June 15, 1920. Three black men who were working with a traveling circus were lynched in Duluth by a mob that stormed a police station where suspects in an alleged rape were being held, staged a kangaroo court, reached a guilty verdict, then dragged the men to a corner lamppost where they were hanged until dead. The rape was never proven, police leadership was criticized for ordering officers to not protect the suspects with their guns, and the National Guard was brought into Duluth to restore order.
But unlike the death of George Floyd, three weeks ago Monday and nearly a century later, information about the lynching was kept relatively quiet.
How quiet? The woman who made the rape allegations died in 1996, and it was a few years later that her great-nephew found out the connection. That great-nephew is now Duluth's police chief.
Not that news of the lynching never got out. A photo of the grisly scene, the bodies of two of the three men shown hanging and the third below them on the ground, surrounded by a group of white men--some seemingly proud of themselves--was made into a postcard.
Four Minneapolis police officers were fired the day after Floyd died and were eventually charged with murder. In the case that led to the Duluth lynchings, one man was convicted despite flimsy evidence and eventually was granted a pardon.
That pardon came last Friday, long after that man was released and told never to return to Minnesota. He died in Alabama.
While the memorial for Floyd began to grow at Chicago and 38th in south Minneapolis not long after he died from the pressure applied by an MPD officer's knee to his neck, the memorial for Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie was finally dedicated in 2003.
The words etched in stone directly above the metal castings of Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie at the corner of First Street and Second Avenue in Duluth speaks volumes: "Impossible to Remain Silent."
"One of the reasons we're commemorating this anniversary shows that what happened 100 years ago and what happened now do have a connection," said Avi Viswanathan, Director of Inclusion and Community Engagement of the Minnesota Historical Society."We want to make people understand that this is something that's happened over time," he said. "It's not just today, or in the last few years, and it wasn't just a hundred years ago. It's important to connect that past so that we realize that there's a long-term systemic problem."
Viswanathan gives credit to the people who began organizing a permanent remembrance of the three men who died in 1920.
"They've taken this history and displayed it themselves," Viswanathan said. "They known it's part of what their community has done, and they don't hide from it. There will be gatherings to make sure that they're in touch with their own history, as sad this moment was."
