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Episode 1 — Reporter Eric Roper moves into his 113-year-old house and finds an irresistible piece of history that sends him down a rabbit hole like no other. It takes him back in time to the Civil War and across the Midwest to uncover the mysterious origins of two of the former owners of his home – Harry and Clementine Robinson.

For documents, photos and other source material related to this episode, go to: https://www.startribune.com/ghost-of-a-chance-podcast-episode-1-guide/601204915

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Tiffany Gill, Eric, Marvel Cook, Melissa Townsend, Chris Phillips, News, Resmaa Menakem, Brandon Jones, Jeff Ralph, Raymond Winfred, Bob Harris, Gwen, Sherito Mosley Mitchell

Melissa Townsend  00:06

It all started when a man named Eric Roper bought an old house in South Minneapolis. It was March of 2020.

 

Eric  00:12

And we all know kind of what’s happening in March 2020 we’re all going to be locked in our homes now for quite a while.

 

Melissa Townsend  00:18

It was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and he was really curious about who lived there before him.

 

Eric  00:24

Because I’m interested in local history. I love going down history rabbit holes.

 

Melissa Townsend  00:28

So he started googling.

 

Eric  00:30

And at some point, I stumble across a website, and this website had a map showing that there was a group of black families who lived in and around my neighborhood in southwest Minneapolis in the early 20th century, and then by 1940 almost all of those families are gone. And when I look closer at this map, I can see that one of these families lived in my house. Their names were Harry and Clementine Robinson.

 

Melissa Townsend  00:59

They were a black couple who bought his home back in 1917 for a little perspective, that’s just as the US was entering World War One. Now, Eric is white, and he had never really thought about it before, but his neighborhood is pretty white too, and he started wondering what happened in this black couple and all these black families who disappeared from the map. Eric Roper is a reporter at the Minnesota Star Tribune newspaper, so he put his reporting skills to work to try and learn everything he could about Harry and Clementine Robinson.

 

Eric  01:34

So I quickly become obsessed with this, and it was the pandemic. And I remember I would come downstairs, you know, my husband would be making lunch, and I would say this thing, you can’t believe this other thing.

 

Melissa Townsend  01:46

And then he struck gold. He found photos of them.

 

Eric  01:51

Let me pull them up here. In both cases, they are wearing some nice clothes, they are.

 

Melissa Townsend  01:57

Well, you can’t see these photos, so let me just tell you, Clementine appears to have a very light skin tone. She’s wearing a large, elegant, sweeping, dark colored hat.

 

Eric  02:07

I can’t get over that hat. It’s winged. It kind of goes over her shoulders.

 

Melissa Townsend  02:10

And she’s got a high collared top that goes about halfway up her neck. Hairy skin is more of a darker tone. He also has a high cream collar. It’s starched. He has a little tie. It’s a very formal look.

 

Eric  02:24

They project to me, sort of a refinement.

 

Melissa Townsend  02:28

Both of them are looking just beyond the camera, you know, the way they do in old photos, chin up with a dead serious expression, very regal in a kind of Victorian kind of way. You now by this time, Eric had lived in the house for a couple of months. It’s May 2020, and one afternoon, less than a mile away, a young black woman, darnella Frazier, standing on the sidewalk in front of cup food’s convenience store uses her cell phone to videotape a white police officer, Derek Chauvin across the street, kneeling on the neck of a black man, George Floyd for nearly 10 minutes, for nearly 10 minutes.

 

Eric  03:11

Not that far from my house on 38th in Chicago.

 

Melissa Townsend  03:23

Over the next few days, the cell phone video circulates on social media, and South Minneapolis residents begin to gather in protest.

 

Eric  03:39

And then unrest starts to erupt, and then the.

 

Melissa Townsend  03:42

Whole world erupts.

 

Eric  03:46

I remember seeing like protests in Paris and in Europe.

 

Melissa Townsend  03:56

When George Floyd was murdered, South Minneapolis became ground zero for a global racial reckoning.

 

News  04:07

The only overdose that killed George Floyd was an overdose of excessive force and racism police department

 

Melissa Townsend  04:21

And Eric Roper was there in his little house just a few blocks away.

 

Eric  04:26

I remember sitting up late at night. I mean, maybe it was like two o’clock in the morning, because the fires were getting closer, and I was watching live TV at like two o’clock and sort of seeing, okay, how close is it getting right? At what point do I have to, like, react? Around that period, there was a lot of pressure for people to post on social media, to make a statement in relation to racial justice, and, you know, I just felt very awkward, partly because I’m a journalist, I don’t really make big statements. And also I hadn’t really grappled with this issue very much. I didn’t know what to say.

 

Melissa Townsend  05:06

As the dust started to settle, Eric began to think about the Robinsons again, and he thought.

 

Eric  05:11

Maybe this Robinsons thing would add up to something that can contribute as we try to understand the many decades of events that led up to George Floyd’s murder, and it wasn’t clear to me that that would actually happen, but at least I was learning something.

 

Melissa Townsend  05:29

At that point. Nobody was thinking it would be a podcast for the Star Tribune. It was just Eric’s passion project,

 

Eric  05:35

Eric’s curiosity on the side, you know.

 

Melissa Townsend  05:38

But Eric started talking with people, lots of people. He’d go out for coffee, he’d tag along at community events, and he’d listen to people tell stories that he had never heard before.

 

Sherito Mosley Mitchell  05:49

I remember my father. I remember the hate mail.

 

Melissa Townsend  05:53

Sherito Mosley Mitchell was at one of the community meetings. She was a black woman who grew up in Minneapolis in the 1960s.

 

Sherito Mosley Mitchell  05:59

This was in Minnesota. I remember my father sleeping in the living room with a shotgun. I’m just saying there are multiple stories that you can reach out and get.

 

Melissa Townsend  06:13

For more than four years, Eric has been searching for every detail he can find about the Robinsons and understanding how their story tells a Hidden History of Minneapolis, and that’s when this became an official Star Tribune project. And I came on board to help Eric turn his search into this podcast.

 

Eric  06:34

You’re listening to Ghost Of a Chance from the Minnesota Star Tribune. This is the story of my search to find out what happened to Harry and Clementine. Robinson, I’m Eric roper.

 

Melissa Townsend  06:44

I’m Melissa Townsend.

 

Eric  06:46

This is episode one.

 

Melissa Townsend  06:51

The first question Eric had was, who were Harry and Clementine, and the second question was, what brought them to Minnesota? To find out Eric had to go all the way back to the beginning of their story. Most people have heard of the great migration, the wave of African Americans who moved north between roughly 1910 and 1970 people were escaping Jim Crow in the south and looking for a more stable life with better jobs, better schooling, better places to live. But many people don’t know that well, before this great migration, there were smaller waves of African Americans moving around the country, and some of them made their way to Minnesota, not very many, but some Eric found out that the Minnesota Historical Society had a whole collection of old interviews of people who were part of these migrations. So we started listening.

 

Eric  07:47

It sort of blew my mind, just hearing these people talk, you know, I mean, they’ve passed away a long time ago, and they’re telling us their experiences.

 

Raymond Winfred  07:55

My name is Raymond Winfred Cannon.

 

Melissa Townsend  07:59

He heard Raymond Winfred Cannon, he said his family were free people in North Carolina, but they could see that the civil war was coming, so they moved to Minnesota before it was even a state.

 

Raymond Winfred  08:11

Do you know why he happened to choose Minnesota? They were going as far north as they could get. I think that was the idea that they had in mind at that time.

 

Melissa Townsend  08:21

As far north as they could get, Eric found another interview from a woman named Marvel Cook.

 

Eric  08:27

Marvel Cook’s family moved to Minnesota around 1900.

 

Marvel Cook  08:31

my father felt that there were many opportunities there. The university was there, and he bought a piece of property there and built a beautiful house, which we grew up in, very close to the Mississippi River, and it was just lovely.

 

Melissa Townsend  08:50

So Marvel’s family moved because they thought there were opportunities in Minnesota. Eric searched high and low for a recording of Harry and Clementine Robinson, and he came up empty. So he really needed to figure out for himself who were they and what brought them to Minnesota. He says part of his search started on a popular genealogy website.

 

Eric  09:16

So ancestry.com obviously a very powerful database, and you have to start by building a family tree. So I have a whole house history, family tree and Clementine you know, she gets a profile. Okay, now we’re gonna start building in like between newspaper clips, census records, whatever we can find.

 

Melissa Townsend  09:37

Luckily, Eric found a record of clementines brother. His name was Gideon Brown, and through him, he was able to locate clementines birthplace.

 

Eric  09:48

I found out that Clementine was born in this small rural town north of Kansas City, Missouri, called Mecca, or Shady Grove.

 

Melissa Townsend  09:58

Eric found there wasn’t much online about. This town. So he went there.

 

Eric  10:04

And so we are sort of driving through farmland, rolling countrysides, very beautiful out here, very beautiful day. And I can see that we’re approaching the lake, which means that we’re close to Mecca cemeteries.

 

Melissa Townsend  10:17

Eric learned that in the 1970s after many families had already left Mecca. The Army Corps of Engineers flooded the town to make a lake, Smithville Lake. The town had shrunk to just a few residents, but still, some were very unhappy about their town being wiped out.

 

Eric  10:34

So let’s go maybe like over here.

 

Melissa Townsend  10:40

All that’s left of Mecca is the black cemetery. So Eric went there to see if he could find out more about clementines family. He met up with a woman named Gwen Green. Her great grandfather grew up alongside Clementine here in the 1880s and 90s.

 

Gwen  10:56

Do you see why they would call this Mecca? It’s quiet, serene, calming. I just feel the spirits here.

 

Eric  11:07

Yeah, the fact that it’s closed off and it’s it’s very pleasant.

 

Melissa Townsend  11:11

Yeah, after they left the cemetery, Gwen and Eric went somewhere where they could talk. Gwen had some records about clementines family.

 

Gwen  11:20

Yes, this is from 1885 I was told they’d taken kids that were being abandoned, like if the one of the parents died, then the Estes family would keep them for a while, until they found a home for them to go to.

 

Eric  11:37

Clementines mother, Laura, isn’t she was Laura Estes, so she came from that family.

 

Melissa Townsend  11:48

Before the Civil War, Missouri was a slave state, many of the people in the black community there today are descendants of slaves, including Gwen’s family. With Gwen’s help in his own sleuthing, Eric was able to piece together clementines family history, and he found out she was the first generation in her family born free in the United States.

 

Eric  12:11

As far as I can tell, these records are notoriously difficult to find Clementine’s father was born in Kentucky, and I presume that he was enslaved there.

 

Chris Phillips  12:22

Something like 20% of the black population of Kentucky leaves in the first year after the war. Most of them are driven out by violence.

 

Melissa Townsend  12:32

Eric and I reached out to an historian named Chris Phillips. He’s done quite a bit of research into what happened in this region right after the Civil War ended.

 

Chris Phillips  12:41

We have lots of descriptions of the roads filled with black people just trying to flee Klan violence.

 

Melissa Townsend  12:47

Eric found that by 1870 clementines father was living in Mecca, Missouri. He was a farmer and a Baptist minister. Clementines mother had a very different story.

 

Eric  12:59

Clementine’ss mother was probably born into slavery as a baby, but soon after that, became free because her father,Clementine’s grandfather, was freed in 1854, before emancipation.

 

Melissa Townsend  13:13

Eric knows that clementines grandfather was freed because he actually found the will that freed him. It’s written by the slave owner Thomas Estes, and he’s freeing Washington. Estes, that’s clementines grandfather.

 

Eric  13:28

My negro man Washington, about 27 years old, I will to be free on the first day of April 1854.

 

Melissa Townsend  13:38

just five words that change the lives of every generation after I will to be free. Eric also pieced together Harry Robinson’s family story, and he was also the first generation in his family born free, but he was not raised in Missouri like Clementine.

 

Eric  13:59

Yeah, he’s from a small railroad town called Mitchell in southern Indiana. Both his parents were enslaved in Kentucky, just like clementines father, and they were both freed by the 13th Amendment, and then fled Kentucky and moved to Indiana.

 

Melissa Townsend  14:14

So Eric headed to Mitchell, Indiana to learn more about Harry’s life before he moved to Minnesota, and there he met a man named Jeff Ralph. Jeff Ralph works at the Lawrence County Museum of History. Mitchell is in Lawrence County […]

 

Eric  14:31

Why would a family come to Mitchell in particular? Do you think because, and this is a railroad town, right?

 

Jeff Ralph  14:38

From what I’ve been able to learn, Mitchell was the first place north of Louisville, Kentucky that a black person could get off the railroad and feel welcome. If you went to Washington County, which is the next county south east of here, they had basically The Sundown loss. You know, they could be there during. During the daylight, but if they were there at night, they were fair game.

 

Eric  15:04

I mean, think about those words, fair game. This is a really dangerous landscape that Harry’s family is walking into, and they’re just trying to find the safest place to put down roots and make a life. But it’s really difficult, and this, this is where Harry is born.

 

Melissa Townsend  15:22

Jeff had found an old newspaper article describing Harry’s father.

 

Jeff Ralph  15:26

Says he was tall and well built, a whitewasher by trade, a Baptist by religion and Republican in politics, industrious, good natured and honest.

 

Melissa Townsend  15:39

So at this point, even though Harry was in Indiana and Clementine was in Missouri, Eric could see that they had a lot in common.

 

Eric  15:46

It’s sort of weird how much they had in common. They claimed to both be born on the very same date, May 2, 1881 and they were both from large families. Clementine was one of 18 children, and both their fathers were preachers, Baptist preachers.

 

Melissa Townsend  16:04

And Eric and I both wanted to know what was it like to be part of that first generation of black citizens born free in the United States.

 

Brandon Jones  16:13

You’re not property anymore. That’s a different that’s a very different disposition on life.

 

Melissa Townsend  16:18

Brandon Jones is a therapist we talked to He’s based in Minneapolis, and he has a particular focus on intergenerational trauma.

 

Brandon Jones  16:26

You also have opportunity to experience some of what you couldn’t do before, like you could read, you could go to school, you could travel without papers, and now you might not have the same opportunity or access as a white family at that time may have had but you had an opportunity like that, had to be a different experience.

 

Melissa Townsend  16:47

But at the same time, Brandon told us that the expectation was that black people would, quote, unquote, know their place.

 

Brandon Jones  16:56

You know, stay out of trouble. Keep your head down. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let anyone know that you are smarter than you are, because you may be considered a danger because you’re getting uppity or too lippy.

 

Melissa Townsend  17:12

So Brandon told us there was this tension between knowing your place and standing your ground.

 

Brandon Jones  17:19

That’s kind of the tug of war that many black people had to face during that time period of the Jim Crow era, trying to have a life where you can have some joy, but also having these social barriers and levels of racism that keeps you from fully experiencing this American dream so to say.

 

Melissa Townsend  17:40

So, how did Harry and Clementine manage this tug of war between the racism that was keeping them down and the freedom that was giving them wings, and what does any of this have to do with Minnesota? That’s after the break.

 

Melissa Townsend  18:20

When Eric was in Missouri with Gwen Green, she told him that Clementine wouldn’t have had much of a future if she had stayed in that small town.

 

Gwen  19:48

I think that they wanted to, you know, make something of their self if they stayed in Mecca, there’s nothing there for them but domestic worker farming. You. I think that they wanted to venture out and see what was out there.

 

Melissa Townsend  20:05

And so he went off to figure out when Clementine left. And he told me, for this, he needed to use both the census and old city directories. And I said, what’s a city directory?

 

Eric  20:17

Yeah, they don’t exist anymore. City directories are a lot like phone books, except that they list your occupation and they list your address, a lot of which have also been digitized now, so we can do searches for people addresses and other things.

 

Melissa Townsend  20:33

And this is where Eric found Clementine in official documents from 1900.

 

Eric  20:39

She’s living in Kansas City, and she’s a domestic servant, also described as a nurse girl, and we can see that in the city directory, she’s got different addresses almost every year.

 

Melissa Townsend  20:51

So Clementine had flown the nest by the time she was 19 years old, she had moved about 30 miles away to find new opportunities, but Eric found Harry’s path to leaving his hometown was a little more complicated. The urge to uproot may have come from a tragic accident that happened when he was just a boy.

 

Eric  21:14

The historians in Lawrence County helped me locate this article in the Indianapolis journal newspaper from 1890 when Harry was about nine years old, he and his entire family became essentially poisoned by accident after rat poison sifted off a shelf into their dinner and Harry’s father died.

 

Melissa Townsend  21:35

It was a tragedy, but Eric found it wasn’t rare.

 

Eric  21:39

The poison powder that the Robinsons had accidentally eaten was called rough on rats, and like other rat poisons of the era, it was made with arsenic. Arsenic has no distinguishing taste, so it becomes notorious for accidental poisonings in this era. In another case in Indiana, around this time, a man died after making gravy. Turns out he had mistakenly mixed in rat poison, thinking that it was flour.

 

Melissa Townsend  22:07

Harry’s father died on February 4, 1890 we asked that therapist, Brandon Jones, how did he think that would have affected Harry?

 

Brandon Jones  22:17

You see a parent lose their life, it’s gonna leave an imprint on you, no matter how old you are or the parent is, to die from something that’s preventable, like rat poisoning, that can be pretty traumatic for Harry.

 

Melissa Townsend  22:35

Brandon says, Sometimes something this traumatic can sink a young person. It can bring on depression and anxiety, but other times it can have a different effect.

 

Brandon Jones  22:44

It probably motivated him to, you know, do as much as he can, because you don’t know how long you have to live in this world, which is not uncommon for a lot of black men to think.

 

Melissa Townsend  22:54

In other words, Terry may have gotten the message that life is short. Use your gifts. Shoot your shot.

 

Eric  23:07

I found all these newspaper clippings from the local newspapers in Mitchell, Indiana from Harry’s high school years. And this is right before the turn of the century in 1899, 1900 and he’s a local superstar throughout Harry’s senior year, it’s noting that he’s kind of a leader in the class, like he’s among the top of the class, and then it kind of culminates with him being the top of the class, getting the top honors of the class, the valedictorian. And so this gets him a special thing. This means that he actually receives a scholarship to a law school.

 

Melissa Townsend  23:42

Eric learned that at the time the Nashville College of Law was offering scholarships to promising students in communities around the country. So as valedictorian in Mitchell Indiana, Harry won that scholarship. People in Mitchell Indiana are still proud of Harry Marla Jones works alongside Jeff Routh at the Lawrence County Museum of History. Again, Mitchell is in Lawrence County.

 

Brandon Jones  24:09

You know, he was excelling in every way. And that very much impresses me, that you know, time or situation wouldn’t hold that boy down, that he was going to do big things. It shows he has a lot of Moxie.

 

Melissa Townsend  24:22

In 1900 Harry Robinson was on his way to becoming a lawyer. It was a huge accomplishment, but Harry never went to law school. Eric found an announcement in the local newspaper dated three weeks after Harry’s graduation ceremony.

 

Eric  24:46

And it’s a picture of Harry. It’s on the top of the front page of the paper, and it’s says Harry Robinson, the Mitchell colored boy who won the scholarship offered by the Nashville Tennessee law school and was turned down on account of his color the.

 

Melissa Townsend  25:00

On account of his color, the law school did not accept black students. Marla Jones.

 

Brandon Jones  25:09

The elation turned to disappointment must have been palpable. I mean, he I can’t imagine.

 

Melissa Townsend  25:19

Harry Robinson was a 19 year old young black man from a small town in Indiana. Eric wondered, What did this tell him about the world?  […] Resmaa Menakem, come is another therapist we talked to. He’s a best selling author based in Minneapolis.

 

Resmaa Menakem  25:38

This is how you make it. Come here. You may be able, from your hard work, be able to achieve some things, but when you get there, you find out that you can’t have access to the things that you thought you could have access to, and you’ve played the game the way that they said you should play the game, and it’s still not enough.

 

Melissa Townsend  26:01

That summer, Harry left Mitchell, Indiana. It looks like he moved around the Midwest for a while, and then in 1907 he landed in Kansas City, Missouri, and that’s where he met a young woman named Clementine Brown.

 

Eric  26:22

She’s living in this boarding house at 1107 Harrison Street. And who else is living in this boarding house? Harry Robinson.

 

Melissa Townsend  26:31

Eric likes to imagine the scene where they struck up their first conversation.

 

Eric  26:36

In my imagination, they’re both working hard jobs, and you know, you coming home and you’re sort of taking a load off, you get to know people, and they clearly made a connection. If they were actually born on the same date, I’m thinking that’s the connection like, oh, actually, hello, we were both born on the same day. I mean, if I was single and I met someone who had my same birth date, I’d at least have a conversation with, Oh, my God, we have the same birthday. Oh, we were born in the same year, and then it’s just like love ever after after that, right? Like they’re just, they’re soul mates, right?

 

Melissa Townsend  27:20

But racial tension was ratcheting up in Kansas City. Historian Chris Phillips.

 

Chris Phillips  27:25

It becomes the Confederate capital of Missouri at about that point, meaning that all of these ex Confederates rise through the system. They come political leaders, they create their own cemeteries, they glorify the lost cause. And so if you’re black in Kansas City at that moment before the Great Migration, it’s a really tenuous place to be and moment to be there.

 

Melissa Townsend  27:52

So Harry and Clementine hatched a plan to move to Minnesota. Maybe Harry planned to enroll at the University of Minnesota. There were some black students there at the time. And Eric found that Clementine seemed to have her own plan.

 

Eric  28:06

You know, she had been a domestic servant her whole working life, and so she makes this stop on her way to the Twin Cities in Chicago, and it looks like she enrolled in the molar School of dermatology. It’s a course that lasts a few weeks, and you would learn in this course about, you know, hairdressing, facial massage, electrolysis, all sorts of things, but they’re all in the realm of hair care and beauty.

 

Melissa Townsend  28:34

Historian Tiffany Gill has written about black women in the beauty industry in the early 1900s We called her to get an idea of what Clementine was doing.

 

Tiffany Gill  28:44

She really is at the very first wave of black women entering into formal beauty work. And there were not many black women owned beauty colleges that she would have been able to attend. And so she went to the Mueller School, which was a way of teaching black women, along with white women, the trade of beauty work.

 

Eric  29:08

So what I sort of take away from this is that she’s not just moving out of Kansas City, but she’s trying to move up in the world. And maybe there’s this impression that Minnesota is sort of a barrier free place. I mean, it’s all the way almost as far north as you can get.

 

Melissa Townsend  29:24

What would Harry and Clementine find in Minnesota? That’s next time. One more thing before we go. When Eric was in Missouri Learning about clementines history, he met a man named Bob Harris. He was a respected elder, and he had a literal suitcase full of history of the town that’s now underwater. And when he sat down to talk with Eric, he was inspired to talk about his grandparents and their favorite songs. And to Eric, one of those songs really spoke to the journey that he was on.

 

Bob Harris  30:00

My grandfather’s song was the hymn. He’ll understand it by and by, do you know that by and by, when the morning come, all the saints of God together in home, we will tell the story how we’ve overcome and we’ll understand it better by and by. See you. You don’t understand a lot of things now, but later on, you will.

 

Melissa Townsend  30:38

Bob Harris died on May 9, 2024 it was just a few months after he and Eric spoke. He was 81 years old.

 

Melissa Townsend  30:48

This is Ghost Of A Chance. Our website is Startribune.com/ghostofachance.  There you can see pictures and documents from the podcast, and you can also sign up to receive news about discussion guides and events.  Our email is ghostofachance@Startribune.com. Get in touch if you have a question or feedback or a tip related to the Robinson story.  We’d also love to know if this story motivated you to do something in your communit so let us know.  You can help pay for this incredible story and others like it with a subscription to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Go to our website Startribune.com.

 

CREDITS  30:48

Ghost Of A Chance is reported by Eric Roper and written and produced by me Melissa Townsend. Our executive producer is Jenni Pinkley. Our editor is MaryJo Webster. Fact checking by Eric Roper and MaryJo Webster. Sound Design by Marcel Malekebu. Our contributing editors are Star Tribune managing editor, Maria Reeve and Star Tribune editor and senior vice president Suki Dardarian. Legal review from Randy Lebedoff. The art for our show comes from Anna Boone and Brock Kaplan. Special thanks to Kyndell Harkness, Zoë Jackson, Laura McCallum, James Eli Shiffer, Nancy Yang, Casey Darnell, Laura Ewan, Tane Danger and members of the local community who served as our advisors.