They're selling postcards of the hanging. They're painting the passports brown. The beauty parlor is filled with sailors. The circus is in town. Here comes the blind commissioner: they've got him in a trance. One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker; the other is in his pants. And the riot squad they're restless: they need somewhere to go ...
http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/desolation-row ... With the end of the Civil War, Minnesota became a Mecca for large numbers of the freed slaves. The social-culture of Minnesota - as typified and reflected by the passionate anti-racism of John Ireland, Ignatius Donnelly
, James Manahan and Arthur Charles Townley <of the Non-Partisan League>, William Mahoney <founder of the Farmer-Labor Party>, etc. - was TOTALLY intolerant of the Ku Klux Klan from its very beginnings.
A large number of Blacks - freed slaves - participated in the formation of Utopian Colonies at Mille Lacs and Aitkin, Minnesota. There were even some Blacks who were associated with the Irish Utopian Colonies in Swift and Big Stone counties. During the 1890s, there were all-Black as well as racially-integrated camps of lumberjacks in Pine, Carlton and St. Louis counties. These workers - influenced by Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones, Vincent St. John and Carlo Tresca - fashioned a direct-action labor movement to contend with the capitalists of that day.
The Ku Klux Klan sent missionaries to Minnesota in 1920 ... http://www.ainfos.ca/01/aug/ainfos00370.html ... During 1920, sixty-five persons were lynched. Of these, fifty-seven were Black men, and one was a Black woman.
The incident drawing the most notoriety that year occurred June 15 when a mob estimated at between five thousand and ten thousand persons stormed the jail in Duluth, Minnesota, and lynched three Blacks accused of raping a White girl ...
In the years prior to World War I, Duluth was a city where race relations had never surfaced in open hostilities. There had been occasional veiled threats when members of the Ku Klux Klan held cross burnings ...
The legislature .. created the Commission for Public Safety on April 16, 1920 ...
... much Commission activity centered on squelching the Nonpartisan League. While law enforcement officers looked the other way, or even participated directly in the suppression of free speech, speakers were beaten, tarred and feathered, and otherwise harassed and threatened under the blanket protection of patriotic outbursts which were allowable. Some speakers or organizers of the League were routinely thrashed by some sheriffs who further encouraged citizens to act against these dangerous elements in Minnesota. The notion was prevalent that citizens could act with impunity against what they perceived as socialistic, "red," or disloyal acts, without fear of official reprisal ...
...
http://www.duluth.lib.mn.us/Programs/Mockingbird/LynchingsExcerpt.html Postcard From A Lynching
By Chris Julin and Stephanie Hemphill
June 2001
Minnesota Public Radio
October 25, 2002
RealAudio... it was a shock when the headline, "Duluth Mob Lynches Three Negroes," ran in papers from the Duluth News-Tribune to the New York Times. But the story quickly faded from the news, and most people in Duluth were happy to forget the murders. Two generations of Minnesotans grew up knowing little or nothing about the lynching in Duluth.
June 15 is the anniversary of the lynching. A few years ago, a citizens group began a campaign to build a memorial to the lynching victims in downtown Duluth. That memorial is now in place, and is the focus of ceremonies in downtown Duluth to remember the event on this anniversary ...
http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2001/06/lynching/It was the John Robinson Circus that brought Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie to Duluth. They and other young black men were employed by the circus as cooks and “roustabouts,” laborers who performed a variety of physical tasks. Traveling by train, the circus was greeted by an eager crowd upon arrival in Duluth. They were in town for a free street parade and one day of performances on June 14, 1920.
On the warm summer night of June 14, Irene Tusken, age nineteen, and James Sullivan, eighteen, went to the circus in Duluth. At the end of the evening the pair walked to the rear of the main tent. Nobody is sure of what happened next, but in the early morning of June 15th, Duluth Police Chief John Murphy received a call from James Sullivan’s father saying six black circus workers had held the pair at gunpoint and then raped Irene Tusken. Little evidence would be found to corroborate these claims. An examination of Tusken that morning by Dr. David Graham, a family physician, showed no physical signs of rape or assault.
Six blacks were immediately arrested by the Duluth Police and held in the Duluth city jail, located inside the police station on the corner of Second Avenue and Superior Street. Already reported in the local newspaper, news of the alleged rape spread rapidly. That evening a white mob estimated between 1,000 and 10,000 people gathered on Superior Street outside the police station. They met little resistance from the police, who had been ordered not to use their guns.
Wielding bricks, rails, and heavy timbers, the mob forced its way into the jail, tearing down doors and breaking windows. They pulled all six blacks from their cells. After a hasty mock trial, Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie were declared guilty and taken one block to a light pole on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East. A few tried to dissuade the mob, but their pleas were in vain. The three men were beaten and then lynched, first Isaac McGhie, then Elmer Jackson, and lastly Elias Clayton ...
http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/html/lynchings.htm ... Seven blacks, all laborers from the John Robinson Circus, were indicted by the grand jury for the crime of rape. The NAACP hired three black attorneys — Frederick Barnett Jr., Charles W. Scrutchin, and R. C. McCullough — to defend these men in court.
For five of the indicted blacks, charges were dismissed. The remaining two, Max Mason and William Miller, were tried for rape. William Miller was acquitted. Max Mason was convicted and sentenced to serve seven to thirty years in prison ...
http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/html/legalproceedings.htm 
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