Lynched in Duluth

The lynching of three African-American roustabouts, employees of a traveling circus in Duluth, on June 15, 1920 made national headlines.

The local newspaper that day reported that six "negroes" had been arrested for the rape at gunpoint of a "well-known" white girl who was watching the loading of the animals tent. Newspapers gave her age as 17, but she was in fact 19; the initial reporting omitted the detail that she was there with a boyfriend, who was robbed in the course of the crime. A subsequent rumor had it that she was left dead or dying; but at the bottom of the above front page, the Duluth Herald reported that the victim was alive and recovering from her injuries.

Duluth had the first lynching in its history last night.
A crowd estimated anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 bent on avenging the assault on a young West Duluth girl, lynched three negroes held as suspects, two of whom, it is claimed, had confessed to the crime, and a third who was being held as a material witness, hanging them to an electric pole in front of the Shrine auditorium. The mob wrecked police headquarters and wounded several policemen.
The three negroes whose dead bodies are today at Grady and Horgan's undertaking rooms are Isaac McGhee*, age 26, Elmer Jackson, age 20, and Elias Clayton, age 19. McGhee is the only one of the trio who, to the last, claimed innocence of the crime.
The gathering of the mob started early in the evening. It is claimed that a truck on which was the label "city truck" came from the western end of the city shortly after 7 o'clock carrying a gang of young men. Attached to the truck and dragging behind was a long rope. The truck traveled through the streets slowly while those on board shouted, "Come on, fellows, join the necktie party."

Police and firemen attempted to keep the mob out of the police station using non-lethal methods, but to no avail.

Fire hose which was turned on the mob by the fire department, which was called out to disperse the mob, only added to the fury. The mob took the hose out of the hands of the firemen and turned the water on the police. Hundreds of feet of fire hose was destroyed.

Forcing their way into the police station, the mob found McGhie in a first-floor holding cell; the other five suspects were behind bars in a juvenile detention area upstairs. The Duluth Herald account doesn't mention what happened to the other five; wire reports printed elsewhere said that the mob released three of them after a mock trial. Another news story reports that ten other Black employees of the circus were taken from Duluth to a jail in the town of Virginia.

At the site of the lynching, two clergymen, identified as Father W.J. Powers of Sacred Heart Cathedral and Father P.J. Mahoney, "pleaded with the crowd to allow the law to take its course," but were shouted down by the crowd. McGhie, Jackson, and Clayton were hanged one after the other, and the mob eventually dispersed.

A grand jury convened two days later eventually issued 37 indictments against members of the mob, but only three men, Louis Dondino, Carl Hammerberg, and Gilbert Stephenson, would be convicted of rioting. The white men served fifteen months or less. Nobody was ever tried for the murders.

Meanwhile, seven Black employees of the circus were charged with the rape; NAACP-hired lawyers succeeded in getting five of those charges dismissed. One man, Max Mason, was convicted on the charge and served four years at Stillwater State Prison.

Wikipedia notes that Duluth's current Chief of Police is a great-nephew of the rape victim.

"Minnesota's Shame," unsigned, in Chicago Whip, June 26, 1920

And since this here blog is supposed to be dedicated to editorial cartooning, I'll close with the only two examples I could find about this incident. Both appeared in newspapers produced for an African-American readership.

"Is This Democracy?" by James L. McGuire in The Bystander, Des Moines, IA., June 25, 1920

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* In later paragraphs of the Herald article, the correct spelling of Isaac McGhie's name is used.