defending black leaders who walked into a St. Paul sewer ditch and disrupted a construction project because it employed only whites.

"That case I don't think ever went to trial, but the result was that those contractors immediately changed their employment practices," he recalled.

During the civil rights era, the Tilsens opened their home to Rose Freeman Massey, a young woman from Mississippi they'd met when she came to Minnesota to raise money for a voter-registration drive.

With their help, she attended the University of Minnesota. In January 1969, she and other members of the African-American Action Committee staged a 24-hour sit-in at Morrill Hall. They demanded the university create an African, African-American studies department, that it recruit and give scholarships to black students and that the black community be in charge of the Martin Luther King scholarship program.

Tilsen defended the protesters at trial. Two of the "Morrill Hall Three" were convicted of misdemeanors; another was acquitted. The university eventually met all their demands.

"He's my Dad," Massey said of Tilsen. "He's an incredible human being. He stands on principle and he taught all his kids to do that, me included."

Massey, who retired after a 35-year teaching career at the Milwaukee Area Technical College, now works with students struggling academically.

"If they're going to have half a chance in life, they need to get an education," she said. "That's what Ken and Rachel did for me. I make sure I do something every day to give back."

During the Morrill Hall case, Tilsen met Bill Tilton, one of the "Minnesota Eight" accused of breaking into a draft-board office in Alexandria, Minn. "We wanted Ken; Ken was the best," said Tilton, who later shared offices with Tilsen. "Our cases were dead-sure losers, but he made us feel we had hope."

400 arrests at Wounded Knee

On Feb. 27, 1973, the town of Wounded Knee, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, was seized by followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM), largely to protest what they saw as a corrupt tribal government. The occupiers traded fire with the U.S. Marshal's Service for most of the 71 days they held the town.

In the end, more than 400 people were arrested, resulting in 275 cases in federal, state and tribal courts. This time, it wasn't the accused who went to Tilsen; he went to them.

"I got a call from a woman ... saying there's all these people in jail and ... no lawyers. So I ... flew to South Dakota, and there, a jail probably built for eight, maybe 10, people had about 70 people in it.

"So I went and woke up the U.S. magistrate. ... We began holding hearings about 4 or 5 in the morning. By noon, maybe 10 o'clock, we had cleared out the jail."

Tilsen was chief legal coordinator for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense and Offense Committee and attorney for AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks, who were charged with 10 federal crimes. After a nine-month trial in St. Paul, the case went to the jury. During deliberations, a juror suffered a heart attack or stroke and the judge dismissed the charges.

Tilsen defended farmers protesting a high-voltage power line from North Dakota to Delano, Minn. When utility companies proposed building the line, Tilsen twice took the case to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Eventually the utilities dropped their plan.

He rarely made much money doing social justice work, with one notable exception. When the power companies dismissed petitions to condemn land for the line, the court ordered them to pay Tilsen's attorney fees of $340,000. "A huge, humongous award," he recalled with a big grin.

Tilsen defended activists protesting farm foreclosures; members of the Honeywell Project being investigated by the FBI; P-9 union meat-packers during the Hormel strike in Austin, Minn., and members of Minnesota 33% (including future U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone) who fought to set up voter-registration tables at a surplus-commodity distribution center in Anoka County.

Hennepin County District Judge Mark Wernick and attorney and radio host Ron Rosenbaum were among many who worked at Tilsen's elbow early in their careers.

Said Rosenbaum, "In a time of specialization, Ken is one of the last experts on everything. He does not recognize defeat. That's a quality in a litigator that is really something special."

Said Wernick, "What stands out is how much he gave of himself and his time to work on these cases that he believes in. What it's harder to say and show people is what a fantastic lawyer he was, the results he got for people."

Tilsen's courtroom opponents were less effusive but respect him nonetheless. Retired Hennepin County District Judge Thor Anderson, a former federal prosecutor, said, "I have nothing but high regard for him."

Roger Miller, a lawyer for one of the utilities in the powerline case, called him "a tough opponent" and "a good lawyer."

Tilsen closed his law office in 1994 and continued the work he had started a year earlier as adjunct professor at Hamline University Law School, teaching litigation skills and running a law clinic.

He says he misses the excitement: "It would be wonderful if I could find a way at this point to be involved at some level, but there are lots of good, brilliant, dedicated people who are doing wonderful work."

Pat Pheifer • 651-298-1551

Pat Pheifer • PPHEIFER@STARTRIBUNE.COM