The Long History of Black Political and Identity Struggles in Minnesota: A Consideration of the Work of William D. Green

The events of 2020 brought attention to and elicited renewed reflection on Black lives and histories, particularly those centered on midwestern places. Minnesota, the site of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, was thrust into the national spotlight and became an important site of protest in the international resurgence of the movement for Black Lives. One of the most generative if uncomfortable effects of these events was to reinvigorate conversations about the centrality of Black people and systemic racism in the histories of places like Minnesota. Historians have been crucial in those conversations, producing newspaper columns, appearing on television, and offering the context and nuance needed to make progress.

Enter William D. Green, a history professor at Augsburg University in Minneapolis who, over the past decade or so, authored three books on Black experiences and the shape of racial prejudice and exclusion in Minnesota. All published by the University of Minnesota Press, Green's books offer rich portraits of the complex identities of Black Minnesotans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Across the three books, Green's temporal focus spans the 1830s to the 1910s, just when the Great Migration began and Black people arrived in substantial numbers in large midwestern cities like Chicago and Cleveland. Minneapolis became a major destination when the Great Depression made industrial opportunities in cities further north more attractive. Though the setting for Green's studies is St. Paul—Minnesota's more prominent city during the earlier periods—both cities simultaneously speak to the state's racial history. As Green puts it in A Peculiar Imbalance, "this is a Minnesota story" (xi). Though not intended or structured explicitly as a trilogy, the books work well when read together. After the first two books, Green notes, "there were a lot of pieces to the puzzle that I had not yet fitted together," which the third book especially allowed him to do (Children of Lincoln, 3). All three books add places like Minnesota to narratives about Reconstruction and add African Americans and race to the stories of Minnesota and midwestern history. In exploring these nineteenth-century stories, Green clarifies how early Black struggles for freedom in Minnesota were a prelude to future generations' challenges.

The first book, A Peculiar Imbalance, examines how concepts of race and ethnicity were increasingly standardized in the period from 1837 to 1869—a point Green shows through the sociopolitical experiences of Black men in particular. Imbalance is an "extended essay" on "what it meant to be a black member of early Minnesota society" (xi–xii) and a tightly argued, rich portrait of race relations in mid-nineteenth-century Minnesota. It begins by pointing to one of the North Star State's original contradictions: while the 1787 Northwest Ordinance held that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory," slaves were present well into the 1830s in the Minnesota country—the term Green uses to denote the Upper Mississippi Valley region before it was organized into territories and states (5, xii). At forts in the region, American army officers often purchased slaves using their allowance to "keep" a servant, a practice so widespread it brought slavery wherever "military presence and culture appeared on the frontier" (8). Although not unique to Minnesota's Fort Snelling, whose most famous residents were Dred and Harriet Scott, Green uses that location to demonstrate the cruel inefficiencies of frontier law. Slaves were frequently unable to sue for their freedom in free territories but could later...