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The true story, and the black citizens, behind the evolution of
racial equality in Minnesota He had just given a rousing speech to
a packed assembly in St. Paul, but Frederick Douglass, confidant to
the Great Emancipator and conscience of the Republican Party, was
denied a hotel room because he was black. This was Minnesota in
1873, four years after the state had approved black suffrage-a
state where "freedom" meant being unshackled from slavery but not
social restrictions, where "equality" meant access to the ballot
but not to a restaurant downtown. Spanning the half-century after
the Civil War, Degrees of Freedom draws a rare picture of black
experience in a northern state and of the nature of black
discontent and action within a predominantly white, ostensibly
progressive society. William D. Green reveals little-known
historical characters among the black men and women who moved to
Minnesota following the Fifteenth Amendment; worked as farmhands
and laborers; built communities (such as Pig's Eye Landing, later
renamed St. Paul), businesses, and a newspaper (the Western
Appeal); and embodied the slow but inexorable advancement of race
relations in the state over time. Within this absorbing, often
surprising, narrative we meet "ordinary" citizens, like former
slave and early settler Jim Thompson and black barbers catering to
a white clientele, but also personages of national stature, such as
Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all
of whom championed civil rights in Minnesota. And we see how, in a
state where racial prejudice and oppression wore a liberal mask,
black settlers and entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists
maneuvered within a restricted political arena to bring about real
and lasting change.
How white advocates of emancipation abandoned African American
causes in the dark days of Reconstruction, told through the stories
of four Minnesotans White people, Frederick Douglass said in a
speech in 1876, were "the children of Lincoln," while black people
were "at best his stepchildren." Emancipation became the law of the
land, and white champions of African Americans in the state were
suddenly turning to other causes, regardless of the worsening
circumstances of black Minnesotans. Through four of these "children
of Lincoln" in Minnesota, William D. Green's book brings to light a
little known but critical chapter in the state's history as it
intersects with the broader account of race in America. In a
narrative spanning the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction,
the lives of these four Minnesotans mark the era's most significant
moments in the state, the Midwest, and the nation for the
Republican Party, the Baptist church, women's suffrage, and Native
Americans. Morton Wilkinson, the state's first Republican senator;
Daniel Merrill, a St. Paul business leader who helped launch the
first Black Baptist church; Sarah Burger Stearns, founder and first
president of the Minnesota Woman Suffragist Association; and Thomas
Montgomery, an immigrant farmer who served in the Colored Regiments
in the Civil War: each played a part in securing the rights of
African Americans and each abandoned the fight as the forces of
hatred and prejudice increasingly threatened those hard-won rights.
Moving from early St. Paul and Fort Snelling to the Civil War and
beyond, The Children of Lincoln reveals a pattern of racial
paternalism, describing how even "enlightened" white Northerners,
fatigued with the "Negro Problem," would come to embrace policies
that reinforced a notion of black inferiority. Together, their
lives-so differently and deeply connected with nineteenth-century
race relations-create a telling portrait of Minnesota as a
microcosm of America during the tumultuous years of Reconstruction.
The life and work of an African American suffragist and activist
devoted to equality and freedom At her last public appearance in
1962, at 88 years old, a frail, deaf, and blind Nellie Francis was
honored for her church and community service in Nashville,
Tennessee. No mention was made of her early groundbreaking work as
an activist in Minnesota and nationally. Even today, while her
advocacy for women’s suffrage and racial justice resonates
through current issues, her efforts remain largely unrecognized. In
telling Nellie Francis’s complete story for the first time,
William D. Green finally brings the remarkable accomplishments of
her complicated life into clear view, detailing her indefatigable
work to advance the causes of civil rights, anti-lynching, and
women’s suffrage. Green’s account follows Francis’s path from
her first public event (giving a speech on race relations to a
white audience at her high school graduation) to her return to
Nashville and retirement from the national stage. In the years
between, she campaigned in Minnesota for racial dignity, women’s
suffrage, an anti-lynching law (after the infamous lynching in
Duluth in 1920), and interracial collaboration through the
women’s club movement. She came to know most of the prominent
civil rights leaders of the twentieth century and met three
presidents and countless business leaders of both Black and white
societies. But she also faced intense and vicious reprisals, as
when, as leader of the local chapter of the NAACP, she and her
husband, a prominent African American civil rights lawyer,
experienced the fury of the Ku Klux Klan after moving into a white
neighborhood in St. Paul. Green retrieves Nellie Francis’s story
from obscurity, giving this pioneer for gender and racial equality
her due and providing a long-awaited service to the history of
Black activism and civil rights, both regional and national. His
book offers welcome insight into the universal, yet often
unacknowledged, challenges that strong and engaged Black women are
forced to endure when their drive to enact justice confronts
racism, cultural pressure, and societal expectations.Â
How white advocates of emancipation abandoned African American
causes in the dark days of Reconstruction, told through the stories
of four Minnesotans White people, Frederick Douglass said in a
speech in 1876, were "the children of Lincoln," while black people
were "at best his stepchildren." Emancipation became the law of the
land, and white champions of African Americans in the state were
suddenly turning to other causes, regardless of the worsening
circumstances of black Minnesotans. Through four of these "children
of Lincoln" in Minnesota, William D. Green's book brings to light a
little known but critical chapter in the state's history as it
intersects with the broader account of race in America. In a
narrative spanning the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction,
the lives of these four Minnesotans mark the era's most significant
moments in the state, the Midwest, and the nation for the
Republican Party, the Baptist church, women's suffrage, and Native
Americans. Morton Wilkinson, the state's first Republican senator;
Daniel Merrill, a St. Paul business leader who helped launch the
first Black Baptist church; Sarah Burger Stearns, founder and first
president of the Minnesota Woman Suffragist Association; and Thomas
Montgomery, an immigrant farmer who served in the Colored Regiments
in the Civil War: each played a part in securing the rights of
African Americans and each abandoned the fight as the forces of
hatred and prejudice increasingly threatened those hard-won rights.
Moving from early St. Paul and Fort Snelling to the Civil War and
beyond, The Children of Lincoln reveals a pattern of racial
paternalism, describing how even "enlightened" white Northerners,
fatigued with the "Negro Problem," would come to embrace policies
that reinforced a notion of black inferiority. Together, their
lives-so differently and deeply connected with nineteenth-century
race relations-create a telling portrait of Minnesota as a
microcosm of America during the tumultuous years of Reconstruction.
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