The Lynchings in Duluth. MIchael Fedo

      The Clayton, Jackson, McGhie Memorial in Duluth viewed from the corner of Second Avenue East and First Street. The memorial is located diagonally opposite the corner where the lynchings took place.

      Preface to the Second Edition

      Through the decades since this book’s initial publication, I have discovered, to my surprise, that in many ways my life has been informed by the long-ago murder of three innocent black men on a downtown street in the city where I was born and raised. It begins with a question posed by the Zen philosopher: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present, does the falling tree make a sound? For students of history, the question might be, if an event occurred and no one remembers it, did it happen?

      By 1973 the story of the Duluth lynchings had been long absent from public discourse and classroom reference. The city—indeed, the state of Minnesota—had “forgotten” the historic event. Textbooks on Minnesota history, and even a detailed history of crime in the state, pointedly omitted the hangings in Duluth.

      Serendipity would return the incident to public awareness, and I am grateful to have a part in this overdue conversation and remembrance. That year I determined to write my first novel, and for reasons long forgotten, I chose to place the story in post–World War I northern Minnesota. Prior to beginning the writing, however, I recalled something my mother had mentioned years earlier when I was a lad of nine or ten. She said that when she was a little girl, three black men had been hanged on a downtown street corner, slightly more than a mile from where we lived. I could not then, and still cannot place her reference in any context. Indeed, I still wonder what possessed her to relate this incident to me. I do not recall being struck by the story when I first heard it, but it lodged in the recesses of my mind for decades, suddenly surfacing as I contemplated my novel.

      I considered including the lynching scene as a chapter in the new book, with a main character witnessing the killings. I sought to locate the book I assumed had chronicled the event fifty years earlier, read it for accuracy, and incorporate details into my own text. But no such book existed, and none of the half dozen Minnesota libraries I consulted had records of that fateful June night in 1920. No one, it seemed, had even heard of the murders. However, a librarian at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul informed me that he had discovered a file on the lynchings and I was welcome to peruse it.

      The manila folder contained several newspaper clippings and a pamphlet detailing what happened in Duluth during the evening of June 15, 1920. Following review of this material, I uncovered other information from the History Center’s archives, and after three Saturdays poring over old newspapers and records from the governor’s files, supreme court transcripts, and notes from other state officials, I had filled a spiral notebook. At this point, I abandoned the novel and set about documenting what happened in my hometown on a night that forever impacted racial attitudes of citizens in northern Minnesota, and perhaps throughout the Upper Midwest.

      Moving forward with this project, the questions that impelled the research and writing were: How could such a thing happen in Duluth, Minnesota, a far-northern city of a hundred thousand citizens, with fewer than five hundred of them African American? And why did almost no one remember or even know about it?

      There seemed a concerted effort on the part of many city officials to forget the tragedy happened, to expunge it from conversations and records. For more than half a century, lynching deniers held sway in northern Minnesota. Indeed, an employee at the St. Louis County Historical Society told me that the society had maintained a file on the lynchings for a number of years, but the director ordered it removed. Also the clerk of court in St. Louis County back in 1973 stated that all court records from trials following the lynchings had been ordered destroyed by a local judge. A neophyte investigative reporter, I believed him, and indicated this in the book’s initial incarnation. Several years later, following regime change at the clerk of court office, I received a letter from a Duluth high school student who said, “In your book, you claimed court records were destroyed. Well, I got them two weeks ago for a report in my history class.”

      Even persons who agreed to talk to me wondered why I wanted to dredge up so unseemly a subject that would not reflect well on my hometown. Some book reviewers thought the same thing, as shown in this assessment from the September 23, 1979, Minneapolis Tribune: “Now, nearly 60 years later, Michael W. Fedo, a Duluth native … has chosen to rub our noses once again in the awful events.”

      That most reviewers were more charitable and far less chauvinistic than the Tribune critic did not generate sales. “They Was Just Niggers” was an appropriate but inapt title. With a minimal advertising budget from the fledgling West Coast publisher, the book was relegated to back-of-the-store shelves under Regional or Sociology labels. Customers seeking the book were too embarrassed to ask for a book with the N-word. The initial edition quietly disappeared from stores within several months of its release.

      The book soon disappeared even from remainder bins, and the story I assumed might generate interest in an important but forgotten incident seemed dead. But in 1993 Harlin Quist called and offered to republish the book. Quist, a former off-Broadway actor and producer, had earned a solid reputation as a Paris-based publisher of lavishly illustrated children’s books. Among the luminaries he published were Eugène Ionesco, Robert Graves, Edward Gorey, Mark Van Doren, and many, mostly French, illustrators who subsequently attained international eminence.

      Quist was on hiatus from his Paris operation, returning to his hometown to care for his ailing elderly mother. He was bored and searching for new adventures. He was going to refashion the downtown Norshor movie theater into an arts center where local artists, writers, and musicians would have a quality venue for exhibiting and performing. He thought profits from my book would help jump-start the operation.

      His newly designed book was retitled Trial By Mob, but it too quickly disappeared, as Quist, encountering financial glitches, left town—bills unpaid, no forwarding address. Fast-forward to November 1999. Sally Rubenstein, an editor with the Minnesota Historical Society Press, phoned. The press would like to reissue the book with a new title: “The Lynchings in Duluth.”