The group climbed the Duluth hillside, somberly, silently: more than 30 stone faces. We followed the same route last week that a mob estimated at 10,000 took more than 91 years ago -- that infamous night, Duluth's darkest moment.
The old jail was stormed on June 15, 1920. Three frightened, falsely accused circus workers were ripped from their cells, beaten, dragged and, eventually, hanged. Their only crime: being black.
I knew the story well. All Duluthians should. As the memorial at the lynching site reads in commanding letters that literally are etched in stone, "An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent."
But there was one part of the story I hadn't heard before, or had forgotten amid all the horrific details, a part of the story that struck me now. At about the same time Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie were being led to their deaths up Second Avenue East to First Street, the opera house across the avenue was letting out. So, not everyone in the "mob" was seething with anger over a report that black men had raped a young, white girl. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Duluthians were simply caught up. How many realized, knew, that what was going down was wrong, was an injustice, was an inhumanity? And what did they do? Very little, the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial's Carl Crawford told our group, a class organized by the Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce.
What would you have done?
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What would I have done? I couldn't help but contemplate the haunting question. Mob mentality is mighty powerful, mighty frightening.
Among the many quotes at the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial is one from Albert Einstein. "The world is a dangerous place," the world-famous scientist and humanist once said, "not because of those who do evil but because of those who look on and do nothing."
Do we laugh with the crowd at sexist jokes told at work? Do we make offhand, racist remarks within earshot of kids, passing prejudice to yet another generation?
Or are we, individually, doing what we can to dispel discrimination, to get along and to be tolerant? True change can start within each of us.
As a community we seem to be doing a lot of things oft considered correct on these fronts. Eight years ago last week, we dedicated the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, the only one of its kind in the U.S. to acknowledge a lynching. We hold ceremonies there every year to mark another anniversary of the shameful "event." We refuse to forget Duluth's other lynching, our city's first such black eye, in 1918, of Olli Kiukkonen; his attackers tarred, feathered and hung him for being anti-American, a "slacker," the term used then for those who refused to serve in the military. In August 2010, during his first days on campus, and still in the wake of racist comments made by UMD students on Facebook, newly named University of Minnesota Duluth Chancellor Lendley "Lynn" Black called for a two-day summit on inclusiveness and the campus' climate.
And the list goes on.
Sadly, though, so do incidents of racism in our community, even if subtle.
I was alarmed to read the letter on today's page from a UMD graduate who says that, in hindsight, she shouldn't have stuck it out in Duluth, not while she was being called the
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n-word and worse.
My chamber class last week gasped audibly when a story was told about a local company losing out on a great employee, a professional of color, because of the way he was treated at his hotel while in town to interview. Why would he want to live here?
Did anyone at the hotel notice what was happening? The injustice? The inhumanity? And what did they do?
At the memorial last week,
30 stone faces read silently the many quotes etched into the walls. I'll share just one more. It was the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw who told this story: "A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: 'Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil; the other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.' When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied: 'The one I feed the most.' "
Chuck Frederick is the News Tribune's editorial page editor.
