Unearthing Paths toward Black Freedom in the Midwest

If the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline, as W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued, how to understand what various forms that problem took in different regions requires understanding the meaning of race at the state and local level.¹ Midwestern states lacked a formal color line and many had reputations as racially liberal, making them appealing destinations for those African Americans who fled the South during the Great Migration.² But despite the existence of civil rights regimes enshrined in law, by the late twentieth century, the region’s Rust Belt cities came to represent the worst of the urban crisis with its characteristic poverty and racial segregation.³ Understanding the way in which race mattered throughout the region’s history reveals how the significance of race determined the shape of freedom in the Midwest.

William D. Green’s is a meticulously researched examination of the involvement of African American men in Minnesota politics from the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth. Green’s research on these “race men” is impressively detailed, revealing how closely tied the achievements of black leaders were to the state’s white political establishment. Green argues that despite Minnesota’s reputation as a bastion of racial tolerance and Republicanism, black men in politics worked within a confined set of parameters that were largely determined by white elites.

The book follows three generations of black men in politics: the barbers, the entrepreneurs, and the radicals. As they did elsewhere, African American barbers built relationships with the white elites whom they served, which allowed them to leverage political power during Reconstruction. This generation of race men made alliances with Republicans and eventually gained black suffrage, though they were hindered in their attempts to secure the passage of other civil rights legislation. The entrepreneurs were more successful with a public accommodations law, but a lack of enforcement and loopholes in the law left the state segregated through custom, as happened elsewhere in the Midwest.⁴ The third generation Green follows—the “radicals”—looked outside the state and built connections with national civil rights figures such as W. E. B. DuBois and the Niagara Movement.

Throughout Green’s work, the comparatively small number of black inhabitants of the state, especially in the rural areas beyond Minneapolis and St. Paul, prohibited African Americans from constituting a powerful voting bloc at any time before the Great Migration. Paths that proved fruitless give a glimpse of a more tantalizing promise of freedom for the majority of African Americans in Minnesota, who largely toiled in manual labor and resided in the lower working class. Unsuccessful efforts to secure Homestead Act land for former slaves in western and southern Minnesota stands out as a particularly fascinating lost opportunity. Furthermore, the exclusion of saloons from the state’s original public accommodations bill raises questions—if black and white workingmen would have been allowed to drink “elbow to elbow,” might that have lessened the social isolation of black men and women in the state? What members of the working class wanted—what would have translated into more freedom for them—is not explored in the book, nor is the political mobilization of black women. These remain important areas for further research.

If the sectional crisis shaped the lives of black Minnesotans before the Civil War and the development of Jim Crow affected their civil rights strategy afterward, the South loomed even larger in the lives of black midwesterners after the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. Darryl Mace’s In Remembrance of Emmett Till is an examination of the...