The Lynchings in Duluth. MIchael Fedo
to avoid a confrontation with her father. But once there, she met him just inside the archway, with a small crowd of laughing teenagers. She joined them, and the group wandered throughout the exhibits and the sideshows until shortly after 9 PM. By then, the couple had separated from their friends and headed toward the tracks behind the menagerie and cook tents, where about two hundred people were watching the crews pack up.
Perhaps the two were holding hands, touching gently, hip to hip. Or perhaps their relationship was businesslike and formal; with no traces of nervousness, they may have discussed approaching the blacks.
If the two watched the animals being led into cars, then crossed to the field where the circus sounds faded and located a soft spot of ground, they may have engaged in adolescent fumblings, the damp night air playing over their bodies and then … or perhaps a contact was made, a price agreed upon. Payment would be forthcoming—after the merchandise was sampled.
If the couple believed they were alone, possibly the observing blacks from the circus laughed, chirping obscenities. Or it might have been that the blacks refused to pay for their pleasure. But a more plausible explanation of the happening was that while beyond the menagerie tents, the two may have been robbed by the blacks or merely insulted. Embarrassed and angered, the couple moved away, the slow drawls and taunts echoing behind them.
Irene, perhaps confused more than outraged, took her cue from Jimmy. And, walking next to him, she must have felt the tenseness in his body, seen his face glower with fierce fury. Perhaps as he gathered his thoughts he supposed they could yell rape. That would surely fix the “niggers.” They’d hang for that! It’s no wonder the guys at the steel plant hated “niggers.”
The two walked to the Grand Avenue car line, boarded a streetcar, and rode to Forty-ninth Avenue West and Grand. From there, they hiked three blocks to the Tusken home, where they discussed a possible plan of action. After ten minutes, Jimmy left, possibly telling Irene to wait until she heard from him.
Irene went into the house, where she saw her father seated in the front room, reading the evening paper. He saw her but said nothing. “I’m going up to bed,” the girl said.
Her father acknowledged her with a perfunctory grunt and returned to his paper.
Hearing sounds of bedtime preparation in her parents’ room, Irene stopped and looked in and saw her mother putting up her hair. Mrs. Tusken noticed her daughter, and the girl stepped inside the room. “Mama, I met Jimmy tonight,” Irene said. “We went to the circus.”
The weary Mrs. Tusken perhaps yawned and smiled weakly. “All right, dear, go to bed now.”
Irene bathed and was in bed by ten minutes after eleven.
Jimmy, meanwhile, went home to change clothes before reporting to work at the Duluth Missabe and Northern Ore Docks at midnight. He had been working the midnight to 8 AM shift as a boat spotter, watching the holds in the cargo carriers fill up, then signaling the loader to stop. The hours on the job were sometimes an impediment to his active social life, and occasionally dust blew in his eyes or clogged his nostrils. But these were small sacrifices. The pay was good, and with the money he could afford the small luxuries other young men his age would do without.
He was popular with some of the seamen—a rough, brawling bunch who sometimes invited him to participate in poker games when work was slow or gave him good Canadian whisky and maybe even asked him to find girls for them occasionally. No doubt the boy was flattered by the attention of the older men and pleased to be accepted by them.
When he arrived this night, there were few seamen around, and Jimmy paid little attention to their good-natured bantering. He completed the loading of one boat, and shortly after 1 AM told his father, P. B. Sullivan, who was night superintendent at the terminal, that Irene Tusken had been raped by circus Negroes. Enraged, P. B. Sullivan phoned Arnold Tusken, then called Chief John Murphy at home.
It was nearly 2 AM when the chief was awakened by the call. A strident voice told him to get out to the ore docks immediately. But the chief, believing he was talking to a crank, demanded to know why he should leave his bed.
Sullivan gave Murphy his name and position but refused to say why he was calling. He pointedly added that the nature of the call was a serious emergency.
“How many men will I need?” the chief asked.
“Figure that out when you get here,” Sullivan replied.
The chief dressed quickly, then went down to the station and checked out a car for the drive to the West Duluth docks. There, amid shouting and haranguing, father and son reported the details of an alleged assault on Irene Tusken.
At about ten minutes to ten last night, Jimmy reported, he and Irene were starting for home; when they turned to leave, here were six blacks blocking their way; one slipped behind Jimmy and grabbed his arms, while a second black placed a pistol in back of his ear. “Be quiet,” he allegedly growled, “or I’ll blow your brains out.”
At that point, Jimmy said, he stopped struggling. The weapon, he said, scared him. Then a second roustabout went through his pockets, removed his watch, examined it, but returned it. A third black grabbed Irene, placing his hand over her mouth, while a fourth man removed her ring. Several men looked at the ring but gave it back.
Then Jimmy told Murphy he was pushed forward while four men dragged Irene to a clump of bushes near the railroad tracks. “Just keep still,” the man with the gun reportedly told Jimmy. As Irene was settled behind some bushes, she fainted, the chief was told, and Jimmy was made to watch as the blacks “ravished” her. When she recovered, fifteen minutes later, Jimmy helped her up, and the man with the pistol pointed a direction away from the circus and told them to beat it. The couple did as they were told, and young Sullivan told Murphy that he went home, came to work, and informed his father of the incident.
The story clearly distressed Murphy. Rape was not a usual crime in Duluth, but he knew it always meant trouble. Inevitably, the family of the victim would attempt revenge, but the man inside the officer couldn’t fault that. Making matters worse, he probably felt that six blacks violated a young white girl.
Using Sullivan’s phone, Murphy called the yardmaster at the Northern Pacific station and ordered the circus train detained. However, he was told the train had left and was heading through the Duluth, Winnipeg and Pacific yards, en route to Virginia, about sixty miles north. Murphy made a second call to the DW&P yards, reaching the yardmaster after a dozen impatient rings. “This is Chief of Police Murphy,” he barked. “We have an emergency here, and I want the circus train held until I can get there.”
His third call went to the dispatcher at the police station. “Get hold of Fiskett, Schulte, Lading, and Olson,” he ordered. “Find ten or twelve others and have them meet me at the Duluth, Winnipeg and Pacific lines in West Duluth right away.”
Capt. Anthony Fiskett, a veteran officer, the second-highest ranking man on the Duluth force, received a call shortly after 3 AM and led the contingent of officers to the rail yards by 4:30 AM.
The chief had already begun jogging down the tracks, shouting to his men to divide up and cover both sides of the tracks. The beefy officers huffed down the line, trying to stay abreast of their chief and wondering why the urgency of his call. Finally, Murphy gasped that a white girl had been raped by circus “niggers,” and they’d have to get the guilty men. “There were six of ’em,” Murphy called.
Nearly out of breath, Murphy pushed forward, prodding his half-wakened men onward, moving them out where the sparse lights of the train glowed of pale blue and yellow in the predawn dark, over a quarter mile up the tracks. The great train snaked another half mile around a bend and nearly out of sight. But at last she was stopped, and the approaching officers could hear her engine hissing as they hurried toward the lead car.
Chief Murphy, Capt. Fiskett, and Lt. Schulte, a hard-bitten veteran of twenty-two years’ service, located the foreman’s car and explained the situation. Six blacks had raped a white girl near the menagerie tent last night, the chief excitedly explained. “I want to talk to every nigger that was idle between about nine and ten o’clock