In 1937, the gloriously imperious W. Gertrude Brown could no longer keep her balancing act alive at the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House. She departed under pressure, it seems, from a white board of directors which found her too much an activist for her people, and from a number of prominent African American men who had become jealous of her success and her reputation. Two head residents quickly came and went, then the highly competent Henry Thomas came on staff to direct the Wheatley from 1942 through 1965. Ray and Mae Hatcher served several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s as directors of boys’ and girls’ programs respectively. Harry Davis and Ray Wells took over the boxing program and provided instruction to a succession of Golden Gloves champions from the late 1940s into the early 1960s.
About the time that W. Gertrude Brown made her exit from the Wheatley, two significant changes came to the Northside. In 1937 came the completion of the first stage of the Sumner Housing Project, then in 1941 came the construction of Floyd B. Olson Highway along the thoroughfare that had been known as 6th Avenue. The housing project offered affordable and attractive residential units; those whose families were able to secure spots in the facility considered themselves very lucky. The highway, too, seemed a harbinger of modernity, with a greatly broadened roadway appropriate to the age of the automobile. But construction of the highway dismantled or induced the departure of those businesses, now mostly Jewish owned, that had thrived along old 6th Avenue. Many of these moved in the early 1940s, typically to Plymouth Avenue, which to later generations would become “The Avenue.”
During and after the World War II (1939-1945) years, unprecedented opportunities opened up to African Americans on the Northside. Executive orders issued by Presidents Roosevelt and Truman banned discrimination in companies contracted to the federal government. Enforcement is never perfect in such cases, but the number of jobs now open strictly on the basis of talent, ability, and capacity for hard work increased greatly. An ordnance plant in New Brighton became a major employer of African Americans, as did Onan Industries, located on the Northside; and certain Twin Cities companies such as General Mills, Pillsbury, and Honeywell compiled better records in employment practices than had been the case before World War II.
One of the major forces working to ensure better employment opportunities, and working to promote and report on enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws in the Twin Cities, was Cecil Newman, editor of the long-lived newspaper, the Minneapolis Spokesman. Newman had founded the Spokesman in 1934, by which time John Quincy Adams’s Appeal had faded from the scene in the aftermath of the great editor’s death in the 1920s. The Spokesman quickly surged into the market that the Appeal had dominated, and for decades thereafter would be the preeminent African American-owned newspaper in the Twin Cities; its location in Minneapolis (the Appeal had been based in St. Paul) signaled the shift that had taken place in the relative influence of the African American communities in the two cities. Newman was an enormously influential presence in the Twin Cities, posting job openings, running articles and editorials protesting discriminatory policies, working closely with the Minneapolis Urban League and the NAACP, and offering his newspaper headquarters as an information clearing house that in many ways advanced the cause of equal opportunity for African Americans.Housing discrimination, though, continued to be widespread, even as the late 1940s, the 1950s, and, especially, the 1960s brought to Minneapolis thousands of new African American migrants, mostly from the American South. Most of these settled on the Northside, which was already becoming more African American in residential patterns as prosperous Jewish people found ways to crack the prejudice against them to forge new institutions and to take up residence in nearby St. Louis Park. Most of these new arrivals had little sense of the history of the African American community on the Northside: Minneapolis had been just one of several northern urban options, and they came to the city for jobs, not to acquire a sense of history. By the late 1960s, such inner city populations were voicing their displeasure at the world in which they had landed, to the power elite in cities that had fallen far short of the promised land when it came to jobs, housing, and racial attitudes. When in the summer of 1967 major riots broke out in Cleveland, Detroit, and Los Angeles, young African American people also thrust their voices and bodies into the whirlpool of discontent: A major riot lasted for several days along Plymouth Avenue, destroying many Jewish-owned businesses, and hastening the Jewish exit to St. Louis Park.
By the early 1970s, the world that the young people who had grown up when Phyllis Wheatley, Sumner Field, Glenwood (now Theodore Wirth) Park, Sumner Elementary School, Lincoln Junior High, and North High School were in their heyday was gone. In programming and service to the community, Phyllis Wheatley faded to a shadow of its former self; in the mid-1960s, the old building had fallen to the forces of urban renewal and a new professional social work approach to providing an array of community services at separate locations. Sumner Field had lost its own best programming and no longer offered the warming houses to ice skaters in winter and the friendly, concerned personnel that had staffed the park during the 1920s-1940s era. Glenwood (Theodore Wirth) now seemed far away to a generation oriented more toward Plymouth and Broadway Avenues. Sumner Elementary had succumbed to the construction of Olson Highway, Lincoln became an elementary school, and North High was housed in a new building that was increasingly filled with African American students, with scant evidence of the Jewish young people that had so outnumbered the African American kids just a few years before.
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