In the years before Minnesota became a state, many women moved to the settlement that became Minneapolis with the idea that they were joining a New England village with a particularly invigorating climate. New England was regarded as the cradle of American civilization for many early inhabitants, who were hoping to use their experience in the timber industries of Maine and Vermont to create vast fortunes in what was known as the Northwest.

Yet muddy streets, rudimentary social institutions, extreme weather and exotic-looking people in unfamiliar types of clothing made it difficult to maintain to believe the hype of the city’s earliest boosters. The earliest female settlers had to strain to pretend they were in New England: they were constantly confronted by the fact that they were on the edge of American settlement, the border of what they regarded as savage wilderness. They were surrounded by evidence of the multi-racial society that had taken shape around the fur trade and endured for almost a century before their arrival.

The noisy arrival of the Red River carts every year –pictured here on Washington Avenue in 1858–was one of the events that most fascinated and exasperated newcomers who were trying to reconcile their vision of their new community with the reality of their environment. These oxcart trains had played a critical role in developing the state’s urban center along the Mississippi River. They were driven by mixed-race traders from the Red River Valley, who conveyed cartloads of furs hundreds of miles overland to the merchants near St. Anthony Falls. These traders exchanged pelts for cash and manufactured goods, which they brought back to their settlement in the most northern part of the state. The carts–which were constructed entirely of wood–were noisy enough to be heard long before they could be seen. Their arrival was always an event, signaling a commercial bonanza and a spectacle for urban dwellers.

By the 1840s, these drivers–who identified as Metis, people descended from both French and Native American traders–were  regarded as exotic envoys from another world by new settlers, who were increasingly unfamiliar with the multicultural melange of Minnesota’s old fur trade culture. Women in particular viewed the traders as unwelcome intruders. A woman who arrived in St. Anthony in 1849, who was identified as Mrs. James McMullen in 1914, remembered : “Whenever the Red River carts came by, I used to tie the dog to the doorlatch. I did not want any calls from such rough looking men as they were. Those carts would go squawking by all day.”

Perhaps even more disconcerting was the presence of Native Americans on the land that many settlers had expected to have been cleared for their arrival. “My mother was very timid,” remembered Mrs. James Pratt, who arrived in 1850. “The sight of an Indian would nearly throw her into a fit,” she remembered in 1914, when she was interviewed by the Daughters of the American Revolution. “You can imagine that she was having fits most of the time for they were always around. Timber wolves, too, were always skulking around and following the men, but I never knew them to hurt anyone.” Her memoir likened Native Americans to wild carnivores, dangerous beasts to be kept at bay from growing settlements.

Mostly, women remembered that they were too overwhelmed with the demands of survival to pay too much attention to the unfamiliar elements of their new environment, which was quickly transformed by the influx of new settlers. “I moved to the farm on what is now Lyndale Avenue North, sixty-four years ago,” Mrs. Rufus Farnham recalled in 1914. “The Red River carts used to pass along between my home and the river, but I was always holding a baby under one arm and drawing water from the well, so could not tell which way they went. I only saw them when they were straight in front of me. Women in those days never had time to look at anything but work.”

Oral histories are drawn from The Book Committee, Old Rail Fence Corners: The ABCs of Minnesota History (Daughters of the American Revolution, 1914). Photo of Red River Carts is from the Minneapolis Photo Collection at the Hennepin County Central Library.

March is women’s history month. Historyapolis is going to suspend regular programming to focus exclusively on women and gender for the entire month. And I’m going to be stepping back from the keyboard and inviting other writers to share stories, biographies and analysis that can illuminate life in the city for women. And how women made the city what we know today.

To kick off this project, I want to showcase two new books focused on Minneapolis that have women at the center of their complex and engaging narratives. If you want to know more about Minneapolis history, you owe it to yourself to grab copies of Penny A. Petersen’s Minneapolis Madams and Julie L. Davis’s Survival Schools. These books employ very different methodologies and are chronically separated by almost a century. But they have so much in common. Both books were published by the University of Minnesota Press. Both books are finalists for a Minnesota book award. Both books force Minneapolitans to question fundamental assumptions about their city.  These books have laid the foundation for the Historyapolis Project, which seeks to answer the call for more complex and challenging stories about the city many of us call home.

Davis and Petersen have many fans out there, especially among the readers of this page. For the uninitiated, you need to know that Davis and Petersen write about sex, power, politics, racism, colonialism and the development of the city. Petersen’s volume illuminates the history of the city’s red-light district and the madams who created this commercial empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Davis’s book looks at the innovative “Survival Schools” created by the American Indian Movement  in 1972 as part of their revolutionary agenda. She uses these schools–controversial pedagogical experiments–to explore complex questions of Native American activism, colonialism, genocide and urban history.  Both books bring to life colorful characters, some of whom you will meet later this month on Historyapolis.

It’s map Monday. Here we have another map from Calvin Schmid’s Social Saga of Two Cities, the demographic opus he published in 1937 with the support of the Minneapolis Council of Social Agencies. This chart shows the concentration of “Negro Population” in Minneapolis, circa 1930.

Over the last several weeks, I have traced the origins of residential segregation in Minneapolis, looking at newspaper accounts of racial conflict around property transactions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1920, the African-American population in Minneapolis grew from 2,592 to 3,927. In these years, new migrants settled largely in two neighborhoods: the near Northside and Seven Corners. These concentrations of black residents did not emerge by coincidence.

In previous posts I have written about what 1909 newspaper reports called “race wars” in Linden Hills and Prospect Park. These episodes show how segregation was created in large part by neighborhood activism, which served to keep African Americans from purchasing or renting homes in all white areas. Racial discrimination was not codified into law in Minneapolis. But it was omnipresent, shaping property exchanges in all parts of the city. The result was the clusters on this map.

In 1910, the African American community in Minneapolis was not a homogenous group. Internal class divisions complicated and even racial solidarity. Black leaders often stood ready to defend the rights of men like Pullman Porter William H. Simpson, who built a home in Prospect Park. But when William S. Malone– who was attempting to start a mission in the city’s seedy Gateway district–sought to purchase a home in Linden Hills, he was attacked by both whites and middle class blacks.

An interesting character, Malone continues to appear in the black press for years after the Canfield House incident. Charles Sumner Smith, editor of the Twin City Star and The Minnesota Messenger, rails against Malone in September, 1910, calling him a “political parasite” and leader of “renegades, bar-flies, and blind-piggers, who are bartering their votes for beer, cigars and money.” I’ve been trying to investigate more about Malone and his specific political affiliations, but his activity has been difficult to track. He appears again in the Star in 1912 under the headline: “Malone stripped of authority. Committee tears his official badge.” He had been in charge of managing delegates to a local Methodist conference, but having been found “in a state of intoxication,” was barred from attention the convention. I’m working to see if I can figure out why Malone was so despised by both white and African American Minneapolitans.

This post was written by Historyapolis intern Derek Waller, who researched the origins of residential segregation in Minneapolis for his January term project at St. Olaf College. Waller is continuing his research into this and other incidents, which he will present as part of a senior capstone paper.

 

 

In May, 1946, first graders at William Penn school hosted a party. The students at the elementary school–located at 36th and Penn Avenue North– served bread they had baked themselves, which they spread with butter and peanut butter for their guests. The hosts–who were white–were welcoming children into their classroom from the nearby Phyllis Wheatley settlement house, who were all African American. Besides showcasing the modest culinary talents of the children, this gathering had a higher social purpose. It was part of a broad city-wide effort to improve race relations in the community.

A small news brief accompanied this charming photo from the Minneapolis Times. The newspaper reported that this event–which was newsworthy enough to merit coverage from the media–was part of the “human relations training” given the children, who were coming of age in a city determined to shake its reputation for racial intolerance. Under the leadership of Hubert Humphrey, the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations sought to reorder “the pattern of social relationships” in Minneapolis, starting in 1946. With the direction of sociologists from Fisk University–including Dr. Charles S. Johnson–the Committee launched a massive “self-survey” of racial attitudes in the city. Hundreds of volunteer data collectors documented discriminatory practices in the city’s commercial, educational, industrial and religious institutions. At the same time, they established training sessions designed to help Minneapolitans overcome their racial prejudice.

Before Historyapolis researcher Rita Yeada found this image in the uncatalogued newspaper photos in the Minneapolis Collection, I hadn’t realized that human relations training was offered to children as early as 1946. These children—residents of the racially diverse Northside of the city–probably needed less instruction in interracial friendship than the adults who organized the event.

Only a few months after this photo was published, Minneapolis was named the “capital of anti-Semitism in America” by liberal journalist Carey McWilliams. But by 1948–when Humphrey called on the Democratic party to “walk in the bright sunshine of human rights”–Minneapolis would have begun to build a new reputation as a center for civil rights.

On December 3, 1920, the Secretary of the Minneapolis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People penned a letter to her organization’s headquarters in New York City. She was writing to request any literature available on “residential segregation. Especially court decisions.”

Two weeks earlier, this small chapter of the national civil rights organization had watched, with dismay as 200 residents of South Minneapolis gathered at a community center on 43rd and Pillsbury Avenue South.  The meeting was convened to protest “against the presence of Negroes or persons of Negro blood, as residents in the Thirteenth Ward,” according to the Minneapolis Morning Tribune article enclosed in the letter. Mrs. Hall elaborated on the situation for her New York correspondent. “White people,” she wrote in the letter above, ” have tried to keep members of our race from purchasing property in said ward, notwithstanding there are over an hundred colored owning property and have for years.”

Neighbors were agitated over falling real estate prices, which they blamed on an influx of African Americans. These activists had no way to know that Minneapolis had entered what would be perhaps the longest economic decline in the city’s history. Triggered by the collapse of farm commodities at the end of World War I, this slump would only deepen through the Great Depression. It would be more than two decades–after the end of World War II–before the city’s economy would revive.

In 1920, white Minneapolitans could not discern these larger economic trends. Instead, they focused their anxiety on what they saw as an obvious causal relationship between sinking real estate values and a burgeoning African American community. The newcomers had arrived in the city as part of the larger Great Migration, which brought massive numbers of African Americans out of Jim Crow peonage in the South to Northern cities. For these migrants, Minneapolis never had the allure of Chicago or Detroit or New York, largely because job prospects were so grim for African Americans in the Mill City.  But the city had difficulty absorbing even this small number of opportunity seekers, who settled in the most overcrowded and crumbling sections of town. Their quest for housing was circumscribed by the hostility of neighborhood groups like the one that emerged at 43rd and Pillsbury.

At the meeting on Pillsbury, neighbors appointed a committee of 12 to “make a check on the number of residents with colored blood and ascertain who had sold the property to them.. .The aim, as set forth in the meeting, is to prevent others from buying real estate, and to negotiate with those who are now residents, seeking their change of residence,” according to the Morning Tribune.

One member of this committee declared that “they know they are undesirable as neighbors and hope to make a great profit on their investment by forcing white people to buy them out to get rid of them.”

Mrs. Hall got only a terse reply from New York, which included a clipping from the NAACP’s publication The Crisis. This article, according to the staff member who fielded her request, “gives the decision in full in the Supreme Court of the United Sates rendered Nov. 5, 1917 declaring all segregation ordinances unconstitutional.” The law was clear. Cities could not prohibit African Americans from buying property in any neighborhood. But of course–as this and other neighborhood campaigns showed –Hall and other civil rights activists risked the wrath of the mob if they dared to transgress the often invisible racial boundaries laid across the urban landscape.

The newspaper quotes are from the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. The letter reproduced above is from the NAACP archival collection at the Library of Congress. It comes to me via Professor Ann Juergens, of the William Mitchell College of Law, who shared this document and so much more from her pathbreaking research on civil rights pioneer Lena Olive Smith.