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."