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A documentary about writer and activist Meridel LeSueur, titled “My People Are My Home,” is featured at the next Labor Movie Night Tuesday, Aug. 1, at 7 p.m. at the East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, St. Paul.
The program is free and open to all.
The 45-minute documentary, made in 1976 by a Twin Cities women’s film collective, follows the text of several of LeSueur’s writings, woven with images of Midwestern people, particularly working class women. It captures and represents her work with the artistic depth and edge it deserves.
Neala Schleuning, a member of the women’s collective that made the film, will introduce it and lead the post-film discussion. Schleuning was a founder of the Women’s Studies Department at Mankato State University and is the author of several books including Women, Community and the Hormel Strike of 1985-1986 and America: Song We Sang Without Knowing – The Life and Ideas of Meridel LeSueur.
“For more than seventy years, the Minnesota-based writer and activist Meridel Le Sueur was a voice for oppressed peoples worldwide,” according to an article in MNopedia by Schleuning. “Beginning in the 1920s, she championed the struggles of workers against the capitalist economy, the efforts of women to find their voices and their power, the rights of American Indians to their lands and their cultures, and environmentalist causes.”
LeSueur’s writings included The Girl, a 1939 novel that documented the lives of working-class people in St. Paul at the end of Prohibition.
The Labor Movie Night is sponsored by the East Side Freedom Library with several partners, including the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation and AFSCME Local 3800.