#alanpage

This is Alan Page protesting in Minneapolis today. Alan was a Minnesota Viking, is in the NFL Hall of Fame and is a retired Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.

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Len Nelson

The photo below was taken yesterday in Minneapolis. It’s of an octogenarian man marching in protest of an often brutal and frequently illegal and unconstitutional ICE and Border Patrol immigration enforcement operation in the form of an unnecessary and fascist militarized federal government assault on his city, state and country.

On a frigid Friday morning, this old black man pulled on some long underwear, maybe some insulated pants, a couple of shirts and possibly a sweater, a pair of warm gloves, a stocking cap and some other winter gear. Gear which included a face mask — not to hide his identity from anyone or to escape culpability for unlawful and shameful acts like the ones donned by the masked and heavily armed horde of three-thousand semi-secret and frequently violent “police” agents who are have descended upon, disrupted and terrorized his community these last weeks. Nope. Just an actual Minnesotan wearing a face mask in winter — to keep from getting frostbite.

This old man went outside in dangerous subzero temperatures with wind chills reaching tens of degrees colder than that to join tens of thousands of other Minnesotans doing the same. To say to the corrupt Trump regime by their simple but noble presence, “We support the apprehension removal of undocumented violent criminals — but not that way. Not here, not anywhere and not ever. Because it is wrong and it is un-American.”

This man is Alan Page.

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For almost every year of the six decades of my life of which I have recollection, Page has been one of my heroes, first as an insanely talented football player for the Minnesota Vikings. I was six when he was drafted by “my” team in 1967. I was eight when he helped the Vikings win their one and only NFL Championship in 1969. I was ten when, in 1971, he became the first of only two defensive players to ever have won the league’s MVP Award. Page, like for many Minnesotans of the time, was my favorite player on a team stacked with great ones.

When I was a teenager I learned, either from the Minneapolis Star or Minneapolis Tribune newspaper (this was before they combined into one), or maybe from WCCO radio news, that Page was attending law school even while playing in the pros. I learned that he then worked as a lawyer for a private law firm outside the football season after he had graduated law school and earned his license to practice. I thought it was pretty cool. As I followed his remarkably distinguished legal career into my adulthood, even long after I had moved to Wisconsin in my twenties, my respect and admiration for the man continued to grow. He has been a distinguished voice of reason for a very long time.

There is no question that Page is a liberal. A moderate and measured one — far from a left wing flamethrower. The evidence of his career as a private firm lawyer, then as a prosecutor (including time as the Assistant State Attorney General) and his subsequent three and a half terms as an Associate Justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court, all show that he was fair and faithful to the law and to the state and federal constitutions.

In 1992, Page won his first election to the state’s highest court with 63 percent of the vote. In 1998, he got a record 72 percent. In 2004 it was 72 percent again. In 2010, he had 62 percent. Clearly, Minnesotans respect and admire him, too. Page retired from the bench in 2015 upon reaching age 70, the state’s mandatory retirement age for justices.

In 2018, he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed upon him by one Donald J. Trump. In his introduction of Page at the ceremony, Trump called him “a very special man” and praised his football prowess and attainment of a collegiate law degree. He read from a script, “In 1993, he became the first African American Justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court, where he served for more than two decades.” Then, in his usual clumsy way, Trump strayed from the prepared-for-him remarks and said, “That’s very impressive. What do you think? That’s a very impressive job. Really, it is. Thank you, Alan.”

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Page also demonstrated yesterday, through his willingness to show up not only as an engaged citizen but as one with earned stature from a life led with fierce commitment to justice, just how much Trump is so very wrong about America’s fundamental principles. He is a sterling example of principled opposition to tyranny and a warning to Trump and his goons that good people will go to the mat for the constitution and their rights and will not meekly acquiesce to the predictable but nonetheless shocking and cruel abuses of law and human dignity which now accompany our daily newsfeeds in this time and place because of Trump and his MAGA shock troops.

Alan Page hit like a tackle and moved like an end, then broke the old stereotype from the inside out. He reached four Super Bowls with Minnesota, won NFL MVP as a defensive tackle, and helped define the Purple People Eaters era.

Then he built a second life that dwarfed the usual retirement arc, law school, the Minnesota Supreme Court, and a legacy that never stayed inside football.