Civil rights attorney Ken Tilsen dies at 85

Ken Tilsen, a civil rights attorney and stalwart of liberal causes across the Midwest, died Sunday night.

He was 85 and had been suffering declining health for months.

"Ken was a stalwart of progressive Minnesota history, of progressive U.S history," said St. Paul attorney Bill Tilton, a former client, officemate and long-time friend. "He had just the greatest love of his fellow man, and there was no doubt in his mind he was going to spend his life helping people."

Tilsen was born in North Dakota, but his family moved to St. Paul's Selby-Dale neighborhood during the depression. He went to Marshall High School, and served in the Navy at the very end of World War II.

Tilsen returned and married Rachel Le Sueur, daughter of activist Meridel Le Sueur. He also attended the University of Minnesota and its law school. He graduated from law school in 1950 and joined the Robbins Davis and Lyons law firm, a predecessor of the well-known Robbins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi firm.

"If he'd just stayed in that law firm he would have been a very wealthy man," said his son, David Tilsen. "But he left that in 1967 to go into private practice because he was doing a lot of civil rights work, a lot of draft resistance work. He didn't want the work he did to reflect on his friends and partners in the firm. He wanted the consequences to fall on him."

But the impact of his work spread across Minnesota and the country.

At one point, his son said, Tilsen was defending about half the draft resistors in the state during the Vietnam war. He did civil rights work on behalf of students at the University of Minnesota, defended opponents to war protesters with the Honeywell Project and led the successful legal battle against a proposed power line across central and western Minnesota in the mid 1970s--a cause that helped make him a long time ally and advisor to U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone.

Tilsen rose to national prominence as one of the attorneys handling the federal cases stemming from the uprising on the Wounded Knee reservation in 1973. "He was the backbone of that effort," Tilton said.

His son, David, said Tilsen retired from private practice in the late 1990s, but continued to teach at Hamline University and help run the legal clinic there. He kept consulting and providing counsel through his retirement.

Tilsen is survived by his partner Connie Goldman, three sons and three daughters, and over 20 grandchildren and 47 great-grandchildren. His interment is scheduled for Wednesday at 11 a.m., at the Temple of Aaron Cemetery in Roseville. Plans for a memorial service are pending.

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