With regard to the illicit activities that took place at the behest of Kid Cann and other mobsters, there was concern in the Northside community about the influences that such activities had on young people. Concern focused especially on the fates of young, poor, single women drawn to the big city, on their own, all too susceptible to the exhortations of those plying the illegal trades. As a result of a youth study by a white women’s civic organization, Women’s Cooperative Alliance (WCA), the idea of a settlement house for young African-American women on the Northside was first put forward in 1922. A campaign run by these wealthy and well-connected women (many of them wives and daughters of the city’s elite businessmen) raised enough money to purchase the old Talmud Torah School at 808 Bassett Place. By the time this Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House opened in 1924, its target population included not just young girls but all members of the community, males and females, old and young; programming, though, was especially abundant for children and adolescents. “The Wheatley,” as the organization came to be known in brief, proved to fill a need so great that a new, much more ambitious campaign was mounted to build a bigger facility, which opened in 1929 at 809 Aldrich Avenue North.
For forty years, the Wheatley would be the heart and soul of the African American community of North Minneapolis. On it second floor were several rooms, a commons area, and kitchen where University of Minnesota students and nationally famous personages such as Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, and A. Philip Randolph could stay at a time when dorms and hotels in Minneapolis refused service to them. Thus, kids who gathered for classes in sewing, cooking, and dancing; to participate in sports programs such as football, basketball, and baseball; or who took advantage of a well-stocked library or special programming designed to convey African-American history and culture; rubbed shoulders with some of the brightest and most talented people in the land. The children and adolescents got a chance to see someone who looked like them making beautiful music, dancing, doing political or labor organizing, and in general moving confidently in the world. This made a lasting impression on those who came to the Wheatley from 1924 through the middle 1960s; for many an impressionable youngster the Wheatley experience gave them confidence to go forth in a world that did not always seem to welcome their participation, to take on the challenges of an adversely stacked deck and come out a winner.
Presiding over the residential, educational, recreational, health, and nutrition programs at the Wheatley from 1924 until 1937 was a remarkable head resident, W. Gertrude Brown. A physically stout, strong woman who rose to about 6’2” in height, Ms. Brown was even keener of intellect. She quickly became a leader in the greater Twin Cities community, even as the Wheatley became the most famous African American institution in the area. Ms. Brown adroitly served as the nexus between the well-to-do white community and the neighborhood people whom she loved and who loved her. For a long while she also managed to do a challenging balancing act, offering space and lodging to groups gathered in Minneapolis to promote the activities of the NAACP, Urban League, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and a few much more radical groups seeking to advance the cause of poor people and people of color. Every person who lives today to reflect upon the presence of W. Gertrude Brown remembers her as a towering and totally positive presence in their lives: full of stern love, ready with instructions on deportment and grooming, tolerating no nonsense but dispensing abundant tough love.
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