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Episode 4 –There is sometimes a steep price to pay for being bold. Eric investigates a mysterious shooting involving Harry, and a damaging accusation that threatens his livelihood on the eve of a global catastrophe. He also makes a shocking discovery that pulls back the curtain on the Robinsons’ relationship. They are tested.

For documents, photos and other source material related to this episode, go to: https://www.startribune.com/ghost-of-a-chance-podcast-episode-4-guide/601204958

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Nelson Peary, Adida Gibbs, Eric, Kirsten Delegard, J Q Adams, Marvel Cook, Interviewee, Melissa Townsend, Dionne Trice, Dianne  Stewart, Penny Peterson

Melissa Townsend  00:06

Previously on Ghost Of a Chance.

 

Interviewee  00:10

The Robinsons were part of this network of people who were all making a beachhead, making a life, making a black community in Minneapolis. Eric found that during the 1920s three more black families moved into Southwest Minneapolis, and Clementine was back in the appeal newspaper. Mr. Harry Robinson has opened the Little Dixie sandwich shop. Mr. Robinson is a race man, and has given freely of his work to the race. So I’m looking around. I mean, Little Dixie, Little Dixie Chicken Shack, all these different searches, and this leads me to a clip, man shot and seriously wounded in restaurant Negro cook under arrest. Harold Robinson, a negro said by police to have been employed as a cook in the restaurant, was held at the fifth precinct police station without charge. There’s a Fauci police report that was used to write two Fauci articles.

 

Melissa Townsend  01:00

So it’s at this point that Eric decided he needed to do his own investigation.

 

Eric  01:05

Why would someone shoot Roy Mattis, who seems to have everything to lose by shooting Roy Mattis? Well, maybe Roy Mattis did something to him. You’re listening to Ghosts 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 Rober.

 

Melissa Townsend  01:28

I’m Melissa Townsend.

 

Eric  01:30

This is episode four.

 

Melissa Townsend  01:34

It’s no small thing that two local newspapers reported that Harry Robinson, a black man shot Roy Mattis, a white man for no good reason. It puts Harry and clementines entire future at risk. It could ruin their standing in the community. It could destroy them financially. So it was important to Eric to find out what happened in the Little Dixie Chicken Shack the night of February 15, 1926 and how did it impact Harry and clementines lives? Eric assumed that the case against Harry probably went to court, so the first thing he did in his investigation was try and get his hands on the court records.

 

Eric  02:20

I filed a request with the Henneman county courts for any official court records, and I was hoping that maybe this would illuminate the rest of the story. But they didn’t have any information about the shooting.

 

Melissa Townsend  02:31

Without those court records, Eric had to go a different route.

 

Eric  02:34

If you think about you know, a guy like Harry Robinson is running a night business in 1926 you’re going to meet a lot of interesting, potentially scary characters, maybe drunk characters in the middle of the night.

 

Melissa Townsend  02:47

So Eric started digging for any reason there might be trouble at a Chicken Shack in Minneapolis, and he came up with a few ideas about what might have led up to the shooting that night.

 

Eric  03:03

My first instinct is to start looking in the newspaper records to get a sense of like, well, why are chicken shacks in the news? And I start to find a lot of clips about chicken shacks being robbed and bandits, and, you know, hold ups and things like this. One story I found, and the headline is, Armed Bandit, holds up Cafe Chicken Shack rated by lone man who gets $75 and then there’s another one, two arrested, believed to have robbed proprietor of Chicken Shack. And then this one trick foils banded pair one is slain Chicken Shack proprietors carry out rehearsed strategy. That clip is actually about these two Chicken Shack owners had this plan where one of them was gonna throw a bottle across the room if there was a bandit, so that the other one could go grab the gun and then shoot the bandit.

 

Melissa Townsend  03:56

The vibe of these clips is that chicken shacks are being held up, and sometimes owners fight back. And Eric wondered, could that have been what happened to Harry?

 

Eric  04:07

So it’s a cold night in Minneapolis, middle of February. Maybe there’s snow on the ground. It’s like the middle of the night. Perhaps Harry’s alone, as he probably was accustomed to be pretty late at night at the Chicken Shack, and Roy Mattis walks in, and maybe Roy Mattis is there to rob the chicken check. And then, sort of, in the aftermath of this, it doesn’t get reported, all this detail about that Roy was holding up the business. And maybe the police don’t believe Harry. This all just gets lost.

 

Melissa Townsend  04:37

Maybe, but then Eric thought of another possibility.

 

Eric  04:42

You know, Roy Mattis kind of lives in this area, and maybe he’s one of these people that’s annoyed that Harry still lives in this white neighborhood after all this time. And there’s a potential maybe where he comes in and just makes some remark, or maybe even more than a remark, something that’s pretty aggressive, where. We know that there are reports of white people threatening and committing violence against black people in this period. One article in particular in 1923 talks about these separate incidents of black men being randomly attacked on the streets. And the allegation in the black newspaper about that is that this is a coordinated effort by members of the Klan.

 

Melissa Townsend  05:25

Eric hadn’t heard much about the Ku Klux Klan in Minneapolis before, but historian Kirsten Delegard told us they were really active in the city in the first half of the 1920s.

 

Kirsten Delegard  05:35

So you have Klan members in the schools, you have Klan members in City Hall. You have Klan members in the police department open. Klan members, people in Klan robes are riding in civic parades. It’s completely open.

 

Melissa Townsend  05:48

Eric even found allegations in the black newspaper that an alderman representing southwest Minneapolis was a member of the Klan and across the river in St Paul, there was a cross burning meant to intimidate a black family living there that happened just about a year before the shooting.

 

Eric  06:05

So just to be clear, we have absolutely no idea if Roy Mattis was a part of the Klan, but at the time, we know that there are white people making threats and attacking black men clan or not, and maybe that’s what Roy did, and then Harry shot him.

 

Melissa Townsend  06:20

Maybe that’s what happened. But there’s one other scenario that Eric wondered about bootlegging. Prohibition had gone into effect about six years earlier. Could Harry or Roy have been involved in some kind of bootlegging situation

 

Eric  06:39

In the era of prohibition, we know that there’s still booze everywhere it’s being imported. It’s being manufactured both in the city but also in the countryside, specifically in central Minnesota, there are farmers who have stills and things like that. And there’s also examples of chicken shacks that are front for bootlegging operations, which we know because there’s a lot of articles about liquor raids on chicken shacks during this period.

 

Melissa Townsend  07:03

So could Roy have been connected to the bootleggers in central Minnesota, and could Harry have been selling bootlegged liquor out of the Chicken Shack?

 

Eric  07:11

Maybe that explains why Roy Mattis walks in either he is protecting some sort of territory that Harry has violated by selling booze, or maybe there’s some deal that they have that’s gone south. I mean, there’s lots of scenarios you could go into there.

 

Melissa Townsend  07:29

Yes, lots of scenarios, but these were all still speculation. Eric needed more information to make any firm conclusions about what happened with Roy and Harry in the Chicken Shack that night.

 

Eric  07:44

This is Eric Roper. It is May 16, 2024, and I’m going through workhouse records. These are for the city work.

 

Melissa Townsend  07:54

Eric went to a big warehouse where he could look at old files from the City of Minneapolis. These files tell you who was sent to the workhouse.

 

Eric  08:02

I’m currently looking in 1926 because this is a key year when the shooting happened.

 

Melissa Townsend  08:09

Back in the 1920s if you were convicted of a lower offense, something less than a felony, the city might send you to the workhouse. Eric wanted to see if Harry or Roy were ever sent to the workhouse to do time for the shooting.

 

Eric  08:23

And there’s these large books, and they’re handwritten, your eyes start to glaze over, reading the names.

 

Melissa Townsend  08:30

He was sitting in a folding table, paging through these giant ledgers, reading handwritten lists of people’s names, their personal details and their crimes.

 

Eric  08:39

And you know the charges here, a lot of them, it just says drunk. And then there’ll be, like, a lot of sort of ditto marks, because so many of these are for public drunkenness.

 

Melissa Townsend  08:47

So much for prohibition.

 

Eric  08:48

Vagrancy, it’s a common one on here. So far, I’m not finding anything.

 

Melissa Townsend  08:55

By the end of the day, Eric had come up empty. In fact, after years of searching, he still can’t find any record about the shooting or if anyone served time for it.

 

Eric  09:04

You would imagine that there would be some record of this somewhere, whether it’s in the workhouse, whether it’s in the county jail, whether it’s at the MPD index, whether it’s in the Hennepin County court system, all these places I’ve gone to. Now I can’t vouch for the completeness of any of these records, but I’ve found nothing.

 

Melissa Townsend  09:25

So Eric decided to go in a different direction. Instead of looking for records about the shooting, he would look for any criminal record. He had done quite a bit of research at this point into Harry Robinson, and he hadn’t come up with anything. But what about Roy Mattis? Did Roy Mattis have a criminal record? Eric started digging, and he found some things. That’s after the break.

 

Melissa Townsend  09:52

So Eric had gone down a new rabbit hole trying to figure out if Roy Mattis had a criminal record. And here’s what he found out.

 

Eric  11:32

So Roy Mattis was born in 1896 and so when he’s 17, he has a kid with a woman named Hazel moral they ended up getting married, and the time of the shooting, he’s a clerk at this lithography company, and his father is like a VP, sort of an executive at this company.

 

Melissa Townsend  11:51

At first, that’s the kind of information Eric could find about Roy Mattis, details about his personal life. He couldn’t find a criminal record, or at least that’s what he thought.

 

Eric  12:02

It had found a clip in St Cloud from 1934 and St Cloud is far north of the Twin Cities, and it was a guy named Louis Mattis, which is Roy’s father’s name, and he’s getting arrested for selling illegal liquor. And I’m like, well, doesn’t seem like Roy. And I kind of put that aside for a very long time, and then as I got more and more desperate to figure this out, I was thinking like, well, Roy’s middle name is Lewis. Let’s check it out. And I went through all these like Stearns County ledgers.

 

Melissa Townsend  12:31

Eric knew a lot of illegal distilleries were located out in rural Stearns County, Minnesota at the time, so he went to look at the conviction records to see if Louis Mattis could actually have been Roy Mattis, and he was.

 

Eric  12:47

Here at the history center going through boxes and just discovered that Roy Mattis was a bootlegger. We have a record here of him getting convicted of selling moonshine whiskey in 1934 just a big, big discovery.

 

Melissa Townsend  13:07

Eight years after the shooting in Harry’s Chicken Shack, Roy Mattis was arrested for bootlegging. Could that mean that he was bootlegging during the time of the shooting? If it was just that one instance, it might not be that convincing, but it wasn’t just that one instance.

 

Eric  13:24

While I was looking for that bootlegging arrest, I also found he was arrested a couple months after that for just being drunk. And then if we fast forward to 1945 he’s in downtown Minneapolis, seemingly drunk because he’s like falling down, and he’s trying to get into parked cars downtown, cops pick him up, and they find he has all these war bonds in his pocket, and that’s all in the papers. So based on what I know about Roy later in his life, he is a complicated character to say the least.

 

Melissa Townsend  13:55

It’s tough to speculate about what was happening for Roy Mattis nearly 100 years ago. We would want to do to him what was done to Harry. We wouldn’t want to make false or incomplete accusations that said there’s reasonable evidence to suggest that Harry did not, as the news article had stated, shoot Roy Mattis for no good reason. Based on all the information that Eric has collected maybe Harry had a gun because other chicken shacks were being robbed, or because of Klan violence, or because he was bootlegging. And Roy Mattis has a criminal record. He might have been involved in some kind of illegal activity when he came into the Chicken Shack, but we can’t find any evidence of that, and we can’t find any evidence if either of them served time for the shooting.

 

Eric  14:47

I feel like I’ve turned over basically every rock that I can find at this point. And this does sort of haunt me on a day to day basis, and I cannot tell you what happened that night at the Chicken Shack. I. Am still looking though, so maybe one day we’ll have more clarity.

 

Melissa Townsend  15:07

That may be, as far as Eric has been able to take the investigation into the shooting, but he knows a lot more about what happened to Harry after that was all said and done, he and Clementine began to have financial trouble.

 

Eric  15:22

They’re really bobbing above water, but barely.

 

Melissa Townsend  15:32

The shooting happened in February 1926, Eric found that the next month, Harry and Clementine took out a loan for $500 that’d be $9,000 today.

 

Eric  15:44

Could there been legal bills associated?

 

Kirsten Delegard  15:46

There could be legal bills be overspending [..]

 

Melissa Townsend  15:48

Eric went back to historians, Penny Peterson and Kirsten delagard. He asked them to make sense of what was happening with the Robinsons finances. And Kirsten started wondering.

 

Kirsten Delegard  15:58

How much does a lawyer’s fee cost, and how much does it cost to maybe pay off some people in the police department? And then, of course, like, what happens to your business when there’s a shooting in the business? Like, what you have to think that this was a difficult you know? And he was like, Okay, we just need to get through this. People will forget about it, or I’ll get through but then it coincides with the collapse of the economy in Minneapolis.

 

Melissa Townsend  16:22

They all agreed this was terrible timing. The city was on the cusp of the Great Depression. Money was getting tight for nearly everyone, and it looked like the Robinsons financial situation was becoming dire.

 

Eric  16:35

After that first loan for $500 they take out another loan for $300 then another loan for $1,500 then six months later, another loan for $500.

 

Melissa Townsend  16:48

Harry and Clementine took out four loans in just three years. Today, those loans would add up to roughly $51,000 historian Penny Peterson.

 

Penny Peterson  16:59

I mean this, bing, bing, bing, bing. There’s times when their house is paid off, but then they have to borrow again, and then money is getting increasingly tight.

 

Eric  17:09

Meanwhile, we know that they’re still working hard. I mean, it looks like Clementine has left Saint Barnabas and Dr Farr, and we can see from some of the newspaper reports that she is seemingly working on her own. There’s one article from 1927 that describes her as one of the best known masseuses in the city and notes that she has, quote, built up a large clientele among the leading white citizens.

 

Melissa Townsend  17:34

But it looks like that hard work wasn’t enough.

 

Eric  17:39

I found an ad that Harry Robinson put in the Minneapolis Tribune, and it was dated March 1931 and he was selling the business. In fact, he put in five ads that month, and they said, sandwich shop, first class. Good business. Reasonable. Meaning, he’s going to offer some reasonable terms here.

 

Melissa Townsend  18:00

We knew Harry was renting the space, so Eric asked Penny Peterson, what was he selling?

 

Penny Peterson  18:06

He’s selling your customer list, your recommendation, your recipes, you know, that’s what you’re selling, and maybe some of the equipment as well.

 

Eric  18:20

If we think about the luncheon that had happened five years before, and all these big names that come, and this was a celebration. I mean, remember the flowers were out. I mean, this was like a very beautiful affair. And now we’ve come to a place where that dream is starting to crumble for the Robinsons, but at least they still had clementines work and their house.

 

Melissa Townsend  18:44

But Penny had looked at the Robinsons financial records, and she knew that their grip on the house was shaky.

 

Penny Peterson  18:52

I think the mortgage they’re just probably paying the interest on it and its interest on interest. It’s like student loans today. Gee, I only borrowed $20,000 but now we’re over 50,000 how did that happen?

 

Eric  19:04

Penny said they couldn’t pay off those last two loans, so in 1931 they lose the house to foreclosure, and they have to leave this neighborhood that they had fought to live in for 14 years.

 

Melissa Townsend  19:18

This was when the Robinsons left their home in southwest Minneapolis.

 

Eric  19:25

This is what I’ve been trying to figure out this entire time. You know, what happened to the Robinsons? And here it is, they had taken a number of risks to become homeowners and then business owners, but ultimately, a lot of things went wrong. There was the shooting, there was the media coverage, and then there’s this great depression that’s going to sweep over everything.

 

Melissa Townsend  19:49

In 1930 there were 11 black families who owned homes in southwest Minneapolis. By 1940 there were only three eight black families had left. Left and with them, the whole city took one more giant step toward racial segregation. Harry and Clementine would need to start over, but before we get to that, we need to share an unexpected discovery that’s after the break.

 

Eric  20:26

Just here in the microfilm room of the Minnesota History Center, looking through microfilm indexes. The first index I pulled was.

 

Melissa Townsend  20:35

After Eric had basically pieced together this whole story of what happened to the Robinsons. He decided to look in one more corner of the Minnesota Historical Society. It’s where they keep the files from the Hennepin County civil court, not the criminal court where he had been before the civil court.

 

Eric  20:53

Anybody who was suing, anybody in Hennepin County, they’re all indexed in here. This is pretty obscure record searching at this point. I mean, we’re going into the deep end of trying to find anything we can out there, not expecting to find much.

 

Melissa Townsend  21:08

But he did find something.

 

Eric  21:10

The first thing I pull up and I see the plaintiff is Clementine Robinson, and the defendant is Harry Robinson. This is November 23 1915 so I’m just totally perplexed. No, just kind of blew my mind here.

 

Melissa Townsend  21:29

When Eric was able to see the full file in person, he could see that Clementine was filing for divorce from Harry, but the file was dated 1915 that’s before they bought the house and before they opened the Chicken Shack. And we knew that Clementine and Harry were together that whole time, so we both wondered what happened. Let’s start with what Eric saw in the file.

 

Eric  21:54

I remember having kind of a, kind of a fairly physical reaction to seeing it.

 

Melissa Townsend  21:59

This is clementines account of domestic abuse at the hands of Harry. It’s graphic. I’m going to read part of it, but if you want to skip this part, you just need to fast forward 60 seconds, and you’ll be in the clear. The defendant, that’s Harry, has a violent and uncontrollable temper, and has at all times since said marriage been a constant user of intoxicating liquors to excess, and has on frequent occasions come to his said home under the influence of liquor and there struck, beat, kicked and otherwise abused and mistreated the plaintiff, that’s Clementine. On said occasions, the defendant swore at the plaintiff and called her vile names and has threatened on several occasions during said married life to take plaintiff’s life if she made any complaint about him, the defendant, she says he has spent all of his evenings away from home, drinking and gambling at which he has spent and lost his money, and but for her work and efforts, said parties would have had no home to live in, nor any money with which to pay rent and buy clothes and provisions. According to clementines divorce filing, the most recent attack was the final straw, she tells the court, Harry is working as a waiter, making $80 a month, and she wants a divorce and suitable alimony and attorney’s fees.

 

Eric  23:37

This is incredibly personal information. It took me a while to really process this document, and I thought about it for a long time, and if I was to sort of take anything away from it, that wasn’t just how sad it is. Is that this is a brave thing for Clementine to take this risk and to put this in writing.

 

Melissa Townsend  24:01

It’s unexpected and terrible and disappointing. When Eric first found out, he called me and we were both stunned, and then we thought, Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this on the podcast.

 

Eric  24:15

I think one of the biggest reasons I was concerned about this document is that it feeds a really problematic stereotype about violent black men.

 

Melissa Townsend  24:25

We know that black men like Harry are over represented in media stories about violence and underrepresented as people in positive roles. So let me say this in an old recording, Marvel Cook talked about her father. You might remember her from a previous episode. She was a black woman who grew up in Minneapolis in the early 1900s her father’s name was Madison, and she talks about him like he was one of the most caring and tender men on the planet.

 

Marvel Cook  24:55

My father believed that children should be nurtured and we take long. Walks together, and he would tell me things I learned, all about the constellations and about love.

 

Melissa Townsend  25:10

In another old interview, Adida Gibbs sounded just the same when she talked about her father, JQ Adams, you might remember he was the publisher of the appeal newspaper.

 

J Q Adams  25:19

How was your father, as a family man, you were coming along, some of the incidents wonderful.

 

Adida Gibbs  25:29

He spent his money on his family, and he was very fond of my mother. I have often thought about how loving he was when he spoke to her or of her.

 

Melissa Townsend  25:45

There are no excuses for domestic violence, but there are explanations. And when it came to Harry and Clementine, we wanted to understand more about why he may have been violent.

 

Dionne Trice  25:57

Say your name again, introduce yourselff?

 

Melissa Townsend  25:59

So I called a therapist who might help.

 

Dionne Trice  26:01

Okay, well, my name is Dionne Trice. I am one of the marriage and family therapists over at the Family Development Center over in St Paul.

 

Melissa Townsend  26:10

Is it okay if I record this for the podcast?

 

Dionne Trice  26:12

Go right ahead.

 

Melissa Townsend  26:13

Dionne is a black therapist who has particular expertise with domestic violence, and one of the first things she told me was you have to remember what it was like in the early 1900s.

 

Dionne Trice  26:24

We have to understand that you could beat and discipline a woman like you could a child. Wow, that was a common experience, common thought process, to be able to hit a woman thinking it was your right to do so.

 

Melissa Townsend  26:38

But she said the level of violence described in the divorce filing was extreme. So I asked her if she could help me understand more about what leads to domestic violence, and she said there are some general observations. One, men who have been abused often end up abusing. Two, oftentimes, men who abuse have had experiences of traumatic abandonment and rejection. And when she said this, I thought about Harry’s childhood, so I told her about it.  Harry when he was eight, his dad dies of accidental rat poisoning, and then when Harry becomes a high school senior, he’s valedictorian of his class, and he gets a scholarship to law school, and they take it away when they find out he’s black, and so talk about abandonment and rejection. As I was saying all this. Dionne was nodding her head. Oh, yeah, this makes sense.

 

Dionne Trice  27:34

One of the ways that we would explain their cycle to the men is we would use a Jack in a box, a Jack in a box. You know, you get 15 cranks before it pops open, right? But when you have poverty, abandonment, social stressors, injustices, trauma, that are unresolved and undealt with that’s like taking a crank away every day. This is one of the thing about mental health and African Americans. I’m speaking specifically about African descendants of slaves here, the pressures to assimilate or to bear this pressure of being the middle class, the exception that kind of stress that you’re constantly undertakes cranks away. So I don’t get to wake up with with 14 cranks. I only get to wake up with seven, eight. So then, of course, when I’m walking and I come home and I’m with my family, all the other daily things that get added makes it far easier for me to lose it.

 

Melissa Townsend  28:46

Dionne told me Harry’s alcoholism was probably a response to the same thing.

 

Dionne Trice  28:51

Especially if I don’t have empathetic space in which I can be able to voice and say these things and be heard, be honored, respected, validated and heard.

 

Eric  29:05

We don’t know if Harry had a space where he could talk and be heard about the pressure that he felt, but I found this old recording of a man named Nelson Peary. He was a black man who spent his younger years in Minneapolis, and in this interview, he talked about what he learned from his father about sharing emotions.

 

Nelson Peary  29:25

One of the things that my old man drove into me, that I think took hold of me, and that he used to always tell me, a man Don’t cry. And from that on, went on where a man doesn’t have any emotion, you know, and you can’t look like that. Live like that. I don’t guess I got it out of me. I don’t think I ever will get it out.

 

Melissa Townsend  29:51

Men were not supposed to share their emotions. Before I said goodbye to Dionne, I wanted to ask for her thoughts on Clement. Fine. Why did she stay with Harry during the abuse?

 

Dionne Trice  30:07

It is heavy respectability in politics. Because, again, if I’m in a predominantly white society, respectability is I can’t show my flaws. I can’t reach out for help. If I don’t live up to social norms, then I can be highly penalized for that. Are we going to become the laughing stock? Is he going to lose all social credibility? Am I going to lose social credibility? I can’t afford that.

 

Melissa Townsend  30:41

You can imagine, that’s what Clementine was thinking for seven years as she endured this violence. But then in 1915 she filed for divorce. Eric did some digging, and he learned that a lot of women at the time were doing the same thing.

 

Eric  30:57

In 1915 the number of divorces was actually skyrocketing where they lived in Hennepin County, Minnesota, nearly 700 divorces were granted that year, and that’s about 2.5 times the number from a decade earlier, which far outpaced the growth of the population. According to some reports, in 1914 one out of every seven marriages ended in divorce.

 

Melissa Townsend  31:22

But somewhere around 1916 Harry and Clementine got back together.

 

Eric  31:27

Harry and Clementine definitely separated, but it looks like they never got divorced.

 

Melissa Townsend  31:31

In the divorce filing from 1915 that Eric saw, there was no response from Harry and there was also no final divorce decree, all we know is that in 1917 they bought a house together, and in 1925 they opened a business. Maybe that was a sign that he dealt with his demons and cleaned up his act. But how to find out? We called an expert.

 

Dianne  Stewart  31:55

It’s so interesting.

 

Melissa Townsend  31:58

Dianne  Stewart is an historian and an author, and she specializes in black love, marriage and relationships.

 

Dianne  Stewart  32:05

I actually am wondering, I’m thinking about her family. So she is definitely coming from a context where her family would be considered high black society. Her sister is a nurse, her brother is a doctor.

 

Melissa Townsend  32:21

They all lived in Kansas City, Missouri.

 

Dianne  Stewart  32:24

I’m wondering if there might have been family interventions. Is it possible that her brother intervened on her behalf and said, Look, you know, we’re going to take our sister back if you don’t shape up. I just wondered, what would the family conversations have been?

 

Melissa Townsend  32:43

Or she says, maybe Harry came to his senses on his own.

 

Dianne  Stewart  32:47

I’m wondering about that. Did he himself realize? Okay, what am I doing? This is ridiculous. I’ll never get someone as good as this who literally becomes, you know, a foundation for my own status, no matter what, I wonder if he did shape up, and maybe through the help of religion, I’m so intrigued. I just don’t know.

 

Eric  33:13

Man, I really struggle with this. I think when you’re researching someone, it’s really easy to root for them and to sort of come up with an idea of them in your head, and I think that I started to realize that Harry is clearly more complicated than I understood previously. But I really do think that by the time that Harry opened the restaurant, that he was in a different place in his life. And why do I think that? Well, first, let’s just talk about who came to that luncheon in 1925 just months before the shooting. I mean, these are the black leaders of Minneapolis, and I don’t think they would have been there if Harry was the same violent and irresponsible person that Clementine had described a decade earlier, and besides that, his life had changed dramatically from 10 years earlier. I mean, he had a successful wife and a house and a business, and again, he was supported by some of the most respected local black leaders.

 

Melissa Townsend  34:20

That makes sense to me too, but I wanted to ask Eric if this new information from the divorce filing changed his understanding of what might have happened at the Chicken Shack the night of the shooting. And he said he’s as puzzled as ever about what happened that night in the Chicken Shack, but he also said he knows one thing for sure.

 

Eric  34:43

I think that Harry was a man that cleaned himself up. I mean, he was finding a way for himself in this city after all these years. So when Roy Mattis walked into the Chicken Shack at that point, I think he had everything to lose.

 

Melissa Townsend  34:59

And he lose nearly everything. By the end of 1931 Harry and Clementine had closed their business and lost their house. I picture them packing up to leave for the very last time. Their dishes are in boxes. The floors are bare, the walls are bare. But the question is, where were they going? The city had only gotten more segregated, So where could they land on their feet? That’s next time.

 

Interviewee  35:33

It’s not fair, it’s not just it’s not correct, but it is what it is. We just got to keep moving forward.

 

CREDITS  35:56

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.