Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins

Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins (1961- ), artist and politician. Andrea Jenkins was born male-presenting in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale and lived in what she later described as “some pretty rough places.” African Americans on the West Side of Chicago faced challenges like run-down and overpriced housing, a lack of employment opportunities, underfunded schools, crime, and police brutality, and all of this was made worse by the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King and then the assassination of local activist Fred Hampton a year later. Jenkins’ father was largely absent due to drug addiction and incarceration, but her mother was “very loving and very much concerned that we get a good education.” She became interested in poetry from a young age, remembering that “I’ve always been in love with words,” and this interest was amplified in first grade when Gwendolyn Brooks visited her class and proclaimed that “everyone can be a poet.” She was also taught by the poet Haki Madhubuti, who she described as “a believer that you must use poetry for social justice, and all Black artists should be using their art to uplift the race.” Throughout her childhood she struggled with her gender identity. “In many ways a lot of my life was really trying to hide from what I knew to be true inside myself,” she later recalled. “I played football in high school. I joined a fraternity. Even younger, I was in the boy scouts. Because, you know, I didn’t want to be a girl. I knew I was a girl, but I didn’t want people to reject me.”

Jenkins attended the University of Minnesota until her fraternity brother and roommate caught her being intimate with a man and outed her to the rest of the chapter, which expelled her from their home, forc-ing her to return to Chicago. She worked on Harold Washington’s 1983 mayoral campaign and began identifying as bisexual, thinking that her family would accept this more than the transgender identity that she felt internally. She married a woman and had a daughter, but when she divorced at the age of thirty, she finally came out as a transgender woman; “I just really realized that I can’t go on anymore, hiding the truth from myself,” she later recalled, “Hiding the truth from those who I love. If I am going to thrive in life, I have to come to grips with who I am, and I have to accept it.” Her family initially struggled with this but eventually accepted her; in her words, “people were willing to work through it, people stayed engaged. They did not banish me from existence, which is a lot more than what some families give.” She returned to Minnesota and completed her bachelor’s degree at Metropolitan State University, later earning master’s degrees in creative writing and community economic development from Hamline University and Southern New Hampshire University. After finishing school, Jenkins became a vocational counselor and entered the worlds of art and politics, doing this work in intersectional ways that, in her words, “is a tool for speaking out because it has the ability to transform people. I try to use my art to give agency and dignity to Transgender people and Black people all over the world.” In 2006 she became co-curator of the Queer Voices reading series, which eventually became the longest running LGBTQ reading series in the country. In 2010 she won the Naked Stages grant from the Jerome Foundation and the Pillsbury House Theater, using the money to create “Body Parts: Reflections on Reflections.” Her other creative work includes the poem collections Tributaries: Poems Celebrating Black History, Pieces of a Scream, and The T Is Not Silent: New and Selected Poems, as well as contributions to the anthologies Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, and Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride. Additionally, her visual art has been exhibited in numerous venues around Minneapolis. In 2015 she began working at the University of Minnesota’s Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, one of the largest LGBTQ archives in the country, and became curator for the Transgender Oral History Project. This has involved hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with transgender people, helping to expand the Tretter Collection beyond its previous focus on white gay men. “One of the reasons we take that approach,” she has commented, “is because transgender people have been undercover for so long. They didn’t have…artifacts and factual records,” she said. “We had to go out and collect those stories, digitize them and make them available online.”

Jenkins also joined the staff of Minneapolis City Council member Elizabeth Glidden, establishing the Transgender Issues Work Group and a Council summit that highlighted transgender issues. This work began in a time when an increasing number of Americans came to support same-sex marriage, LGBTQ representation in popular media, and other aspects of LGBTQ equality, while the number of African Americans in political positions also increased, even as this progress also led to a conservative backlash. Jenkins commented on this by saying that “Being African-American is being a political statement in our society, certainly being transgender is a political statement. Wearing my hair locked, has become a political statement. So if my body is political, if my identity is political, if my hair is political, then I must be engaged in politics for my survival, I need to be able to operate in that oppressive environment. Personally, I’ve been able to manifest a lot of goodwill and support for my family and community and colleagues, but that’s not the reality for most black trans women. So that pushed me into a sense of giving back, reaching back, making space for the people who don’t get to sit at those tables, to bring their issues to the forefront and advocate.” After twelve years as a Council aide, in 2016 Glidden chose not to seek reelection, and Jenkins ran for her seat. She later recalled that while running, “We didn’t shy away from my identity as a black woman, as a trans woman. I have lived firsthand the oppressions that others only talk about, only think about.” Her platform featured the slogan “Leadership. Access. Equity,” received assistance from a political campaign committee that she had co-founded to help transgender political candidates, and called for equity in public safety, transportation, housing, and other issues. She won the election with 73% of the votes, becoming one of the first black members of the Minneapolis city council and the first openly transgender black woman elected to any public office anywhere in the country. In her victory speech, she stated “As an out African American trans-identified woman, I know firsthand the feeling of being marginalized, left out, thrown under the bus. Those days are over. We don’t just want a seat at the table – we want to set the table.” 

Jenkins’ historic victory made her not only the representative for her predominantly black, low-income district but also the unofficial representative for transgender people all over the country. Even as acceptance of LGBTQ rights continued to increase, African Americans of all genders and transgender people of all races continued to face higher rates of violence at the hands of police and civilians, and this was amplified by the simultaneous election of President Donald Trump. In spite of this, she insisted that “I’ve got to be optimistic that things can change, right? I’ve got to maintain hope. That’s the only thing that has really kept Black people in survival in this country; hope.” She was elected Council vice president by her peers, helped create a community-based advisory committee on racial equity, and worked to revitalize businesses at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, only a few blocks from her home. It was there that in May 2020 George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin. She saw the infamous video of the murder only a few hours later, later remembering “The first thing was the callousness. The sort of relaxed cockiness. The sunglasses on the top of his head. Hands in his pockets. You know, it just reeked of racism,” she says. “Literally he knew he was being filmed…and he just didn’t stop. To me that goes beyond police brutality. It enters into the realm of just pure, unadulterated racism. And that, unfortunately, is at the core of our society. We can’t fight what we don’t name. We can’t cure what we don’t name. And so my whole point in declaring racism as a public health crisis is because racism is killing Black people.” In one of her first public addresses, she declared “Over the past seven days in Minneapolis, I’ve witnessed chaos and pain, prayer and pleas, anger and grief, and organized demands for systemic change. I’m exhausted. I feel emotionally drained. But as an elected official, a community member, and a black trans woman, I am determined to seek justice for George Floyd and for all the people who have been harmed by state violence. Justice for Breonna Taylor. Justice for Ahmaud Arbery. I’m in pursuit of justice. This is an emergency. I’m not talking about the coronavirus. I’m talking about racism. As all the universities in the world scramble to try to find a cure for the coronavirus, that same level of concern and action is needed to rid our society of the virus that is racism. I am calling for a declaration of a state of emergency for black people. Racism is a public health crisis…Systemic change would look like making sure that every dollar that we spend – whether as the state, the county, or the federal government – that it has an equity framework that is intended to help the most marginalized people…I know people are really distrustful of the government, and I think rightfully so, but we have to stay engaged. America is an experiment. We are continuously trying to figure out how to be Americans. And we have to stay engaged in the process. We have to continue to lift up democracy. Black women have been doing that since the beginning of this country, and I pray that that we have the strength to continue.”

She initially called for the Minneapolis police department to be abolished, but then shifted to a plan that would reallocate resources. “Defunding the police,” she declared, “means, in my mind, creating a new public safety mechanism that doesn’t require people with a gun to be able to respond to every need that our community has.” The city council did in fact shift nearly $8 million into new mental health teams that would replace police as the first responders to certain 911 calls, and it also created more transparency for law enforcement and reallocating nearly $8 million into new mental health teams that will respond to certain 911 calls. She has also advocated for national change, calling on Congress to pass the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. “The reality that there are more than two binary gender identities will be,” she stated, “widely accepted and widely realized by people in the world. It’s only a matter of time. This whole conservative movement…is a last gasp to hold on to power and authority.” She also lamented the hypocrisy of senators who voted to acquit Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection, saying “The United States Senate said that white supremacy is OK. That breaking the rules for white men is fine…But if you so much as sneeze in the wrong direction, Black man, we will kill you in the streets.” For all of this, Queerty magazine named her one of its fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people.” Shortly after George Floyd’s murderer was found guilty, she reflected that “I try to see the humanity in every person that I encounter and recognize that we are part of a universe. As a poet, a universe is one line in a poem: Uni-Verse. So we all have the exact same lineage, we are all part of the exact same verse. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. So first you’ve got to love yourself. So my spiritualness is about loving myself and recognizing what I call the ‘Creator.’ I know that deep spirituality is in each of us, and so if I love myself then I am loving the Divine Spirit and recognizing that that Divine Spirit is in each and every one of us.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.