Letter From Duluth: It Did Happen Here: The Lynching That a City Forgot:
Many white people had never heard of the lynching; older generations had chosen not to pass the memory down. Many African-Americans here -- just 1,415 black people are counted among the population of 86,000 -- had heard of it, but spoke about it quietly, among themselves.Then Heidi Bakk-Hansen, who works downtown, read a book about the lynching. Every time she passed the empty corner at First Street and Second Avenue East, it haunted her. The men had been accused of assaulting a white woman, but a mob pulled them from jail before a trial and before anyone could see that the charges seemed dubious. In 2000, Ms. Bakk-Hansen, who is white, told their story in a local newspaper.
To many here, the memory was painful and inexplicable: how could a lynching, the legacy of Southern towns, have happened in a gritty but placid port city beside Lake Superior, nearly in Canada? And wasn't Duluth too small, too overwhelmingly white, for racial strife anyway?
Registration may be required; I can't tell with the NYTimes anymore. Luckily, VampWillow pointed out the New York Times Link Generator the other day, and it tosses up this here link.
I'm being deliberately glib here because I really don't want to think about the subject of the article, thanks.
But I'd feel guilty not mentioning it just because it makes me uncomfortable.
i was reading this article this morning at my cafe-on-the-way-to-work. it made my brain go all stupid, thinking things like, 'i'm glad they built a memorial, but i wish they'd chosen a different sculptor'. i'm going to have to stare at it awhile and see if my initial aesthetic reaction changes. but this is definitely pre-caffeine stupidity at work...
if memorials like this were built everywhere they SHOULD be built in this country, we'd barely have room to walk around.
hell, let's do it anyway.
if i build sculptures instead of doing all the things i wanna do, i might escape the firing squad...
The story is really disturbing. The way the NYT story is told, it was once the memorial went up that all of a sudden "tensions have flared." The only black quote is from someone indifferent to the memorial -- is this representative or the NYT's way of saying "even the black people in town didn't want it!" The sculptor picking some young locals to model for the lynched men is utterly creepy.
Eh yeah.
Im black and in Texas.
No need to remind me.
Hiya.
This thread is probably long dead, but in case any of y'all come back in, i'd like to say the following:
The reason the sculptor chose three young men from the community is that there exist, to date, no photos of any of the men. believe me, we've looked. (although i still have geneology research going...) As far as Carla Stetson and Anthony Peyton Porter's design, it was one reached by consensus of the community--everyone was invited to give their opinions, and theirs was far and away the preferred design.
Certainly, I would welcome you to see the sculpture in person. I go by it nearly every day, and I often see people there.
The reporter's mention of "tensions flaring" was kind of, in my opinion, making a story where there isn't any. Unless you want to say that racism is a continuously simmering silent boil in this town. But certainly nothing new. There hasn't been a trace of vandalism, which we all kind of expected.
As far as the black folks in this town "not wanting it"--that's not exactly true. the Old Guard Duluthian black folks, the core of people who've been here through thick and thin, are dealing with a number of factors. One of which is that it took a gay black man and a white woman, both from out of town, to get this thing going. (After the getting going part, it was an uphill battle to get Anyone on board, because people were scared of it. Black and white.) However, many people came forward. People who were descendants of perpetrators, and people who hid in their homes that night in fear for their lives. Lots of those Old Guard black folks have participated from the beginning. I couldn't really *begin* to explain fully the dynamic, 'cause I've only been in this town 9 years--believe me when I say they still say I'm new.
What good does it do? Having a memorial? Well, I think about that a lot. But I think there's something to that idea of not getting nailed by the firing squad. Something about the physical presence of a reminder: This Happened Here.
When I take kids up around the street, from Superior Street, where the jail was, and the one block to the memorial, I make them turn and look from the center of the intersection at Superior and 2nd Ave. E. I have them imagine 10,000 people. 10,000 people, wall-to-wall, as far as you can manage to see. Imagine the roar of a mob. And then I tell them to imagine that it's a crowd full of people they know. Neighbors, classmates, family members. Then I tell them some of the details we know about Elias, Elmer and Isaac. And I describe what happened to them, those last few hours. The point: make history human. Maybe then, slow increments of change.
Heidi
Duluth, Minn.
Heidi, I do keep the old threads open for a reason. Because every once in a while, someone like you has something valuable to contribute to 'em. Thanks.
Suppose I'll have to visit Duluth at some point. Any good vegan/vegetarian restaurants up there?
Hi.
It's a nice town, really. Not much on the vegan end, but plenty of vegetarian options. Summer's a great time to visit. (In the old days, it was known as the "air-conditioned city", because of the Lake.)
We've talked a lot on the memorial committee about why on earth, if you're going to have a memorial to lynching victims, it would have to be in Duluth, Minn.. This is, BTW, the first of its kind. There have been roadside historical markers (also with steep uphill battles to get them), and there is a memorial somewhere in an Illinois cemetery, but Duluth's is the first of its scale, the first to tie this violence to hate crimes and to community healing—and the first to be placed ostensibly where the white community must view it in the course of their day, rather than "hidden away" where only Black folks ( or the "victims" rather than perps) would come across it.
There was a guy who was trying to get a memorial to *all* the US's African-American lynching victims in Washington D.C., but I haven't heard anything since his effort hit the press about five years ago.
Yeah, so why here? Probably because the racists here don't have the social support they have elsewhere, further south. (That's when I'm feeling pessimistic, which is often. They're just quieter, hereabouts.) Or perhaps because northern Minnesota has a distinctive rebellious streak stemming from our Finnish socialist history. Maybe we don't like to fuck up on such a huge scale as having one-tenth of the city show up and lynch three innocent circus workers and then leave it un-atoned for by the next generation. (A Lutheran sensibility? Maybe.) I don't know.
What I do know is that it was pretty damned amazing to see a couple thousand people, politicians and average folks, show up to "atone for" something that happened over 80 years ago. It's pretty hard to see how deep it goes. Whether it will have any actual affect. But, well, it did give me the hopeful shivers.
I guess the best thing to come out of it is that there's a lot of on-going work. Local groups and the city government have done a fair job of at least attending to the issue. (And I'll have to put the bulk of the credit on the work that's been done here by the People's Institute--their analysis and workshops would help any community in their journey. thepeoplesinstitute.org.)
And communities around the US South are taking our example and going forward in their own projects. There are small groups of inter-racial committees all over who have been forging forward--in cultural synchronicity. I guess that's what I have found most interesting: across the US in around 2000, cultural attention was finally turned to our own Black Holocaust. It's slow, but turning our collective eye this direction could take that February Black History month to its missing or often barely mentioned chapter. When America faces the fact that not only did Great-great-great grandpa own slaves, but Grandpa--that guy who took you for ice cream on Sundays after church--took part in a lynching... well, I have hopes that it could change people's detached perspectives.
Thanks, Heidi. Vaguely remember hearing about the lynching memorial years back, but nothing recently either. And with another Bush in the White House. . . no, that's rude.
True, but rude.
I'm vaguely thinking about a trip up to the Sin Cities (and to Vancouver, which, yes, is insane in the same road trip, but sanity, not one of my qualities); Duluth wouldn't be too far out of the way at that point. . .