Farewell Southside Pride. Thank You Ed Felien

 

This December, 2025, Southside Pride newspapers hit the doors and stores for the last time.

Ed Felien, Powderhorn neighbor, husband, father, grandfather, sometimes contrarian, chronic malcontent, often humorous, self-identified Maoist and consistently prolific writer, announced his retirement and the end of the community paper he has published for the past 35 years.

“Before I say goodbye,” he wrote in that last issue, “I need to acknowledge a debt I owe to the thousands of you who read this paper. For 35 years we have sent out our messages of radical peace and love in the hopes that someone might read those messages and go out and do something about it.”  

There are many opinions about Felien and many Southsiders who will miss the paper.

On Facebook, his grandson, Cooper Gatzmer, described the 87-year-old as "… a totally stubborn muckraking journalist with some extreme and hyper specific bias for leftist politics in south Minneapolis,” and a “really cool guy." 

“Ed should be beyond proud of the years of service his publication provided, and the thousands of stories he and his staff uplifted” said Ward 11 Council Member, Jamison Whiting. “Southside Pride has been my New York Times for my entire life, and is the only publication I read front to back. I am truly sad to see Southside Pride leave, but eternally thankful for the decades of local stories, little quirks, and memories the paper provided.”

Felien, a former Minneapolis city council member himself, represented Southside’s Ward 8 on the council from 1974 to 1976.  “I had run for City Council because Mark Salzer had been shot and killed by MPD officer James Decowski, and Lt. Ekblad had broken my friend’s thumb at a rally to protest police brutality,” He said about his time in city government.  “The City Attorney’s Office refused to help us, so I determined to run for City Council to make changes in the City Attorney’s Office.” While on the council he not only pushed for police reform but also, unsuccessfully, for municipal ownership of the electric utility and rent control.

Southside Pride was the longest running paper Felien put out, but it wasn’t the first.

In 1970, he launched his publishing career with a cooperative counterculture newspaper called Hundred Flowers that was produced by a group that lived in a commune.  

He ran unsuccessfully for state senator in 1980 and ten years later, in 1990 he started Southside Pride, he wrote, “in reaction to George H. W. Bush’s war against Iraq.”  

From 1997 to 2007 he also published the Pulse of the Twin Cities, a weekly alternative paper that focused on the local arts and music scene as well as politics.

In 2008 he published the book he authored called “Take The Streets!” about experiences protesting former president Richard Nixon's escalation of violence in Southeast Asia at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis.

One of Felien’s and Southside Pride’s longest serving employees was Elaine Klassen.

Before she worked for the paper she started getting it delivered to her door. 

“I read it with interest and described it enthusiastically to friends as a paper whose theme was health—health of individuals in their finances, relationships, their cultural development as well as the collective health of the community and the health of the environment and the health of the economy.”

She started working at Southside Pride in 1996 selling ads. Then she started writing regular stories that eventually became a regular column called, Spirit and Conscience. She stayed until the end and played many roles for the paper including as proofreader, copy editor and managing editor.  

“I am very fond of Ed and also admire him for being a figure, kind of legendary,” said Klaasen. “Writing, for him, is like turning on a faucet. He can organize everything instantly, and he's compelled to be an educator. I feel very fortunate to have been able to work for him for so long.”

For most of its existence the paper was delivered monthly to each household and business on the Southside, from 35W to the Mississippi River, and until 2023 there were three editions each month, Riverside, Nokomis and Phillips/Powderhorn.  He stop door to door delivery a few years ago and distributed it for pick up at commercial and institutional locations throughout the area.    

“I always trusted what he [Felien] was trying to do with the newspaper,” said Klaasen. “Although the tragedy of injustice here in our city and also worldwide made the paper very serious, there was also a buoyant side. What I loved about the paper was that you never knew what might show up in it. The range was very wide.”

The paper covered local, national and international news as well as art, culture, local businesses, schools and places of worship.

Each issue included community calendars, a religion page with events and places of worship listed and special editions that included sections on home improvement, schools, summer camps, food and restaurants and more. 

Felien, as opinionated as he could be, also welcomed, even thrived on, debate and discourse. He regularly published letters from people who challenged his views, and gladly responded to them in the paper.

“He talked about the newspaper as a way to provide education on a wide scale,” said Klaasen. “His passion for justice was always in evidence by the news he made available.”

Felien was well known for taking on a cause and not letting go.

“He wrote about repurposing the Sears building for what seemed like years and eventually the Sears building was repurposed,” said Klaasen. “Again and again, he wrote about the MPD execution of Terrance Franklin in a basement, unsuccessfully seeking accountability from the MPD. I personally appreciate his tenacious commitment.”

"It was Southside Pride's Lake Hiawatha coverage and editorials in 2017 that drove me to spend days researching and writing a white paper explaining why Ed and the 18-holes-only crowd were wrong on the engineering merits, which in turn led me to become much more deeply activated in local politics generally,” said Fred Beukema, Southside resident and professional civil engineer.  “Since then, I've learned more about Ed's whole project with Southside Pride, and I've come to admire his commitment to his principles, especially racial justice and opposition to war. He is still wrong about the golf course, though.” 

In the last piece he wrote for Southside Pride Felien used most of the space to share three “regrettable failures.” One was not convincing public officials to take up the case of the police killing of Terrace Franklin, another was that the city never fully explained “umbrella man” how the peaceful protest after George Floyd was killed turned into riots,  and the last was not finding another solution to the flooding associated with Lake Hiawatha.

Felien was proud of the Southside. The masthead of every issue said “we are proud of the racial and cultural diversity of the Southside, and we oppose racism and other efforts to keep us apart as a community.”  

Klaasen couldn’t imagine Southside Pride without Felien. “He, himself, was the paper,” she said. “Without Ed, it wouldn’t be Southside Pride.”

Moving forward, Hennepin County will be hosting the paper’s website so many past issues will be available online.   

As one of thousands of readers of the paper; one of the many who were written about in it, and for a time wrote for it, I offer my gratitude to Felien and all the Southside Pride staff. They helped us know ourselves better and pushed us to do and be better. Thank you for the radical peace and love you shared. May it be with you wherever you go from here.