Anti Blackness In Minnesota

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Did you know that Iglehart is named after a slave owner? Harwood Iglehart of Maryland lived in Minnesota while retaining slaves in Maryland. By fall 1854, Iglehart, Hall, and Iglehart’s cousin from Maryland — Charles Mackubin — had moved to St. Paul, dived into law and finance, and gotten ready to cash in on the real estate action. The trio together bought 160 acres overlooking Lake Phalen in what would become St. Paul’s East Side, and all three would become Minnesota civic leaders, winning legislative elections and appointments to lead libraries and schools.

In 1956, the demolition teams rolled into Rondo. Over the next decade, more than 1,000 families lost their homes and 300 businesses were forced out. The majority of the homes and businesses were owned by Black Americans whose ancestors descend from US Chattel Slavery Some of the notable businesses in the Rondo community at the time were McGill Grocery Store. Lewis and Son’s Upholstery” was a prominent Black business in the Rondo Community. In addition to Rondo-owned housing developments, individual families owned homes, allowing them to accumulate wealth.

On June 15, 1920, three  Black American circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, suspects in an assault case, were taken from the jail and lynched by a White mob of thousands in Duluth Minnesota. Rumors had circulated that six Black men had raped and robbed a nineteen-year-old White woman. A physician who examined her found no physical evidence of rape.

Robert A. Viktora, a juvenile, along with others, assembled a crude cross by taping together broken chair legs and then burning the cross inside the fenced yard of the Joneses, a black family. He was arrested and charged under a bias-motivated crime ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota. From WP: Viktora declined to be interviewed for this report. "Lighting a cross has been passed down," he told Life Magazine, although he said he would not discuss the incident. "If it's lit in somebody's yard, they're doing something you don't like or that you want stopped. Like them living in the neighborhood."

Viktora could have been prosecuted for trespass, assault, vandalism, criminal destruction of property, or even for violating a state law against making terroristic threats, Cleary said.

n 1924, Nellie and William contracted to buy a house in an all-white part of St. Paul, at 2092 Sargent Avenue. In response, neighbors organized the Cretin Improvement Association, held noisy demonstrations, burned a cross on the house’s lawn, and offered the Francises a thousand dollars not to move in. They moved in anyway.