St. Paul City Council members took oaths of office on six different books

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
Updated ·3 min read
28
St. Paul City Council members took oaths of office on six different books
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

When the seven members of the St. Paul City Council took their oaths of office on Tuesday, not all chose to do so on a Christian Bible. Five of the seven were sworn in on books that held other meaning to them, from religious texts to academic works.

Ben Hovland, a photojournalist for Minnesota Public Radio, spotted the trend from his perch in the balcony of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, where each member of the youngest, most racially and ethnically diverse and first all-female St. Paul City Council was sworn into office, one after the other, by the city clerk.

Council Member Anika Bowie took her oath on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” the 2010 best-seller by Michelle Alexander. Some have called the work — an indictment of racial disparities in the criminal justice system — a moving precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement. Bowie has written and spoken at length about her father’s 2006 incarceration in the federal prison system for narcotics possession and the impact it had on her adolescence, as well as her experiences navigating that system from the outside.

Council Member HwaJeong Kim took her oath on “All About Love,” a 13-chapter meditation on the transformative power of love by the late poet and essayist bell hooks, whose pen name was spelled lowercase. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, the feminist author grew up in a working-class Black family in segregated Kentucky and went on to study at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Santa Cruz, publishing some 40 books of poems, essays and children’s literature along the way. She died in 2021.

Council Member Mitra Jalali took her oath on a binder containing the St. Paul City Charter. The home rule charter, which effectively serves as the city’s constitution, was adopted and approved by St. Paul voters on Nov. 3, 1970, and became effective June 6, 1972. Jalali, who was first elected in a special election in 2018, was appointed council president on Wednesday.

Council Member Rebecca Noecker was sworn in on a copy of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, which resembles but orders the Hebrew scriptures differently than the Christian Bible’s Old Testament. The Tanakh spans 39 books, beginning with Moses in 1440 B.C. and ending 1,000 years later with the works of Malachi around 450 B.C.

Council Member Saura Jost, who holds a graduate degree in civil engineering, took her oath on a copy of the “Steel Construction Manual,” considered the gold-standard reference book for structural steel design and construction in the U.S. The book has been in print since 1927, with updates and reissues about every five or six years. The 16th edition was published in 2023.

Council Members Nelsie Yang and Cheniqua Johnson each took their oath on a Bible. The Old Testament — the original Hebrew Bible — was written over the course of 1,000 years from about 1440 B.C. to 450 B.C. The Bible’s New Testament books were written by Christians around the first century A.D. Christianity became the dominant religion of the western world during the fourth century under the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine, who embraced monotheism, or the belief in one God.

Related Articles