History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis >>>>> Part One: Historical Background

History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis

Part One:  Historical Background

 

Gary Marvin Davison

 

The story of the North Minneapolis African American community is intimately linked to the history of the territory (established 1849) and state (established 1858) of Minnesota, and to all key events in the history of the United States.

 

People from outside the cultural universe of the Dakota and the more recently arrived Ojibwe people were first drawn to the place we now call Minnesota in the 17^th century.  These were mostly fur traders keen on getting as many beaver pelts as they could for shipment back to a lucrative market in Europe.  The French and the British dominated this trade, but among the traders there were representatives of a variety of ethnicities, including those of African ancestry.  The most famous of these were Pierre Bonga and his son George, the latter of whom became particularly successful as a trader, interpreter (he was fluent in French, English, and Ojibwe), and diplomat who helped to lower the cultural barriers between the native inhabitants and the European arrivals.  Bungo Township and Bungo Brook in Cass County were named for the Bonga family.

African Americans were also linked to the history of Ft. Snelling, which was completed in 1820.  James Thompson arrived at Ft. Snelling in 1827 as a slave but lived to see emancipation become a reality for those formerly held in bondage;  he became the only African American among the St. Paul Old Settlers Association.  Dred Scott became a particularly well-known former resident at Ft. Snelling:  His two-year residence at the fort during 1836-1838 led him to file a lawsuit contending that his residence in a free state should end the condition of servitude that his master sought to maintain upon returning to the South.  Scott won the case in a lower court, but the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the earlier decision.  The high court’s ruling (in 1857) that slaves were transportable property greatly added to the North-South tensions that culminated in the Civil War. 

Among the Minnesotans who fought in that conflict were 105 African Americans.  Thus, Minnesotans of African ancestry were part of the historical flow of events culminating in the 13^th Amendment that officially ended the institution of slavery.  By the time that amendment went into effect (1868), African Americans had already settled in the corner of Minneapolis then known as St. Anthony, across the Mississippi River from today’s downtown.  Sometime in 1857 eight families of free African Americans with roots in Missouri, Arkansas,and Illinois settled near the Falls of St. Anthony.  Members of these families and later African American arrivals to Minneapolis formed St. James Episcopal Church in 1863.

In that same year a steamboat known as the “Northerner” arrived in St. Paul with a raft in tow that carried 76 African American men, women, and children.  The leader of the group was Robert Hickman, destined to become one of the most important figures in the early African American community of St. Paul.  Hickman was instrumental in forming the Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1866, and after his formal ordainment in 1877 he became this important congregation’s official pastor.  Pilgrim Baptist Church has endured to this day as a thriving congregation of St. Paul.   

Until about 1910, the greatest settlement of Twin Cities African Americans, and the heart of African American society and culture, lay in St. Paul.   Most African-American pioneers of the 1860s and 1870s settled initially on a bend in the Mississippi where the lower levee was located, taking up residence alongside Irish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Jewish immigrants.  As the area became too crowded to support additional famillies, these groups spread out.  Although the immigrant families had generally gotten along well as they battled common conditions rooted in poverty, when they spread out they tended to sort themselves into certain areas heavily identified with particular ethnic groups.  African Americans faced severe discrimination in all facets of life in St. Paul, including those bearing upon housing and residence.  Only on the immediate north and northwest corridors leading to residential areas on the western plateau did they find reasonable welcome along a pathway that had been forged by the Jewish community.   

By 1900 population pressures and greater commercialization of areas branching from downtown St. Paul forced African Americans farther north and west onto a plateau along Rondo Avenue and adjacent streets from Rice to Lexington.  Rondo, St. Anthony, Central, Carroll, and University avenues east of Dale Street became the hub of the famous “Rondo Community.”  Here were numerous African American-owned barbershops and hair salons, restaurants, pharmacies, fraternal lodges, churches, and commercial establishments of various kinds.  Until well into the 20^th century, St. Paul produced the greater number of outstanding African American leaders in the Twin Cities:  entreprenuers Thomas H. Lyles and James K. Hilyard;  John Quincy Adams, editor of the highly influential newspaper, the Appeal;  lawyers Frederick McGhee (who helped  W. E. B. DuBois launch the Niagara Movement in 1905 that culminated in the founding of the NAACP in 1910), J. Frank Wheaton, and William T. Francis;  and Dr. Valdo Turner, one of the city’s earliest African-American physicians.

The spirit of the Rondo community endures to this day (celebrated as “Rondo Days” for several recent summers), despite the fact that the construction of I-94 in the 1960s destroyed the street that was the community’s namesake and caused great geographical, social, and commercial disruption.  Long before that tumultuous decade, though, the demographic and cultural weight among African Americans in the Twin Cities had shifted to Minneapolis.