Joe Selvaggio, social change agent who started Project for Pride in Living, dies at 87

 He effectively lobbied some of Minnesota’s wealthiest citizens to contribute to his projects: “You were just compelled to step up and do whatever Joe wanted to do.”

By Randy Furst

The Minnesota Star Tribune

September 21, 2024 at 7:39AM

In 1991, Joe Selvaggio stood outside his Project for Pride in Living house at 2516 Chicago Av. in Minneapolis. (Marlin Levison/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

In 1968, Joe Selvaggio, a young civil rights activist who had just resigned from the priesthood to work on social justice causes, got a job on the assembly line at a Honeywell plant in the Twin Cities. But he was aghast to learn he was making anti-personnel bombs that the United States was using in the Vietnam War, which he opposed.

“Here was this committed peace activist actually working on something that would maim and kill people in Vietnam,” Selvaggio wrote years later.

He quit the job. But by the mid-1980s he was supporting Honeywell’s efforts to buy and renovate housing in the urban core and praising the company for its contributions to the community.