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Episode 2 — Clippings from the Black newspapers back in the 1910s help Eric piece together the lives of Harry and Clementine Robinson as they settle in a place as far north as they could get. Those articles lay out a map to success. But just as the Robinsons find their footing, a rash of racial conflicts across the country threatens to unravel their progress.

For documents, photos and other source material related to this episode, go to:  https://www.startribune.com/ghost-of-a-chance-podcast-episode-2-guide/601204916

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Ethel Nance, Eric, Kirsten Delegard, J Q Adams, Interviewee, Melissa Townsend, Harry, Bill Green, Albert Allen, Edward Nichols, Penny Peterson, Chad Montre, John Coleman

Melissa Townsend  00:02

Previously on ghost of a chance.

 

Eric  00:09

A group of black families lived in and around my neighborhood, and then by 1940 almost all of those families are gone, and one of these families lived in my house. Their names were Harry and Clementine Robinson.

 

Melissa Townsend  00:26

For more than four years, Eric has been searching for every detail he can find about the Robinsons.

 

Interviewee  00:33

You’re not property anymore. That’s a very different disposition on life. You know, he was excelling in every way. And that very much impresses me, because if they stayed in Mecca, there’s nothing there for them.  The elation turned to disappointment must have been palpable. I mean, I can’t imagine.

 

Eric  00:51

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

 

Interviewee  01:01

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.

 

Eric  01:09

You know, they came to Minnesota to find something a bit better than where they were, the hope that the farther north you go, the better off you’re going to be as a black person in America.

 

Interviewee  01:21

You don’t understand a lot of things now, but later on, you will.

 

Eric  01:33

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  01:43

I’m Melissa Townsend.

 

Eric  01:44

This is episode two.

 

Melissa Townsend  01:52

When Eric started his search to find out what happened to Harry and Clementine Robinson. Once they arrived in Minneapolis, he realized the local mainstream newspapers didn’t cover the black community here very much. But lucky for him, the black newspapers from the 1900s had recently been digitized. They were online, and they were a gold mine. In 1908 there was a black newspaper published in St Paul, Minnesota. It was called the appeal. It was one of the premier black newspapers in the Midwest.

 

Eric  02:22

The appeal and the other black newspapers like it were sort of like my time machine into this period to sort of hear what are people saying. We can see both national news and also opinionated editorials.

 

Melissa Townsend  02:34

The editor of the appeal at the time was a man named J Q Adams, and J Q Adams had a daughter. Her name was Adina Gibbs. This is an old recording of her part of a set of oral histories at the Minnesota Historical Society, and she’s talking about why her father published the appeal.

 

J Q Adams  02:53

My father wanted so much to educate colored people to be decent, to be upright. He always wanted them to appear in a right light. I have recollections of his telling them when they were in groups that they didn’t behave themselves. You know, he just tell more. Don’t act like this. Don’t let these people see you acting like this.

 

Bill Green  03:26

Newspapers defined respectability.

 

Melissa Townsend  03:30

Bill Green is an historian based in the Twin Cities.

 

Bill Green  03:33

That’s one source of knowing what we need to do in order to be respectable, and that’s one reason why they were so important to the black community.

 

Eric  03:44

You see a lot of images of people’s houses. On occasion today, we would find it very odd to just put a bunch of people’s houses in the paper, but it’s sort of a celebration of here’s who we are, here’s where we live, here’s what we have accomplished.

 

Melissa Townsend  03:58

And then there are the social pages you ages.

 

Eric  04:03

When you read it, it’s like social media today, with people tagging where they are, who they’re with, what they’re doing.

 

Melissa Townsend  04:10

We asked a man named John Coleman to read the headlines from the black newspapers. He’s a voice actor based in Minneapolis.

 

John Coleman  04:16

The May party given by madam Nellie Hale mccullo at Holcomb Hall. Wednesday night was a most delightful affair, which was well attended. Miss Bertha Clay was crown queen of May.

 

Melissa Townsend  04:32

If you were hoping to aspire to the middle class, like we think Carrie and Clementine were, the paper told you how you needed to present yourself. And so it’s a good sign that after Clementine finished her course at the molar School of dermatology and joined Harry in St Paul, it was posted in the appeal newspaper.

 

Eric  04:52

It’s dated May 2, 1908, and this is kind of a cosmic date that we see throughout the story, because that was Harry and Clem shared birthday

 

John Coleman  05:02

Miss Clementine Brown, a graduate of Mola College of dermatology, Chicago is in the city the guest of Mrs. Willis green, she contemplates following her profession if the field looks good.

 

Eric  05:15

So then I found a marriage certificate that showed that just a month after Clementine arrived in Minnesota, she and Harry got married.

 

Melissa Townsend  05:22

And for a long time, that’s where their trail ended. Eric knew they would end up in his house in 1917 but he didn’t know how they got there.

 

Eric  05:36

I’m searching. I’m searching online for quite some time. And finally, you know, I found some clips in the Twin Cities Star newspaper saying Mr. And Mrs. Robinson of Duluth are visiting some friends. And then I think, well, that’s interesting. And I start to poke around Duluth more, and I find a Harry Robinson in the city directory, and he’s working as a chef, and he’s also listed as working as a cook, and he’s living right next to the primary black church of Duluth.

 

Melissa Townsend  06:08

So he found Harry Robinson, but Eric still couldn’t find Clementine.

 

Eric  06:12

You know, I had tried like, Clementine Robinson, Harry Robinson looking keyword searches. I’m getting really nothing. I’m getting some other Harry Robinsons. Then I start seeing though ch Robinson, and I’m like, Oh, that’s interesting, because Clementine went by ch once in a while later on. And then I look at these classified ads, and it’s like, Mrs. Ch Robinson is a dermatologist, okay?

 

John Coleman  06:35

Mrs. C H, Robinson graduate of dermatology to do your hairdressing, manicuring, hand massage, facial massage, shampooing, singing, dying and bleaching Scalp Treatment of specialty, special attention to residents and hotel calls.

 

Melissa Townsend  06:53

So Eric actually dug up a textbook from the molar School of dermatology to figure out if there was a match between what Clementine learned in school and the services offered in these classified ads. He really wanted to be sure this was Clementine.

 

Eric  07:08

She’s doing everything. It’s like, almost like, chapter by chapter. It’s the hair, singeing, the hair, the bleaching, I mean, everything, one by one. It’s matching up with that textbook. And I’m like, okay, got it, and I knew for sure that they were living in Duluth.

 

Melissa Townsend  07:25

Now, for those of you not in Minnesota, Duluth is a small city in northern Minnesota, right on the shores of Lake Superior. It’s about 90 miles to the Canadian border as the crow flies. When Eric told me Harry and Clementine were in Duluth, I was like, Why, what’s in Duluth? That would draw a young black couple in 1908.

 

Eric  07:47

Duluth is a boom town in this period, basically, in addition to saw milling, which is a huge industry and lumber, you have one of the largest reserves of iron ore in the countries on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. And there’s a lot of foreign born people living there. For example, you have a lot of Finnish immigrants who are arriving there, and sometimes it’s known as the Helsinki of America. And this stuff gets shipped out to the rest of the country through the port of Duluth. And so what you have are iron mining magnates, steel magnates. There’s a saying around Duluth that it had the most millionaires per capita in the United States.

 

Melissa Townsend  08:24

Eric knew a lot about Duluth, but what he didn’t know was what it was like to live there as a black person in the early 1900s and this is when Eric began to see a side of Minnesota that he never knew.

 

Eric  08:39

I found this old recording of a woman named Ethel Nance. She was a black woman who grew up in Duluth, and when I checked the city directories, I realized that Harry and Clementine moved into the neighborhood where she grew up. She said her father worked on the boats at the port and in the hotels in town, and in this old recording, she talked about the time that he bought their first house in Duluth.

 

Ethel Nance  09:03

He came down and was walking around the back of the house, and the neighbor woman came to her door and stood there with her arms Kimball. And he said he purposely walked slowly to give her a chance to really get riled up. And when he kept close enough. She said, I hope you don’t think you’re going to live there. And he said, well, I was thinking about but he didn’t tell if he already owned the place.

 

Melissa Townsend  09:30

Ethel said, Once her family moved in, the neighbors didn’t become any more friendly. Neighbors on one side of the house built a fence that she called a spite fence. The only thing you could see out the windows of the house was the fence. So her father built another story onto the house to see above the fence. But then the neighbors on the other side of the house sabotaged their drain pipe.

 

Ethel Nance  09:53

But it was raining, and I came in and said, Mrs. Rickard, moved the water pipe. You. So at that time, we had a family living in the basement, and it meant by turning that water pipe, the water would go into a window.

 

Eric  10:09

You know, I’ve heard a lot about the history of Duluth. I hadn’t heard about the attitudes that black people were putting up with. I’m sure that has, like, a powerful impact on people’s psyche over times in neighborhoods like this.

 

Melissa Townsend  10:21

In that recording, Ethel Nance said it did have an impact on her father.

 

Ethel Nance  10:25

Well, he always said that these people were antagonistic and didn’t want us there, and he didn’t want us to run errands or do anything at all for them, and really didn’t want us to talk to them.

 

Melissa Townsend  10:40

There’s a book that came out in 2022 that includes some of this history. It’s written by a man named Chad Montre. So Eric reached out to him, and he asked, What should I know about the experience of black residents who were living in Duluth in the early 1900s and Chad said, at the time, Duluth was very racially segregated, and where you could live, where you could socialize, where you could work.

 

Chad Montre  11:05

A lot of them work as waiters, that where they work as elevator operators or custodians. Whites do not let them have access to most other jobs.

 

Eric  11:15

Now, obviously this is commonplace in the Jim Crow South, but Harry and Clementine, you know, they moved north to get away from that, and Minnesota was supposed to be different.

 

Melissa Townsend  11:26

Eric knew that in southern states from Maryland Texas, there were Jim Crow laws that required racially segregated schools, railroad cars, parks, even jails. Many states made interracial marriage illegal, but he also knew that that wasn’t the case in Minnesota. In fact, at the time, there was a law on the books that made it illegal to discriminate against black people in public places. So Eric asked historian Bill Green about it, and Bill said it was a paradox, not just in Duluth, but across Minnesota.

 

Bill Green  12:01

There are two Minnesotans, one that is high minded and liberal and coexisting at that time. There’s another group of whites who are anything but and they tend to be in the majority. They seemed to elect progressive leaders, but it didn’t really relate to them being progressive towards blacks. Discrimination was widespread. Blacks couldn’t go into hotels, couldn’t go into restaurants, despite the fact that Minnesota had a law banning that kind of behavior.

 

Melissa Townsend  12:37

Chad Montry said, yeah, just look at what happened between white settlers and the indigenous people from the region. There was a war in 1862 between US forces and the Dakota in Minnesota. Chad said that sharpened the racism that then would be aimed at newly arrived black residents.

 

Chad Montre  13:00

So and I think the Dakota War is in my book, because that’s the context for whites in Minnesota. Then thinking about what’s going to happen now that blacks are emancipated, if they moved work.

 

Melissa Townsend  13:12

It didn’t matter that the black community in Duluth was only one half of 1% of the population. Bill Green told us it never mattered how many black people were in any town. They were always seen as a threat.

 

Bill Green  13:26

There was a lot of talk among white property owners that the smaller numbers of blacks moving into Minnesota was an indication of a horde about to move in.

 

Melissa Townsend  13:39

In the end, Harry and Clementine didn’t stay in Duluth for very long.

 

Eric  13:43

In 1913 and this is four years after they moved to Duluth, they leave and they head south to this bigger city with a bigger black community, Minneapolis.

 

Melissa Townsend  13:55

And Eric wanted to know, what were Harry and Clementine walking into? Was Minneapolis any more welcoming than Duluth, to find out, he went to talk with a woman named Kirsten Delegard. She’s an historian who specializes in race and housing policies, especially in Minnesota. She runs the mapping prejudice organization.

 

Kirsten Delegard  14:16

So just to be clear, in 1910 Minneapolis is not particularly segregated, nor is St Paul. And the cities are not unique in this regard. This is true of almost every American city in this time, like at the beginning of the 20th century, they are not particularly segregated.

 

Melissa Townsend  14:33

But she said right around the time that Harry and Clementine moved to Minneapolis in 1913 all that was changing.

 

Kirsten Delegard  14:42

I mean, there’s this whole so called Science of the real estate industry that’s emerging at this time, where you have real estate economists developing these models that are saying, oh, yeah, if there’s one black person in the neighborhood, it brings down the property values this amount. I just want to be clear, this was not based on fact. I. In any way. You read a lot of the press and the interviews with white people in this period, and that’s what they’ll say. They’re like, You have to understand, like everything I own is in this house. And how dare these black people come in and try to attack the value of my house, which is all you know, all I have in the world.

 

Melissa Townsend  15:23

On top of that, real estate developers specifically had their eye on the southwest corner of Minneapolis. It’s a lovely part of town. There are a couple of lakes, there are a lot of parks. There’s a nice band shell for outdoor concerts, and those developers thought it was ripe for upscale development exclusively marketed to white residents, but there were already black people living there. So Eric asked Kirsten, what did the white residents in that part of town do to their black neighbors? And Kirsten told him about this one family who was living in southwest Minneapolis around that time.

 

Kirsten Delegard  16:02

The Myrick family, Mary Myrick owned a house which was a home for her extended family. She was a domestic worker, and neighbors pledged to come together and say, we will. We will not give her any work, and we will make sure that she doesn’t get any work so she will be forced to leave because she will not be able to afford to stay in her house.

 

Melissa Townsend  16:23

Kirsten said, Mary Myrick held on for eight years before she was forced to sell her house in southwest Minneapolis. So in 1913 when Harry and Clementine were moving down to Minneapolis, they needed to pick a place to live.

 

Eric  16:41

The first time that we see where they’re living is in 1915 and they had found a little apartment, a duplex, on the south side of the city, south of downtown.

 

Melissa Townsend  16:51

Kristen said it was several blocks away from the southwest neighborhoods where there was growing racial tension.

 

Kirsten Delegard  16:57

It’s considered the very desirable, stable, integrated neighborhood with good access to parks that people use a lot.

 

Eric  17:06

I presume that Clementine was still doing beauty work at this point, and I know that Harry was a waiter. And one of the things that surprised me is how many jobs were off limits to black men in that period. And there’s like studies to show that you know, you see waiters, porters, barbers, janitors, elevator operators. You know, these are mostly jobs in service. Occasionally you’ll see someone works for like the post office that but you know, it’s very limiting of what you could do.

 

Melissa Townsend  17:36

We don’t know what Harry’s experience was like, but in this old recording, a man named AB Cassius. Talked about his experience being a waiter in the 1920s

 

Harry  17:47

When I went to the Curtis hotel to work as a waiter, I was very discouraged, because they only paid $17 a month wages, and if you caught you with any cream in your coffee, they charged your nickel, and if they caught you with a pat of butter, you had to bear nickel. And if you broke a glass, which in waiting, you bound to break some that was all deductible, so there was no way for you to get $17 a month. So each each payday for two weeks, you drew about $6 or $7 you didn’t make any tips, you didn’t have anything.

 

Melissa Townsend  18:31

Today, that would be about $100 every two weeks.

 

Harry  18:35

I discovered that the white waiter downtown at the Radisson and the Nicollet and the Minneapolis club, the Athletic Club, they were all paid $75 a month. And I said, this can’t be right.

 

Melissa Townsend  18:54

Today, that would be about $500 every two weeks. The pay discrepancy was remarkable between white and black waiters. Harry and Clementine were probably struggling financially, but Eric found an announcement in the newspaper that signaled everything was about to change for them.

 

Eric  19:18

And it was In the appeal newspaper, and it’s dated, November 4, 1916.

 

John Coleman  19:23

Madam C H Robinson has been appointed body masseurist at the St Barnabas hospital under Dr Farr.

 

Eric  19:34

She’s working for Dr Farr. Dr Farr is not just some doctor. Dr Farr is a pioneering, very sort of high tech eccentric guy. He’s playing music in the surgery room, which was very innovative at the time. He’s actually innovating in anesthesia at the time. And he was also taking motion pictures of some of these surgeries. And you can imagine he’s also thinking, like, okay, and the other thing I’m going to do is, when the patients are done, we’re going to very. Carefully massage their wounds and so that they heal appropriately. But again, the guy is like on the cutting edge.

 

Melissa Townsend  20:09

When Eric told historian Bill Green he was impressed.

 

Bill Green  20:12

Black woman with that kind of role at a hospital, a white hospital, that strikes me as noteworthy. This is important.

 

Eric  20:24

Clearly, it allowed Clementine and Harry to have enough financial stability to say, Okay, we’re gonna stop renting. We’re actually gonna buy a house.

 

Melissa Townsend  20:34

This is a big deal. This is when Clementine and Harry bought the house that now belongs to Eric. In order to get all the details, Eric reached out to a woman named Penny Peterson. She’s an historian who also works with the group mapping prejudice. She specializes in analyzing historical property records.

 

Eric  20:53

She found the original ad in the newspaper from 1916.

 

Penny Peterson  20:58

Stop paying rent, nice, little six room house with three bedrooms near Nicollet and second car lines can be bought of owner for $3,000 cash and $35 a month.

 

Eric  21:12

Today, that $3,000 would be more than $70,000 for the house with a monthly payment of roughly $900.

 

Melissa Townsend  21:20

Since Eric also bought this house, he could imagine all the features Clementine and Harry probably loved about it.

 

Eric  21:27

It’s not a big house, very cottage style. There’s a beautiful, small stained glass window in the living room. There’s arched passageways between the rooms. Downstairs, there’s big bay windows up in the bedroom. Upstairs, there’s a big claw foot tub, which, you know, I sit in today and think about, we all sat in the same tub, but nobody wants to hear that.

 

Melissa Townsend  21:48

So in 1917 Harry and Clementine bought the house. Maybe it was the claw foot tub that really cinched the deal.

 

Eric  21:55

And even though they have this steady income, they don’t have sort of a nest egg to put into a house. So they buy the house on a contract for deed.

 

Melissa Townsend  22:02

And that made Penny Peterson say, Uh oh.

 

Penny Peterson  22:05

So contracts for deeds are bad. You don’t get the deed until you’ve paid off the entire house. If you miss one payment, you lose everything. Back in those days, as is now, you could have a big balloon payment that you somehow have to put together, and that’s where people often lose it.

 

Melissa Townsend  22:24

It’s clear that Harry and Clementine were taking a big risk when they bought this house, partly because of what Penny Peterson said about the contract for deed, but also because of something Kirsten delagard pointed out about the location of the house.

 

Kirsten Delegard  22:38

So the Robinsons house is sort of in this contested zone in the years after they move in, and what are the.

 

Melissa Townsend  22:44

In other words, they were now going to be living in southwest Minneapolis. That’s where the Myrick family lived. That’s where Eric’s house is.

 

Eric  22:54

By the way, I didn’t know any of this history, but the census data shows us that there’s more than 6000 families who are living there, and only nine of them are black, and it was one of those areas of the city where white residents are starting to target their black neighbors.

 

Melissa Townsend  23:10

So why buy this house? Why take this risk? Eric asked historian Bill Green.

 

Bill Green  23:18

It’s an investment. You know, the challenge that the African American faces is acquiring property, getting wealth in that way. We don’t necessarily want to integrate, but we want better property.

 

Melissa Townsend  23:31

That’s one reason, but Bill Green said there’s also another reason. This house was a signal that they were part of that aspiring middle class with their lives splashed across the pages of the appeal newspaper.

 

Bill Green  23:46

Yeah, that’s That’s it in a nutshell. Actually, the leadership of the black community at the end of the 19th century took efforts to kind of embrace the trappings of middle class status, which was how respectability was defined in the larger world, as well as in the black community.

 

Melissa Townsend  24:09

For Harry and Clementine Robinson, buying this house was a signal that they were worthy of respect, but now they had to keep it. We’ll be right back.

 

Melissa Townsend  24:53

The Robinsons bought their house in a predominantly white neighborhood in southwest Minneapolis in 1917 that same year, the United States entered World War One.

 

Eric  27:34

Industrial jobs are suddenly opening up a little bit, you know, these jobs that we were talking about that were closed off, they’re starting to loosen up. And so Harry landed a job as a furnace man at an ammunition factory that was run by the Minneapolis steel and machinery company. And for a little bit there, I thought, was he just adjusting the temperature of the machinery company? No, he’s actually running these fiery hot furnaces that are helping with the heat treatment of shells.

 

Melissa Townsend  28:04

We don’t have any information about how Harry felt about working in the plant, but we did find this recording of another black man who had the same type of job at the same company years later during World War Two. His name is Albert Allen. In this recording, he described his first day on the job.

 

Albert Allen  28:26

I can’t overlap. Thank you. I didn’t know what I was going to as a shawl plant, and I walked in. Oh, it was a dirty, filthy thing. I think the day about pollution. Oh my gosh, what that plant was doing to individuals. But that time, there’s no one concern but get those shells out. As I was walking down, I had all my nice little blue suit, that award I had mine, I’d been going to school, and just as seen as I could be, and as walking down with the foreman, I see all these fellows sitting up on the shelves and all this dirt around. So I walk

 

Melissa Townsend  29:00

Eventually, Alan began work on the furnace, just like Harry, that furnace.

 

Albert Allen  29:04

cockeyed, hot when you’d walk down this aisle there, he didn’t really come to the plant. He’d have to walk at least 50 feet from it, because they couldn’t stay in the heat. I ended up with a challenge by working right there at the door. Shows you how our body can make an adjustment.

 

Eric  29:19

You know, I’ve seen pictures of these guys, and their clothes are torn and dirty, and they’re dipping these ammunition cells in hot oil. Essentially, this is not pleasant work, but it’s still an opportunity.

 

Melissa Townsend  29:31

Harry Robinson was 37 years old, and this was the first job he had where he wasn’t serving people, but historian Bill Green said Harry was probably still working as a waiter. This work on the furnace in the munitions plant was probably his second job.

 

Bill Green  29:48

Most blacks who were of the middle class, basically the husbands had one or two jobs because the jobs that they were normally able to get a hold of. Have paid menial wages. They were sometimes porters and janitors and waiters at the same time.

 

Melissa Townsend  30:06

Bill said, if Harry could bring in two incomes, it would free up Clementine to participate in social clubs.

 

Bill Green  30:13

The men, their status was their inability to allow their wives or to afford their wives to participate in club activity.

 

Eric  30:22

And that’s exactly what I saw in the newspapers. It was like, Whoa, there’s a lot of social activity happening in the house, and it really starts right around this time, 1917 into the early 1920s you can see them all over the appeal newspaper, but other black newspapers that are publishing at that period.

 

John Coleman  30:39

Mrs. Lagrina Williams of Winnipeg is visiting Mrs. Ed Hall of St Paul, Mrs. Harry. Robinson entertained her last Mrs. Ida sellers recently organized the Phyllis Wheatley literary art club with Mrs. Clementine. Robinson, Vice President, Mrs. C H Robinson West 39th Street, entertained at dinner 16 guests on Christmas Day.

 

Melissa Townsend  31:00

Clementine was also being celebrated for her work.

 

John Coleman  31:03

Mrs. G H Grenier of Moose Lake, Saskatchewan, who has taken her treatment, says they are wonderful. Madam Robinson is the only one west of Chicago using the thermo electric medium.

 

Melissa Townsend  31:17

I want to give you a little space here to savor this moment they made it. I mean, they still had to do some really tough jobs for a living, and there was probably no extra money lying around, but their life spread across the pages of the appeal newspaper was the picture of middle class, black excellence.

 

Eric  31:37

This is when I started to realize that something significant had happened in the house. They’ve been sort of scraping by for years, working in jobs, the only jobs that are available to them, which are very limited, and yet they’ve been able to get this far, which is sort of extraordinary.

 

Melissa Townsend  31:56

But we know at the next year, things would begin to change. You the summer of 1919. Is also known as red summer red, as in the color of blood. It would go down in the history books as one of the most racially violent seasons in the 20th century. Historian Bill Green gave us the details.

 

Bill Green  32:19

I believe there are as many as 40 cities that saw race riots throughout the nation, mostly in the north and in the east and occasionally in the far west. In California.

 

Melissa Townsend  32:33

These cities included Chicago, Omaha, New York, Washington, DC, among many others. And Bill told us this rioting included something not often seen before, black people were arming themselves and fighting back. This was just after World War One had ended, and black vets had returned to the United States with a new sense of entitlement. Edward Nichols was one of them. He was a black man who grew up in northern Minnesota. In this old recording, he talked about his time in France as part of the US Army, and then what happened when he came back to the States.

 

Edward Nichols  33:11

Well, when we arrived in France, I was young man, 17 years old. Now here we were pleasant people, and we wanted to be friendly. And these people, they wanted to be friendly too, and we had money, and we’d buy their wine and and fraternize with them. And they liked us very well. Things were pretty good. You could go in any theater or anything, but when I come back to France, I took my girl to the theater, and the girl in the ticket booth says, Well, you can go in, but you have to sit down front, the front three rolls, or go up in the balcony in what they called near heaven. And I was at it very strongly. But this, this, these were things that happened while I was gone. Yeah, we had quite a bit of trouble there.

 

Melissa Townsend  33:53

Bill Green told us there was a widespread sense that people were fed up with this kind of discrimination, and they were fed up with having to be compliant and polite.

 

Bill Green  34:03

And it all sort of contributed to a sense of blacks drawing the line, and that caused a reaction. Black standing up created a sense among, you know, the white power elite, this is a real threat here.

 

Eric  34:20

The riots of 1919. Did not spread to Minneapolis, but people in the city definitely knew about them. I found an article in the appeal newspaper, and it was reprinted from a Chicago newspaper called The Chicago Herald and examiner.

 

Melissa Townsend  34:33

It was dated September 27 1919, that would be the fall after red summer.

 

Eric  34:40

Because our time of rioting is over, some people think the sky is clear again. No idea could be more foolish. So long as we have discrimination, unfair treatment, a feeling of brooding injustice between the white men and colored men, we shall have a burning fuse on its way to high explosive.

 

Melissa Townsend  35:00

In Minnesota, that high explosive came the next year in 1920 that’s when a mob of white residents in Duluth lynched three black men.

 

Eric  35:10

This was front page national news across the country, including the front page of The New York Times, because it was a triple lynching in a northern city at a time when a lot of people were sort of wagging their fingers at the south saying, Okay, you guys got to cut out this lynching. And in a prominent black newspaper in New York, the New York age, James Weldon Johnson, who was a leader of the NAACP, he said, The truth about this incident is Minnesota has turned out to be as bad as any southern state could be, which is a very sort of damning accusation about Minnesota at the time.

 

Melissa Townsend  35:46

Edward Nichols, that soldier who had come back from France, was in Duluth the night after the lynching. He talked about it in that old recording.

 

Eric  35:54

The next night after the mob, the white people said they were going to get brought all the news out of town, and we decided that we’d just barcade ourselves in our house. And I was only one. Had a gun. I had a 45 Colt. Automatically, I brought back from the war in the night, the sheriff, and there were some, quite a few concerned white people about our welfare, wanted to make a relationship with us, but we decided to go it on our own.

 

Melissa Townsend  36:23

And then there was a knock at the door.

 

Edward Nichols  36:26

So I put on my raincoat, and they had these pockets that go through the army raincoat, and I put the 45 Colt automatic down in there and cocked the trigger back, and I went to the door, and it was a white lad out there. And said, what you want? He said he had a telegram from Western Union, but if he just stabbed his foot out and murdered him, you know, we’re that tense, yeah.

 

Melissa Townsend  36:53

When it came to Harry and Clementine, we already knew that many of the white residents in southwest Minneapolis didn’t want their black neighbors, but red summer had emboldened these neighbors to escalate the situation.

 

Eric  37:06

I found this article in the Minneapolis Tribune from November 16, 1920 and this really is like the bombshell story that puts a fine point on how intense the neighborhood tensions are at that time.

 

John Coleman  37:19

The headline Negro question causes protest. Residents of 13th Ward object to members of race as neighbors.

 

Eric  37:25

And I should say that Southwest Minneapolis includes the 13th ward.

 

John Coleman  37:29

It goes on protesting against the presence of Negroes or persons of Negro blood as residents of the 13th ward. 200 men and women held a meeting at 43rd and Pillsbury Avenue last night and the South Central Community club rooms.

 

Melissa Townsend  37:45

Eric says this meeting in november of 1920 had a clear objective.

 

Eric  37:50

So these folks are saying, we want to get rid of this handful of black families who live in southwest Minneapolis.

 

Melissa Townsend  37:57

After Eric read this, he realized the meeting was just five blocks from the Robinson’s house, what’s now his house.

 

Eric  38:05

And this isn’t sort of just some random assortment of people. This group was very influential at the time. There were two leaders of the club. One was a man named James McMullen, and the other one was a man named Ewan Cameron. Ewan Cameron, around this period would get elected to the State House, and James McMullen, who is the chairman of the meeting, he is a real estate agent, and this is sort of just along the lines of what Kirsten said, that real estate agents play a really important role here, of sort of driving this segregation.

 

Melissa Townsend  38:38

I can only imagine what it felt like to be singled out like that and targeted by 200 of your neighbors. It’s chilling. So what can Harry and Clementine do that’s next time.

 

Interviewee  39:02

The notion of walking on ice is very real. Here. You have to be careful where you step. You have to be very careful with sudden moves that you might make that could result in cracked ice under foot.

 

CREDITS  39:15

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 community 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.  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.