David Tilsen

David Tilsen

David Tilsen is a Minnesota activist and the great grandson of Arthur Le Sueur and Marian Le Sueur and a grandson of long time Communist Party USA member Meridel Le Sueur. Son of civil rights attorney Ken Tilsen and Rachel Le Sueur. Brother of Mark Tilsen. Married to Barb Tilsen.

Radical life

From David Tilsen:

I became familiar with political organizations for the first time. Ken Tilsen was on the front page of the paper. I began going to meetings of the committee to abolish HUAC, where I was suddenly somebody—Ken Tilsen’s son. At fifteen, I was planning rallies, designing leaflets and giving speeches. My introduction to being a political activist was a heady experience. I loved the attention. From there I jumped right into the Committee to End the War in Vietnam; a high school kid, hanging out with college kids. I became a draft counselor. I hitchhiked to Madison one summer to volunteer with the National Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

I went to Goddard College in Vermont—a political and hippy place in 1966— and stayed for two years, returning to Minneapolis in 1968. My parents were very involved in the McCarthy Campaign. I latched on to my Dad, who was the coordinator of the campaign for the southern half of Minnesota. We went to all the DFL conventions. I got into the intricacies of the DFL rules, fighting for proportional representation. Some places anti-war youth walked out and had their own convention. Other places they back-benched: went to the back benches in the same hall and had their own convention. My dad represented them all, and the back-benchers won. I went with him to the 1968 convention in Chicago. We were there before it started. I carried my Dad’s papers as he worked the inside represented people to the credentials committee, including the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, as he had also done four years earlier. We left the day before the convention started and watched the whole thing on TV.

I went to the U of M for a couple years. I didn’t like it. I took classes in math and theater. I met Mischa Penn who was the best teacher I ever met so I took every class he taught. He did this class called History of Racism. Almost all the black students on campus took that course.

In 1970, David Tilsen met Barbara Sandstrom. They bought a house in South Minneapolis with eight friends, named it Bread and Roses Collective, and lived communally as they worked together on political theater, the Twin Cities Women's Union, New American Movement, ending the war, creating a printshop and trying to mediate the co-op wars. The couple married in 1976.

Wounded Knee

From David Tilsen:

In 1973 my Dad phoned me with a request. He was getting calls about a growing number of people in Rapid City, South Dakota getting arrested and jailed. Would I drive him to Rapid City? He would sleep in the car, I would get a hotel and he would go to jail and see what was happening.

It was the third day of the occupation of Wounded Knee. The jail was full of Indians. My Dad said, “The Federal Court is never closed. Let’s wake up this magistrate and this judge, get them down here and get these people out of jail.” AIM leader Madonna Thunder Hawk, who became a life-long friend, said she never heard of Indians having lawyers before. “When Indians got arrested they went to jail.”

Our whole family became deeply involved in Wounded Knee. My mother was one of the leaders of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, WKLD/OC. There were close to 400 federal indictments coming out of Wounded Knee and we ended up with trials in North Dakota, Minneapolis, and Rapid City. Later, there were civil disturbances—the Government called them riots— in Custer and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, around the trials. Those were state charges. We won almost all of the federal charges, though some people who were on federal probation did go back to jail. There were some people charged with interfering with a civil disorder that were convicted, but they didn’t end up serving time.

There were treaty hearings because all of the cases, from the defense perspective, were based on the premise that treaty rights had been violated. Rather than have to argue the treaty in every trial, there was one big treaty hearing in Lincoln, Nebraska. We brought in all these historians and treaty experts like Vine Deloria. Leonard Crow Dog was there with his entourage camping in a neighborhood park. The judge ruled that while the US record with regard to Indians was terrible, it was up to Congress to rectify it. I thought it was a chickenshit decision. My younger brother Mark quit school, moved to South Dakota and never came back.

Jim Mullin lived at Bread and Roses, and created a print shop in our basement with found equipment. He taught all of us printing. We called it Christopher Robin's Printers Collective because we liked Winnie the Pooh. We did all the printing for the Wounded Knee Committee, AIM, Farm Workers organizing, the anti-war movement, and the coop movement. We met some friends who also had a printing business in their basement they called Haymarket Press. We were growing and our equipment was old; they had good printing equipment and we had good press operators so we merged the two, rented a storefront on 32nd and Cedar and opened it up as Haymarket Press. I managed it.

Eventually we bought a building on 35th and Cedar across from Matt’s Bar and it became a much bigger print shop. We became a union shop, did work for political candidates, and learned about direct mail, raising $40,000 a month for the Wounded Knee Committee to maintain offices around the country. My brother Mark and I did concert promotion for performers Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Harry Belafonte, and Willy Nelson when they did fundraisers for WKLDOC. I eventually left the print shop because I didn’t like how it was being managed.

Black Hills Alliance

From David Tilsen:

When the Oglala shooting happened in 1976, I lived in the area for eight months and served as the court-appointed investigator. Those defendants were eventually acquitted, though the case was similar to Leonard Peltier’s. Peltier was facing extradition in Canada and so he was not part of that trial. Had he been part of that trial, who knows what would have happened.

After that, a lot of us got involved with water issues in Western South Dakota. There were a high number of miscarriages in both livestock and people living around the Black Hills area. We identified it as connected to the uranium mining in the Black Hills that did not properly dispose of the tailings—radioactive waste from the mining process. The Black Hills Alliance that developed brought together white ranchers, environmentalists and Indian people. It was an unusual coalition, especially for South Dakota. There were similar coalitions developing around fishing rights in Washington State, so it wasn’t unique, but it was special.

Out of the Black Hills Alliance came the 1980s Black Hills Survival Gathering, a 10-day communing of thousands of people on a ranch near Rapid City. The Rapid City Journal said the Gathering was the third-largest city in South Dakota for ten days. There were experts from all over the world doing workshops on alternative energy and sustainable development.

Alida Dayton came for two days and paid a cab to wait in the parking lot, which got lots of comments, but we appreciated her. She was one of our major funders.

Tribal infrastructure

From David Tilsen:

After Wounded Knee, AIM had found itself in a better position on Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations to elect people to the tribal council and run people for tribal chair, but the question was what could be done to build a sustainable economy?

The first step in the development plan was to start a public radio station. My brother Mark committed himself to the project and I worked on fundraising for it. It changed everything. Every home had KILI Radio on. They did music, broadcasted tribal meetings, even did play-by- play for high school basketball. The second step was to support a college, beginning with a nursing school and then expanding. Today the Oglala Lakota College is flourishing and has some Masters’ degrees. The third step was to create the Lakota Fund to help entrepreneurs open up hotels, coffee shops, and grocery stores.

Mark and I created Direct Expressions to build funds for KILI Radio, Wounded Knee District School, and Porcupine Health Clinic.

Mark and I expanded Direct Expressions and it became our work for many years, developing into an award-winning, well-respected company. We did direct mail, broadcast advertising and political fundraising. We were part of Wellstone’s first election, which was exciting. We were hired by Prairie Island Tribe to organize the coalition against nuclear storage when NSP wanted to store nuclear waste from the power plant on the reservation.

However, it was the Native American entities—KILI Radio and the Oglala College—that kept us in business. In turn, we raised enough money for them to make them stable entities. The college’s endowment was large enough that they were able to stay open during the government shutdown when other colleges were closing. That is a source of pride. When we were ready to move on, we gave Direct Expressions to our Native American employees.

Direct Expressions worked on most of the early Farm Aid concerts, Honor the Earth with the Indigo Girls and Winona LaDuke, Willie Nelson, helped John Marty get the DFL endorsement for Governor, and were part of Paul Wellstone’s election to the Senate.

Pine Ridge

June 26 1975, there had been a gunfight about three miles west. Two FBI agents—Jack Coler and Ronald Williams—and a local, Joseph Stuntz, were killed. It was a terrible tragedy and people were sad and angry all over. [David Tilsen] was working for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Offense Committee WKLD/OC along with two other investigators and had been sent down to the reservation to find out what we could and advise the residents of their legal rights.

Hard Times Conference

In 1976 David Tilsen attended the Weather Underground and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee organized Hard Times Conference Jan 30 - Feb 1 at the University of Chicago.

Political connections

David Tilsen worked on Dean Zimmerman’s defense. He was set up by the FBI. He took a donation for the Green Party. In 2020 he worked on the MN Senate Campaign of Omar Fateh, and Ilhan Omar’s campaign.

David Tilsen and Mark Tilsen's company Direct Expressions were part of Paul Wellstone’s first election.

DSA Facebook

Members of the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America public Facebook group, as of March 12, 2017, included David Tilsen.