The American Indian Movement was founded in July 1968 in Minneapolis by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, George Mitchell, and other urban Indian organizers, many of whom had first encountered political ideas while serving time in Minnesota prisons. Its first project, the AIM Patrol, shadowed police in the Franklin Avenue corridor to document and deter the beatings and mass arrests that filled the city's jails with Native people every weekend — within months, Indian arrest rates in the patrolled neighborhoods fell dramatically.
From street patrols AIM expanded to survival schools, housing and employment programs, and treaty-rights organizing, drawing on the militancy of the 1969–71 Alcatraz occupation. The founders' prison roots gave the movement a lasting orientation toward Native prisoners, and its confrontational style soon made it a priority target of the FBI.