An Ever-Present Impulse: The Legacy of Anti-Black Violence and the Paradox of Minnesota Exceptionalism

With the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, the Band-Aid of conventional wisdom applied to a state long noted for its enlightened relations between Blacks and Whites, was ripped off to reveal to many a shocking truth. Belying a racially tranquil setting within the idyllic Land of Ten Thousand Lakes—where such iconic leaders as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett received a cordial welcome from public leaders—the specter of violence loomed large against Blacks. This subterranean propensity, an ever-present impulse, an ever-threatening potential—enabled by White Minnesotans' complaisance—comprises what University of Minnesota economist Samuel L. Myers calls the "Minnesota Paradox." Its enablers, including progressive political leaders and their constituents, deferred to mobs—but more frequently to city police departments—to do the dirty work of abusing and endangering Black people. They looked the other way until collective memory faded and the public record gathered dust in some long-obscured footnote.¹

During the year preceding the Civil War, police officers and mob members each took extralegal steps in determining the fates of fugitive slaves. One example was the 1860 rendition of Henry Sparks by St. Paul police; they beat him before summarily placing him on a steamboat heading south. Weeks later, Minneapolis Whites rioted after a Hennepin County judge freed Eliza Winston. They completely destroyed the property of Emily Grey, the Black businesswoman who initiated the hearing that led to Winston's liberation. They also demolished Grey's husband's barber shop.² In 1863, St. Paul police allowed White laborers on strike in the city to stone two barges transporting contraband slaves from Missouri. The laborers believed the contrabands had been brought to the capital to break their strike. Petitions had circulated for weeks opposing the use of contraband labor and calling on the legislature to enact yet another law prohibiting Black migration into the state. When draft registration began that summer, officials—fearful that draft riots raging in New York and other eastern cities might spread to the already volatile St. Paul—considered posting a provost guard.³ The police department could not be relied upon to confront the fury of White laborers who were convinced that the Black men now residing in St. Paul stood poised to take their jobs and women—while Whites were fighting and dying in the distant South to free all men.

The Minnesota Paradox remained evident during the years after Appomattox, as civil rights progress cloaked dangerous inequalities. Minnesota Republicans, after two failed attempts, succeeded in amending the state constitution to extend suffrage to the state's Black men. The following March, they ended school segregation.⁴ By then, Congress had nationally ratified the 13th and 14th Amendments, and many White Minnesotans who could be counted on to be anti-Black could see the trend toward racial equality. Indeed, some of their own government leaders seemed willing to concede that a new day dawned for Black equality, when, weeks after the new school law passed, court officials in the Democratic stronghold of Ramsey County—who had scorned Black suffrage—now swiftly seated Black men on a jury.⁵ In January 1870, Minnesota voted to ratify the 15th Amendment.⁶ It made Black men politically equal to the White laborers who felt abandoned by their own Democratic leaders. But those Whites were not without allies. The police—many of whom came from the laborers' socio-economic ranks—could be counted on to enthusiastically brandish their own form of law and order.

That the police would not intervene when Whites threatened Blacks was clear in February 1873 when Frederick Douglass came to St. Paul to speak on the advancement of the "negro" since the Civil War. As he addressed a packed hall of Republican civic, political, and business leaders, a crowd formed outside hurling catcalls and threatening to lynch the speaker. The better-heeled crowd inside responded by shouting louder their support for Douglass's message. The tone of antagonism...