As our last two posts have illuminated, Minneapolis was seen as a bastion for civil rights in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet today the city is known for its racial disparities. A new study just ranked Minnesota the second worst place in the nation for African Americans. How did we get from there to here over the last 50 years? Or was the civil rights rhetoric of the mid-twentieth century all talk with no structural change?
Image is from the Minnesota Historical Society.
Today’s blogger is Heidi Heller, a senior history major at Augsburg and an intern with the Historyapolis Project.
Tucked among Mayor Arthur Naftalin’s files in the Tower Archives at Minneapolis City Hall is a letter written in 1962. Addressed to members of the Commission on Human Relations–which was charged with addressing problems of racial discrimination and conflict in the city–it warned that Minneapolis would probably see an influx of “Reverse Freedom Riders” right before Christmas.
Fifty years later, no one remembers the “Reverse Freedom Riders,” a mean-spirited publicity stunt devised by segregationists associated with the White Citizens Council in New Orleans. This group recruited African Americans who were interested in leaving the South, giving them one-way bus tickets and a promise that “northern cities will certainly welcome you and help you get settled.” Participants were unaware that the communities at the end of their journey were unprepared for their arrival. Intended to embarrass white supporters of the African-American freedom movement, this effort was the brainchild of George Singelmann, who sought to “expose the hypocrisy” of Northern communities seen as widely supportive of civil rights. Minneapolis–along with Philadelphia, New York and Chicago –was one of the cities targeted.
This program–which was funded by the state of Louisiana–was one of the nefarious ways that Southern white segregationists retaliated against the Freedom Rides, a protest organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge the segregation of interstate travel. Between May and November, 1961, racially-mixed groups boarded buses and traveled together through the Deep South. Greeted by police and angry mobs, the Riders risked their lives to illuminate the brutality of Jim Crow. The goal of the Riders was to use non-violent action to force a response from the federal government, which had chosen to ignore discriminatory practices in the South, despite two Supreme Court decisions that ruled these laws to be unconstitutional. More than 400 riders from 40 states ultimately participated in the Freedom Rides, including at least six protesters from Minnesota.
The year after the Freedom Rides, Singelmann and his cronies set out to demonstrate that the north was no more hospitable than the South for African Americans. They conceived the “Reverse Freedom Riders” program and recruited 200-300 African Americans to travel north.
The group targeted communities that had produced supporters of civil rights. It sent migrants to Hyannis, MA because it was near President Kennedy’s family compound. It sent folks to tiny Redwood Falls, Minnesota because native son Richard K. Parsons had worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure voting rights for African Americans in Louisiana. And in the winter of 1962–when the memo we found in the archives at City Hall was written–it focused on Minneapolis because of its association with Senator Hubert Humphrey, who had been the city’s mayor in the 1940s.
Singelmann asserted that “Senator Humphrey is the No. 1 exponent of civil rights in the nation. And we feel therefore, that it is fitting for him to have some of Louisiana’s fine Negro citizens as his dinner guest on Christmas Day.”
The White Citizen Council argued that an influx of southern migrants would show the gap between the rhetoric of civil rights and the reality of racial attitudes in the North. They selected participants they believed would “exhibit the Negroes as face-to-face examples of racial inferiority, fully justifying the philosophy of the segregationists.”
In both respects, this effort failed. Northern communities pulled together to help the people who became pawns in this segregationist scheme, providing temporary shelter and assistance. In many cases, the migrants used the free bus tickets to get out of the South and make a better life for their children.
This memo indicates that Naftalin and other city leaders were determined to thwart Singelmann and his scheme. They made preparations to assist the delegation from Louisiana. And as word spread, students at Carleton College organized a fundraiser to provide holiday meals for the migrants.
In the end, the riders never arrived in Minneapolis. But the city stood ready to ensure that Singelmann’s racist publicity stunt would flounder on the shoals of its obviously malicious intent.
Sources: “Mayor Arthur Naftalin’s Files – 1962 Commission on Human Relations,” Minneapolis City Archives, Reverse Freedom Riders Clip Flips, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Katy Reckdahl, “Reverse Freedom Rides sent African-Americans out of the South, some for good,” NOLA, May 22, 2011, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/05/reverse_freedom_rides_sent_afr.html,; “South Sending Negroes As ‘Guests’ of Humphrey,” New York Times, December 4, 1962; “594 Students Forego a Meal to Aid Negroes Sent North,” New York Times, December 7, 1962.
The civil rights movement fundamentally reshaped life in Minneapolis. By the 1950s, the city had cultivated a national image as a paragon of racial liberalism. Perhaps because of this image many Minneapolitans saw the civil rights movement as something that was going on somewhere else. They believed that Jim Crow was limited to the South and they were keen to support the freedom movement taking shape there.
For many Minnesota activists, however, participation in the Southern freedom struggle changed the way they viewed life back home, spawning decades of activism that would later change the face of this city.In 1961, a local group associated with the University of Minnesota organized to support the Freedom Rides, a protest organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge the segregation of interstate travel.Between May and November, 1961, the Freedom Riders used non-violent action to illuminate the brutality of Jim Crow laws. The protesters were trying to force action from the federal government, which had chosen to ignore discriminatory practices in the South, despite two Supreme Court decisions that ruled these laws to be unconstitutional. The Riders faced death threats, angry mobs, bombs, beatings and imprisonment when they announced their intention to travel in mixed-race groups on buses through the South.More than 400 riders from 40 states ultimately participated in this protest, which attracted six people from Minnesota in June, 1961.
Local activist Marv Davidov decided to join this small group after Students for Integration raised money to sponsor 12 riders and asked for volunteers from the community. The riders from Minnesota knew they were risking their lives as other demonstrators had been savagely attacked and even killed. For Davidov, the Freedom Rides provided an opportunity to demonstrate his core principles. The night before his departure he steadied himself with the mantra: “What do I believe? Am I ‘anti-racist’? Prove it.’
Only a couple of days after he left Minnesota, Davidov and the rest of his group were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi and eventually sent to that state’s notorious Parchman State Penitentiary. Prison officials were closely watched by civil rights activists and the federal government. Yet protesters still endured harsh conditions during their almost two months in prison.
When Davidov returned to Minneapolis at the end of the summer, he was a hero to the crowds that met him at the airport and attended a press conference he held with mayor Arthur Naftalin. Davidov used his experience to build support for the national civil rights struggle, speaking to groups across the state in search of funds and solidarity for the movement. This experience launched Davidov’s career as an activist. He was best known for his later work with the Honeywell Project, which protested the South Minneapolis manufacture of weapons that were used in the Vietnam War.
Here we have a newspaper clipping from Davidov’s imprisonment in Mississippi. And his mug shot, taken by Jackson police, who charged him with “breach of peace.” Both are from the (now digital) files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee, which was charged with tracking “racial agitators” in the state during the 1960s.
This week brought sad news of the death of Pearl Lindstrom, age 92, the most recent occupant of 4600 Columbus Avenue South. This tiny white bungalow in the Field neighborhood was the site of the ugliest racial clash in the city’s history.
When Edith and Arthur Lee bought this house in July, 1931, the neighborhood exploded in rage. During the hot summer days and nights that followed, a mob gathered. One eyewitness recounted:
I have never seen anything like it. Here were literally five or six thousand people, men, women and children, both on the curbs and sidewalks, just standing and waiting as near as they could get to this little, dark house…Six thousand white people, waiting to see that house burned.
The house didn’t burn, thanks to the determination of a group of black veterans who maintained an armed vigil after the police ignored pleas for protection. Arthur Lee was defiant as he demanded equal citizenship in the City of Lakes: “I have a right to establish a home,” he declared, citing his military service in World War I. “Nobody asked me to move out when I was in France fighting in mud and water for this country.” The Lees also drew vigorous support from a Minneapolis civil rights pioneer, Lena Olive Smith, a crusading lawyer and leader of the NAACP.
The mob did eventually disperse. But the Lee family moved after two years, succumbing to the ongoing hostility of the neighbors even after the immediate threat of violence subsided. The house passed back into white hands and at some point Pearl Lindstrom became the owner.
Lindstrom knew nothing of the conflict surrounding her home until the last several years, when neighborhood activists began to uncover this history. They worked with University of Minnesota professor Greg Donofrio and his students to document this episode and have Lindstrom’s house placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Lindstrom handled this community interest in her abode with grace and good cheer, demonstrating an empathy and openness to new understandings of the past in her ninth decade of life. Here she is, talking about the new historic marker:
We will miss you, Pearl Lindstrom. Thanks for being part of efforts to help our community grapple with one of its darkest moments.
Material for this post the Twin Cities Daily Planet obituary for Pearl Lindstrom as well as Maurine Boie, “A Study of Conflict and Accomodation in Negro-White Relations in the Twin Cities–based on Documentary Sources,” M.A. Thesis (University of Minnesota, 1932); Chatwood Hall, “A Roman Holiday in Minneapolis,” The Crisis (October, 1931); Ann Juergens, “Lena Olive Smith: A Minnesota Civil Rights Pioneer,” William Mitchell Law Review 28, No. 1 (2001).
This week I had the privilege of hearing the senior thesis defense of Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, an Augsburg College senior and history major who has worked over the last year as an intern for this project.
Kevin has been a familiar presence on this blog. Many of you have enjoyed his work on sewers, a topic that few of us realized could be so interesting. He has mastered digital tools that have allowed us to bring you our Hennepin Avenue panorama and our Washington Avenue Then-and-Now slider. Kevin has also shared his research on feminism, gay liberation and the battle over pornography that roiled Minneapolis in the 1980s.
For his honors thesis, Kevin wove some of the insights he presented here into a longer piece he called “The Battle of the Bookstores and Gay Sexual Liberation in Minneapolis.” It chronicles the conflicts between gay activists and the police department in Minneapolis between 1979 and 1985, when thousands of men were arrested for using pornographic bookstores to have sexual encounters with other men. These arrests galvanized the gay community to exert pressure on City Hall, where activists and politicians forced the mayor and the police department to stop the harassment of men who were using these spaces to explore consensual, same-sex desire.
This is history that matters, for so many reasons. First, it is critical for our community to reckon with the tragic effects of this police harassment. Arrests were a matter of life or death for many of the targeted men, who had not chosen to identify as gay. One of the most devastating stories uncovered by Kevin is that of the Reverend James Santo, who set himself on fire in the basement of his Hopkins church rather than face his family and congregation after his arrest in a bookstore on an indecent conduct charge. And many of these men were not only arrested, but also were beaten by police, brutality that was chronicled at the time by crusading journalist Tim Campbell in the radical GLC Voice.
This work also challenges a sanitized narrative of gay liberation, which posits that this movement focused solely on the right to be protected from discrimination and led inexorably to marriage equality. “The Battle of the Bookstores” makes the question of sex central. It illuminates how gay political mobilization was animated by the desire for sex that did not conform to heterosexual social norms. While the gay press gave generous space to this struggle, it was a topic that mainstream daily newspapers chose to ignore. Though silence on this subject literally meant death for some people, establishment journalists were at a loss on how to write about dissident sexuality for a wide audience during the 1980s.
And finally, after a week of the #pointergate controversy that illuminates police rank-and-file rage about body cams and the seemingly unbridgeable divide between officers and the city’s mayor, this history underscores both the difficulty and the importance of civilian oversight of law enforcement. While most Minneapolis police officers bring a devotion to public service to a dangerous and often thankless job, the department has frequently clashed with the politicians expected to be its watch-dogs. Contemporary police union leaders have sought to discredit Mayor Betsy Hodges, an outspoken advocate for police reform. In the 1980s, by contrast, the Minneapolis Police Federation focused its ire on police Chief Tony Bouza. “The Battle of the Bookstores” recounts how attempts to reign in rogue officers sparked a “Dump Bouza” campaign that labeled the New York City native a “carpetbagger” and a “faggot.”
For the last sixty years, the department has been dogged by often contentious relations with the communities it is sworn to serve. It drew national scrutiny in the 1940s, when inadequate and abusive policing of the Jewish community on the city’s North side prompted a group of rabbis to threaten to start their own street patrol. And perhaps most famously, police harassment and brutality in South Minneapolis inspired Native American activists to establish the American Indian Movement, which changed perceptions and policies towards Native Americans across the United States. The clash over gay-bashing in the 1980s chronicled in the “Battle of the Bookstores” is part of a longer history of the police and civil rights in the city.
Please join me in congratulating Kevin for all of his accomplishments. Through his senior thesis and his work for Historyapolis, he has already left his mark on the history of Minneapolis. This is merely the beginning of an impressive career that all of us at Augsburg will be watching with pride.
The illustration for this post is from the October 1, 1984 issue of the GLC Voice.
Winter always seems to take Minnesotans by surprise. Yet this seasonal change is rarely as dramatic as it was in 1940, when the region was hit with one of the deadliest blizzards in history. On this day in 1940–on the holiday that was known as Armistice Day before World War II–Minnesotans experienced a storm that instantly became the stuff of legends.
Minneapolitan Samuel Hynes remembered that “blizzards aren’t anything special in Minnesota. I was used to waking in the morning to see my bedroom window blinded by driven snow, used to walking to school leaning into the stinging wind, my face wrapped in a scarf, eyes closed to slits, lashes crusted with rime.” But the storm that took shape on November 11, 1940 was something different, according to Hynes and everyone else. “Long after,” Hynes wrote, “folks talked about it: ‘Where were you in the Armistice Day Blizzard?’ And everybody remembered, just as they would remember where they were on Pearl Harbor Day.”
The day started rainy and dark. “By noon the rain had become sleet and the wind was rising and rattling the windows,” Hynes recounted his autobiography, The Growing Season, which chronicled his boyhood in south Minneapolis. “I couldn’t see the houses across the street.”
Hynes knew something extraordinary had happened when his father told him not to shovel the sidewallk because they were “snowed in.” “Snowed in!” Hynes marveled. “Like Scott at the South Pole!”
When the blizzard subsided, Hynes stumbled through waist-deep snowdrifts, making his way through a still and frozen landscape to reach a friend’s house on the other side of Chicago Field. There he sat, listening to the radio for storm news. Duck hunters had frozen in boats along the Mississippi River. Trains had crashed. Families had died in stalled cars. “In the city thousands of buses and cars were stalled and buried in drifts. Streetcars couldn’t run: at the Bottleneck on Lowry Hill they slid backwards downhill. Fire trucks couldn’t reach fires. Power lines were broken and telephone lines were down. Plateglass windows in downtown stores were shattered by the wind and lay on the snow in fragments, like shards of ice.”
These dispatches, Hynes observed, were like hearing war news: “terrible things had happened, but somewhere else, nothing to do with us, sitting warm and dry in the sunlight, drinking coffee. Something vast and powerful had swept through like a great army, leaving death and destruction behind, and had moved indifferently on.” The storm claimed 49 lives. Today the Minnesota State Climatology Office ranks it second on the list of significant weather events.
This photo from the Hennepin County Libraries Special Collections shows Excelsior Boulevard–where it bisects Minnekahda Golf Course– on the day after the storm. Cars were buried in 15 feet of snow, abandoned by their owners at the height of the blizzard.
For an unvarnished view of municipal politics, make time this Sunday to head over to the Hennepin History Museum, where local author Erik Rivenes will be presenting from his new book, The Big Mitt.
Rivenes’ fictional account centers on character Detective Harm Queen, modeled after Minneapolis police detective Norm King, a professional gambler who assumed control of the Minneapolis police department at the beginning of the twentieth century. King was tapped for this position by mayor Doc Ames and his brother Fred, who decided to make the police department an extension of the city’s criminal world. King and his officers were instructed to monitor illegal operations in the city. Their goal was not to curtail these activities. Rather, they ensured that Ames and his cronies received a hefty portion of the profits from gambling dens, saloons, blind pigs, brothels and sundry swindles.
Under King’s direction, “some two hundred slot machines were installed in various parts of the town,” according to muckracking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who described the workings of the Ames administration for McClure’s Magazine as part of his Shame of the Cities series. “Auction frauds were instituted. Opium joints and unlicensed saloons, called ‘blind pigs,’ were protected.” King invited thieves, confidence men, pickpockets and gamblers to relocate to Minneapolis, according to Steffens. These criminals “were to be organized into groups, according to their profession, and detectives were assigned to assist and direct them.”
Rivenes has used this episode of the city’s history as the basis for The Big Mitt, which takes its title from the poker games organized by the Minneapolis police to swindle gullible card players. Losers or “suckers” who complained were thrown into jail or driven out of town by police.
In addition to reading from his novel, Rivenes will talk about the Ames administration, which he researched in the collections of the Hennepin History Museum.
Electoral politics can be frustrating. But every campaign season also provides a reminder of how voting is a sacred trust, secured through long struggle and great sacrifice. In Minneapolis, the women who were part of the 72-year struggle for female suffrage clearly gave up some of the critical comforts of life for the cause, as this hand-written menu shows.
Should a suffragette find herself downtown in 1911 and in need of nourishment after a morning of committee meetings, she could dine at the Suffragette Lunch Room, which was likely located in suffrage headquarters in the Essex Building. At a time when respectable women had few places they could lunch without a male escort, the Suffragette Lunch Room made it possible for middle-class women to remain downtown for a full day of activism. Without keeling over from hunger. And without being condemned as jezebels (or at least not for their lunch choices).
This menu makes it clear that these committed women did not take time away from their activism for the preparation of food. The fare at this pop-up restaurant was spartan. Diners could feast on potato salad and “dog- a la mode” (which I take to mean sausage instead of canine). They could dress their “dog” with beans, chili sauce, ketch-up and pickles. Buns and “sinkers” were listed separately. To wash it down, the women could choose either ice water (listed twice) or a demi-tasse of tea.
Lunchroom habitues were admonished with two other reminders:
“No intoxicated persons admitted.”
And, finally: “Watch your hat and coat.”
This menu is from the collection of the Hennepin History Museum. My thanks to Susan Larson-Fleming for drawing it to my attention.
Long after the final votes are counted, the political signs remain. The Gateway District in the heart of the historic city was a favorite place for campaign posters before it was finally demolished in 1963. This photo shows the remainders of the 1961 city election, which saw Arthur Naftalin, longtime aide to legendary politician Hubert Humphrey, unseat Kenneth “P.K.” Peterson from the mayor’s office. Naftalin was the first (and only) Jewish mayor in the history of the city. He would guide the community through the tumultuous years of the 1960s, when racial tensions were high.
This image is part of a treasure trove of color slides from the city’s forgotten Skid Row that team Historyapolis recently discovered at the Hennepin History Museum. Thanks to museum staff for giving us generous access to these unique sources. The concerted efforts of citizen researcher Rita Yeada and Historyapolis intern Heidi Heller–who worked together to digitize and organize the images– makes it possible for us to enjoy these images online.
Anna Romskog is a senior history major at Augsburg College and an intern with the Historyapolis Project.
It’s Election Day! Today, voters in Minneapolis will be going to the polls to decide on several statewide offices and a highly contentious race for the school board. Sixty years ago, it was the police department–rather than the school board–that was at the center of public policy debates in the city.
When legendary politician Hubert Humphrey decided in 1943 that he wanted to be mayor of Minneapolis, the city was, in his words, “a wide open town.” In a 1978 interview, campaign aide Bill Simms remembered that Minneapolis had “a dismal national name. . .Prostitution was flourishing. Gambling was obvious in all sections of the downtown area.”
Police raids like this one—shown in a newspaper photo from 1940—were common.
But they took place only when city officials failed to receive the payoffs they demanded from the operators of downtown gambling parlors.
Humphrey made vice and crime central to his campaign. And when he was elected mayor in 1945, he knew that he would need a strong police chief if he was going to carry out his promise to clean up the city.
Ed Ryan had caught the eye of the ambitious Humphrey well before he became mayor. Ryan wasn’t very popular in many quarters; he was head of the Internal Security Division of the Minneapolis Police Department and he’d been trained at the FBI to help keep tabs on communist movements and possible spies. Humphrey nominated him for the chief job, despite the strong opposition of organized labor.
Humphrey went to Ryan and told him “I want this town cleaned up and I mean I want it cleaned up now, not a year from now or a month from now, right now.” Humphrey promised: “You take care of the law enforcement. I’ll take care of the politics.”
Ultimately Ryan and Humphrey would be credited with cracking down on the corruption and vice that had made Minneapolis notorious. Humphrey used this success to launch his national political career, running a successful campaign for the United States Senate in 1948. Ryan also used this crusade as a stepping stone. In 1946, he ran for Hennepin County Sherriff. This broadside is from that campaign, which he ran under the slogan: “Keep the Rackets on the Run.”
Ryan was elected in a landslide and remained in that office for the next 20 years.
The Ryan campaign flyer is from the Hennepin History Museum. The photo of the gambling raid is from the newspaper morgue file at the Special Collections at the Hennepin County Library and was digitized by citizen-researcher Rita Yeada. Information for this post is from Humphrey H. Humphrey’s autobiography, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics. Other sources include interviews conducted with Ed Ryan and Bill Simms as part of the 1978 Hubert Humphrey Oral History Project, which is part of the larger collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.