History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis >>>>> Part Two: Development During the First Decades of the 20th Century

Part Two:  Emergence of the North Minneapolis African American Community

 

Minneapolis became one of the minor destination points for those taking part in that phenomenon known as the “Great Migration,”  the movement of some 300,000 to 1,000,000 African Americans who left the South for better opportunities during the years encompassing World War I (1914-1918;  American participation, 1917-1918).  The war created economic demands and labor needs that slowed the flow of European immigrants and opened up unprecedented opportunities for African Americans in major cities.  Those opportunities were genuinely great in destinations such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh;  they proved to be much less so in Minneapolis.  Nevertheless, the city’s African American population increased from 2,592 to 3,927 between 1910 and 1920, a 51.5% increase as compared to just 7.3% for St. Paul (the African American population of which grew from 3,144 to just 3,376 during the same period).

 

From the 1880s forward the residential weight of African Americans in Minneapolis shifted across the river from St. Anthony into the rapidly growing commercial area that came to constitute downtown.  During the 1920s the weight shifted again, from the downtown area to the Seven Corners area, and to the Near North Side.  By 1930, these areas contained 2,100 (50.2%) of the city’s 4,176 African American residents.  Another concentration of African American population took shape in South Minneapolis along 4^th and 5^th Avenues between East 35^th and 41^st streets.  Of these areas, the smaller Southside African American community contained more middle class families, people who ran their own small businesses or had attained professional certification of some sort.  The Northside also had a good number of lower middle class African American families, and most all families had middle class aspirations;  but many families kept their dignity and tried to forge a better life from initially impoverished conditions.  Some family heads found work on the railroads or in meatpacking plants, but most unions were closed to African American participation;  accordingly, those African Americans who found employment generally became nonunionized redcaps, porters, janitors, waiters, cooks, maids, and barbers.

The African American community of North Minneapolis was from the 1920s through the 1940s concentrated between Plymouth and Glenwood Avenues.  The area around Glenwood Avenue held a significant number of Finnish families, while the area around 6^th Avenue (today’s Olson Highway) contained families bearing a considerable mix of ethnicities:  German, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian and, especially, Jewish.  In time, the earlier arrived German Jewish families tended to move their own residences westward toward Penn Avenue  and northwestward toward Plymouth Avenue, while still maintaining property and serving as landlords to the less economically successful Jews who had been in the community for many years, the more recently arrived Russian Jews, and other ethnic groups on the Northside.  The major area of African American residence on the Northside was just north of 6^th Avenue, on streets branching eastward and westward from Lyndale Avenue North.

Sixth Avenue looms large in the consciousness of those African Americans old enough to remember “The Avenue” in its heyday.  The first African American-owned store to open on the Avenue was “Miller’s Plantorium,” which featured a drycleaning operation and a haberdashery.  Soon the first African American-owned grocery store on 6^th Avenue was opened by William Allen and his son Albert.  Starting three-fourths of a block east of Lyndale Avenue, businesses owned by African Americans, Germans, Jews, and a smattering of other ethnicities stretched westward for seven blocks along 6^th Avenue.  There were twelve restaurants and delicatessans:  Morman’s Barbecue, Monarch Barbecue, Shell’s Barbecue, Price and Smedler Fried Chicken, Tanner’s Chile Parlor, Barney’s Lunch Counter, Brochin’s Kosher Meat and Sandwiches, Graham’s Hot Barbecue Links, Foster’s Sweet Shop, Canton Chinese Restaurant, Law’s Seafood, and Malcoff’s Kosher Meat Sandwiches.  There were three pool halls:  Charley Banks, Oliver & Boyd, and Al Hector’s.  At the west end of this vital commercial area stood the Liberty Theater, where in the 1920s an adult could see a silent movie for 25 cents, children for a dime.  The theater had a stage on which an amateur show was held once a month.  Every week the Liberty would hold a raffle, with the winner coming away with a turkey and the runner-up getting a goose or a duck.

Sixth Avenue also featured a lively nightlife and became a gathering place for African Americans from all over St. Paul and Minneapolis.  There were four nightclubs in the 1920s:  the Kongo, the Delisa, the Blue Lantern, and the Sunset Club.  Nine bands and combos performed at these clubs and other Minneapolis venues.  These popular groups included the namesake groups of Grant Moore, Eli Rice, Rook Gangza, Ray Dyset, Leon Lewis, Clarence Johnson, the Pettifords, the Scottie Williams Combo, and Mr. Black’s Band.  Certain members of these groups also played at the Elks Hall on the third floor of the Kistler building at 6^th and Lyndale, where dances were given three nights a week and every holiday, virtually always filling to capacity.  As Clarence Miller, designer of a priceless map with commentary on the 1920s heyday of the Avenue writes, “In the summer months (before air conditioning), they would always raise the windows to cool and air out the place (deodorizers were not invented then, talcum powder was the thing) and if the wind was blowing towards downtown you could hear the wailing of the trumpets and trombones as you came across the 7^th Street Bridge.”

By the 1920s several predominately African American churches had been established on the Northside, including three that would have enduring significance:  Zion Missionary Baptist, Wayman’s African Methodist Episcopal, and Border Methodist;  the former two congregations remain active on the Northside, while the latter has merged with Hennepin Methodist in downtown Minneapolis.  During the 1920s and 1930s it was said that Sunday was not Sunday if one did not stroll down the avenue in the afternoon or in the evening.  At such times people walked four and five abreast on either side of 6^th Avenue from Lyndale to Bryant, thinning out somewhat by the time Emerson loomed.

So 6^th Avenue was the home to places of African American business, worship, and social interaction.  It was also home to an underworld, controlled at the top by Jewish mobsters such as Kid Cann (Isadore Blumenfeld), who offered gambling, prostitution, and booze (the latter of which was illegal during the Prohibition era, 1919-1933).  Ten or fifteen prostitutes generally walked the Avenue at night;  numerous after hour spots could be found where one could buy moonshine at all times of the night and a man or woman for an hour.  Reefer seeds and Bull Durham cigarettes were free inducements to this trade.  There were also numbers runners selling “policy,” an illegal form of lottery.  Given the high unemployment rate for African Americans, stemming from severe job discrimination, as many as 40% of adult wage earners either earned or supplemented their income from one or more of the illegal activities found on the Avenue.  Many of these people lived otherwise upstanding lives, attended church, lived amicably with their neighbors, and caused little or no trouble.  They found acceptance among those who held strictly to legal professions, because there was an understanding that in a city where discrimination was rife, one did what one had to do to feed, clothe, and house one’s family.

 

Nevertheless, there was concern in the 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.

In 1937, though, Ms. Brown could no longer keep her balancing act alive.  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.