Transcript of ‘It Was Ugly’

Lemonada. Previously on Ghost of a Chance.

Blacks couldn't go into hotels, couldn't go into restaurants, despite the fact that Minnesota had a law banning that behavior.

Madam C. H. Robinson has been appointed body masseurist at the St. Barnabas Hospital under Dr. Farr.

Clearly, it allowed Clementine and Harry to have enough financial stability to say, Okay, we're actually going to buy a House.

Their life, spread across the pages of the appeal newspaper, was the picture of middle class Black excellence. But we know that the next year, things would begin to change.

I believe there are as many as 40 cities that saw race riots throughout the nation.

The headline Negro Question Causes Protest. Residents of 13th Ward object to members of race as neighbors.

So these folks are getting together in a big hall and saying, We want to get rid of this handful of Black families who live in Southwest Minneapolis.

The meeting was just five blocks from the Robinson's house.

The notion of walking on ice is very real here. You have to be careful where you step.

You're listening to Ghost of a Chance from the Minnesota Star Tribune.

This is the story of my search to find out what happened to Harry and Clemente Clémentine Robinson. I'm Eric Roper.

I'm Melissa Townsend.

This is episode 3.

It seems that for decades, Clémentine, Harry, and much of their generation embraced respectability politics. The hope was that if you acted respectably, you would be treated with respect. There was an overwhelming pressure to look the part and play the part. We asked a man named Yuhuru Williams about this. He's an historian based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That's right across the river from Minneapolis.

Don't make noise and everything will be okay. If you can just maintain the veneer of respectability, things will get better. And you see that in a very famous Urban League flyer that's posted in Detroit in the 1920s, which they have a list of do's or don'ts for migrants. And all of them are about, Don't do your kid's hairs up in cornrows. Wear clean clothes. Go to church Sunday. Don't challenge what your teachers say about your kids. The last part of it is, if anything bad happens, it'll be partly your fault.

In 1920, when 200 white people met five blocks from Harry and Clementine house to protest the Black men and women living in that neighborhood, it must have been difficult for them to figure out how to react to that. Eric scoured the newspapers for any reaction from the Black community.

I looked around for a while to figure out what's the response, and the first one that I found was actually came from the Booker T. Washington Study Club, and that is a group of primarily Black women. And the appeal newspaper summarized the feeling of the Booker T. Washington Study Club.

The colored people promptly resented the unwarranted action in very strong terms, claiming that they are law-abiding citizens and that there is no good reason why they should be considered undesirable neighbors, and it is hoped that they will continue to fight for their rights as taxpayers of Minneapolis.

Eric told historian Kirsten Deligard about the article.

Oh, gosh. It just is so poignant, right? We were told if we played by the rules and we did all the right things, we would be okay. You just get this sense that people are like, oh, my gosh, we are facing not that racism is new, but we're facing this new front, this new campaign.

But what could they do?

There's nine Black families, and I imagine that maybe these families are coming together to talk about this issue and whether they can hold on in this neighborhood. For the Robinsons, to me, the most obvious people that they could be talking to are the Bryant family, who actually live just a block down the street. I can imagine that they're getting together and talking about, what are we going to say when the people from this group come to our door?

Just a few days later, there was another article about that protest meeting. This one was in the Sunday edition of the Minneapolis Tribune. The headline is Committee Appointed to Count Negroes.

This is where it goes from this abstraction about, oh, we don't want Black neighbors to who are these people? Where did they get these homes? And how do we get them out of here?

After that article in the Sunday Tribune, a whole week went by with no news.

Then on a Tuesday, November 30th, there's this troubling follow-up article in the Minneapolis Tribune. A spokesman for the protest group says in this article that this group is not going to have any more meetings. There's just been too much publicity around this whole issue, and it's attracting basically bad publicity to the district. It's troubling because here's a moment where this racism is very much out in the open. There's accountability. It's being covered in the press. Now when the group was saying there will be no more meetings, this whole effort becomes invisible.

There's a way of behaving in Minnesota that people refer to as Minnesota NICE. It's when people here are polite and smile at you, but they don't go further than that. They don't engage with you. After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, there were a number of people who were calling out the way Minnesota NICE can be a polite cover for deep-seated racism. That's what I think of when I think about the crowd at this protest meeting. They didn't want Black people living near them. That is racist. But they didn't want to be seen as impolite. It's a version of Minnesota NICE. When I brought this up with historian Yoharu Williams, he had the same thought.

Minnesota NICE, I like to think of as Minnesota Invisible. It's like, it's here, we're just not going to acknowledge it. We don't acknowledge it by dealing with the issue in ways that allow us to maintain our sense of pride and the fact that we're not Birmingham.

Birmingham Alabama has a long history of blatant racial discrimination and violence. When Yoharu said that in Minnesota, discrimination is invisible, he meant to some people. But it's very clear to Black residents.

Underneath the surface, folks that live here go, This is worse than Birmingham. How could this be worse than Birmingham? Because here, the majority of the population buys into the belief that somehow we're different. We're not different at all. We just do it differently.

This protest meeting in Southwest Minneapolis in 1920 came dangerously close to looking a little too much like Birmingham.

It was ugly, right?

Kirsten Delagard.

People knew it was ugly, and we know that it's this desire to avoid this outright confrontation that leads to the proliferation of covenants.

When Kirsten said covenants, she meant racial covenants. That's language that real estate developers could quietly include in a property deed. It said the property could not be sold to or even occupied by anyone who was not white. In some ways, it was the opposite of a public protest. It was a bureaucratic legal maneuver.

That's the way people talk about them. Wouldn't it be great if there was some legal way so that we didn't have to stand on a lawn and threaten people? If we could just keep our neighborhoods all white, then none of this would be necessary.

Kirsten's organization is called Mapping Prejudice, and they have discovered more than 31,000 properties across the region that have racial covenants in their deeds. Most of those were put in place in the first half of the 1900s. These covenants were ruled unenforceable in 1948, but they show us what was happening when Clementine and Harry were trying to build a life here. In November of 1920, the people who were part of the Southwest Minneapolis protest meeting decided they didn't want to make a scene, but a racial covenant wasn't an option. Those older homes like the Robinson's didn't have racial covenants. So This is when the public protest ended. But Eric found that a struggle behind the scenes continued. That's after the break.

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In the last article that Eric found about the protest meeting in Southwest Minneapolis, the protesters said they weren't going to hold any more public meetings. Instead, they were going to turn the issue over to the Real Estate Board and the Civic and Commerce Association. Eric did some digging into those two groups.

The Real Estate Board is basically an association of realtors, and we know that there are realtors on this board who have a policy not to sell to Black people in areas where it's objectionable to white residents. But the group that really stood out to me in looking into this was the Civic and Commerce Association. This is an incredibly powerful organization in the city. A couple of years after this, there's a NAACP leader who says that its membership includes the biggest and most prominent businessmen in Minneapolis.

You can imagine the neighborhood group called on these powerful organizations as backup. The neighbors were bringing in the big guns, so to speak, to somehow quietly overpower the Black families. But these families had a powerful ally of their own, the National Association for the advancement of Colored People, the NAACP.

We know that Harry was a member of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP in 1918.

Now, Yehuru Williams told us something interesting about the NAACP back then. They wouldn't help just anyone.

They champion the rights of colored people, but respectable colored people.

And lucky for them, the nine middle-class Black homeowners in Southwest Minneapolis were just the respectable Black people that the NAACP could get behind. And they did. Eric pieced together this part of the story from a handful of old letters.

To me, this is really a treasure trove of letters because it really helped me understand how this little thing in my neighborhood actually reached the highest levels of the civil rights community in America.

These letters are an incredible window into how Black leaders in the 1920s were trying to demand their rights and how the city's white elites were, well, being Minnesota nice.

So first, the head of the local NAACP, Charles Sumner-Smith. He gets wind of what's going on in the papers. He's reading it like everybody else is. But then Sumner-Smith, he's getting in touch with the national office, and he's trying to reach James Weldon Johnson. Johnson. Now, James Walton Johnson was the leader of the national NAACP at that point.

James Weldon Johnson actually wrote the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing. He is quite a big deal.

Smith is asking Johnson to get in touch with a guy here in Minneapolis named pierce Atwater, who's with the Civic and Commerce Association. Why pierce Atwater? Well, Atwater is a member of the NAACP. He's considered an ally. They call him a friend at court. They're thinking, well, if we're going to have any sway at the Civic and Commerce Association, we're probably going to be able to do it through pierce Atwater.

Eric ran this whole exchange by historian Bill Green. And he said reaching out to the National NAACP office was a savvy move. The local NAACP chapter probably wasn't powerful enough to take this on.

When you're a Black leader back then and you're aspiring for more than just a wretched state. You have to assess how large is the community. Can you be insulated? Can you find protection? And in a place like Minneapolis, the numbers weren't there. So you didn't have money. You couldn't snap a finger and the rooms would be filled with supporters. You didn't have anonymity if you needed it.

In other words, the famous James Weldon Johnson could stand up to pierce Atwater in a the way that Sumner Smith in Minneapolis probably couldn't.

Johnson writes a letter from New York to here in Minneapolis to pierce Atwater, and he's saying, I got wind that there is an effort to block Black people from living in a certain part of town, and he's asking for more details and noting that this would be a very bad thing. Atwater writes back saying, I'm going to check it out. Don't worry, I'll look into that. Eventually, he writes back with a page and a half or so long letter.

There are two passages in this letter that really stood out to Eric.

First, Outwater, he calls this protest meeting a small meeting and really tries to downplay that there's really any there there as far as what's going on in Southwest Minneapolis. The second thing, he says very explicitly that property owners would be very opposed to an influx of Black people moving into that area. But he says this shouldn't be a problem for the Black people. It's a problem for the White people who might be selling their property to Black people because that's who is going to face the heat here.

He thought Black people weren't facing the heat? Eric asked historian Bill Green what he thought about this so called ally, pierce Atwater.

I think it's an illustration of how the friends of African-Americans are really concerned about keeping peace. The way that you keep peace is to know your place. And there's even the irritation of Blacks who would create a situation in which a problem could arise. And they say it's for the good of the Black folks, but it's more complicated than that or nuanced than that.

At first, this looked like the Minnesota NICE response that has drawn so much criticism recently. It keeps the peace but ignores the problem. But Eric learned at the time, this was actually a common way of thinking among many people across the country, even those who considered themselves allies to the Black community.

There were a lot of progressives at the time who are pro-civil rights, or they say a lot of things about Black rights and all these things. But when it comes to neighborhood mixing of the races, that's like another level. That's a step too far.

So pierce Atwater had sent his letter basically saying he wasn't going to do anything. And the ball was back in James Weldon Johnson's court. Again, he's the head of the National NAACP. Eric has the final letter that he wrote back to pierce Atwater. Here is the main point that he said.

I can thoroughly appreciate the feeling of the homeowners in the 13th Ward. But at the same time, if colored citizens wish to purchase property in that ward, and are able to do so, it is the opinion of the association that attempts to prevent such purchasing of property is not only illegal, but will lead to disturbances from which the city of Minneapolis has happily been free.

In other words, the status quo is not going to last.

As far as I can tell, that was the end of it. By 1921, they had come to this very polite standoff.

We know that by In 40, the Robinsons have left this neighborhood, but this is not when they go. Eric says, with this threat behind them, the Robinsons didn't waste much time getting into bigger and better things. Harry started his own business. He was running a catering company out of his kitchen, now Eric's Kitchen.

I've imagined over time, maybe there's stacks of chicken or cakes or vegetables or any these sorts of things that he's preparing as part of his catering business.

Eric found that during the 1920s, three more Black families moved into Southwest Minneapolis. One family, the Jacksons, moved in right next door to the Robinsons. And Clementine was back in the appeal newspaper.

On last Saturday evening, February 26th, a group of women of Minneapolis organized the Businesswomen's Club and elected officers as follows. President Ms. L. O. Smith, our most efficient real estate dealer, Treasurer, Madame Clementine Robinson, Masseus. This bids fair to be one of the strongest organizations in Minneapolis.

The very nature of this club just seems to be like, we are entrepreneurial women, and we're staking our claim and creating an organization just devoted to that idea.

As these Black women were stepping into their place in history, Eric found Harry Robinson was also about to take a big step. That's after the break.

During this research process, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm looking for things in the old papers, and suddenly I find this notice in the Northwestern Bulletin Appeal newspaper, which is a Black newspaper in the Twin Cities and a descendant of the appeal newspaper, and it was dated May second, 1925. What's up with that date? That is Harry and Clementine's shared birthday again. They were turning 44.

Mr. Harry Robinson has opened the Little Dixie Sandwich Shop at 608 West Lake. Mr. Robinson is a property owner of this city, and his wife, Madame Robinson, stands very high with the leading citizens in her profession. Mr. Robinson is a raceman and has given freely of his work to the race.

This is a small clip, but it actually contains a lot of very interesting information.

The first is, okay, so he spent 25 years as a waiter, a cook, a caterer, and now he's opening his own restaurant. That's a big deal.

He's a raceman.

Which means that people see him as being a civil rights person.

And the location of the restaurant.

608 West Lake Street. This is not in the Black neighborhood. This is in a very prominent business district in Minneapolis that is now known as Lynn Lake.

I think it's extraordinary that he opened a restaurant at that corner in what was thought of as a very white neighborhood. It's really a bold move.

Historian Kirsten Delagard.

I can just imagine the conversations where he goes to rent the space. How did he do that?

It turns out Harry had rented the restaurant from a landlord who lived in Connecticut. So you can imagine that he was immune to any local backlash for renting a space to a Black man.

This restaurant is also known as a chicken shack, and this is where you go to get a fried chicken sandwich, which is actually how he advertised it at one point. It was also advertised as a place that was open all night, from dusk until dawn.

In this old recording, a woman named Nelly Stone Johnson talks about chicken shacks that were around during this time. She was living in Saint Paul at the time. That's just across the Mississippi River from Minneapolis. I know that the people coming into those places at that time were very mixed. By mixed, she meant racially mixed. Particularly barbecue and chicken shacks. That was always a heavy mix of clientele. Eric and I both like to imagine the restaurant full of customers with Harry hustling between the grill and the cash register.

In my mind's eye, I think it's a a narrow storefront. You walk in. If there's a bunch of people in there, you probably feel it because there's not a lot of seats at the table. I imagine a long counter that wraps around the front, and you have a bunch of stools on there, like a diner. Then maybe you have Harry and one other person working there, or maybe it's just Harriet. I mean, you have a big grill set up, right? There's probably that sizzle of the chicken cooking all the time.

Right now, I want to take a second and focus on the name of Harry's Chicken Shack, Little Dixie. From the beginning, Eric had a feeling that the name might have some special meaning.

On the one hand, Little Dixie sounds like Southern food, and it was. If you have a hankering for some good Southern food, here you go. It's a no-brainer.

But then Eric found out that there are different regions in the country that are known as Little Dixie. One of those areas is very close to where Clementine grew up in Missouri. Eric saw an article about it when he was there talking with people at the Clinton County Historical Society.

Look at this, Little Dixie. What's that about? There's that word again.

Eric was with a man named Mike Shaver. He's a volunteer at the Historical Society.

I don't know Descendants of landowners, slaves make Little Dixie Tick, Platzburg, Missouri.

Maybe that's where he got his name.

I know. That's what I'm thinking. Maybe there is something to that. Today, 122 years later, descendants of the wealthy Southerners and the grandchildren of their slaves live within this two square mile agricultural community and county seat of about 2,000, which some residents dub Little Dixie because of the Southern influence. The descendants of landowners and slaves make Little Dixie tick. When he named his sandwich shop Little Dixie, was Harry trying to make this really biting statement about Minneapolis, where white people are expecting Black people to remain in their place? What if both things are true? I mean, maybe he's calling in the white folks to eat this delicious Southern fried chicken, and at the same time, he covertly calling them out on racism. Maybe he's really thinking about the hidden messages that he could be sending with the name of this business.

Eric asked historian Bill Green what he thought about this possible double meaning of Dixie.

It's not unusual to see that subtle and complicated nuance at a time where you're outnumbered, outfinanced, outpowered, to make up a word, and you're trying to move forward in that stream.

A few months after the article announcing the restaurant's opening, there was another article in the Black Newspaper. This one was about a celebration at the Chicken Shack. It's dated August 1925.

Mr. J. R. Wilson entertained a group of 16 Sunday evening at the Little Dixie Sandwich Shop. The party met at the home of Madame Robinson, and from there went to the shop and had a delightful lunch. The dinner room was decorated with wonderful flowers.

They met at Harry and Clementine's house. I mean, picture it. There's 19 Black people gathered this neighborhood where white people were trying to get rid of them, and they're all headed over to the chicken shack. This is like a star-studded affair.

Eric looked into each person on the guest list, and they are the movers and shakers of their time. First, you have the woman who brings the celebrity factor, the glitz and glamor.

Internationally famous dancer, Mrs. Dora Dean Johnson. Dora Dean Johnson had traveled the world popularizing the walk dance in the early 1900s, and her Minneapolis connection was her husband, grew up here.

Then you have some prominent Black professionals.

You have a dentist, Dr. Leander Hill. You have former NAACP leader, George Devon, and his wife, Bessy. Who was a school teacher. You also have cafe owner, Robert Van Hook, and his wife, Elizabeth, who was a dressmaker and also involved in the women's club movement. Their son-in-law, Hobart Mitchell, was also there. He later became a mayoral aid.

You also have a few of the most notable civil rights leaders in the city.

Mr. And Mrs. Abram Harris. Now, Abram Harris was the first executive secretary of the Minneapolis Urban League, and that had just been founded that year to improve employment and social conditions for Black residents in the city.

Last but not least, you have a woman named Willy Gertrude Brown.

She often went by W Gertrude Brown, and she was the first head resident of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House in North Minneapolis. And this It should become one of the most important organizations in the city's Black community.

It's worth sharing a little story here to give you a picture of W Gertrude Brown. In this old interview, Ethel Nance talked about her. You might remember Ethel Nance from episode 2. She grew up in Duluth, but she lived in Minneapolis for a period of her life. She remembered this one time, the Minneapolis police were looking for a Black man who might have been involved in a crime. She said it looked like the police might put his life in danger. And that's when W. Gertrude Brown got involved. And Ms. Brown sent out the word that if he was in danger of his life, he could come to Phyllis Reilly house, and she would assure him safety there. She was from the South, and she was militant. You had the impression that she would be sitting at the top of the steps when you open that front door with a rifle, waiting for the authorities to come and try to take someone out of Phyllis Reilly house. I think they would have had trouble, though. When Eric telling me about this incredible party with these incredible people, he paused for a minute.

I wonder whether they felt like, I am in the middle of a very important period for my race. Harry's a member of the NAACP, They're hanging out with people who are on the vanguard of civil rights in Minneapolis. So I think that would have been probably clear.

When we brought this up with Kirsten Delegard, she agreed.

To me, this is just an example of the way the Robinson were part of this network of people who are all making a beachhead, making a life, making a Black community in Minneapolis.

So far in our story, each time Harry and Clementine achieve some level of success, and it looks like they're going to break through the ceiling that's been built over their heads, something bad happens. The scholarship was revoked. 200 people organized to oust them from their home. Now we've reached the point in this episode where that's about to happen again.

I was trying to find anything I could about this chicken shack. I mean, this is Harry's business after all. I'm looking around. I mean, Little Dixie, Little Dixie Chicken Shack, all these different searches. And eventually, I decided, Okay, let me look up the address of the chicken shack, 608 West Lake Street. This leads me to a clip that I haven't stopped thinking about ever since. It's dated February 16, 1926. There's actually articles in The Star and The Tribune, and those are both predecessors of this paper, The Star Tribune. This is from The Tribune. Man shot and seriously wounded in Restaurant, Negro cook under arrest. Roy Mattis, 32 years old, was shot and seriously wounded Monday night in a chicken shack at 608 West Lake Street. Harold Robinson, a Negro, said by police to have been employed as a cook in the restaurant, was held at the fifth Precinct Police Station without charge. Mattis was taken to General Hospital, where an examination disclosed that a bullet had passed through his neck. Mattis told police that he had entered the place to buy a sandwich and that his assailant involved him in a dispute and shot him without any warning.

Eric said he couldn't believe what he was reading. The more he thought about it, the less sense it made.

The way the paper portrays it, it's like this cook is just shooting customers or something. I mean, that's a wild thing to do. We know on its face that that doesn't make a ton of sense. Owners of businesses don't just shoot people for no reason. It's not helpful to your business to do that.

But the two newspaper articles were nearly identical, and neither one had Harry's side of the story. Eric went to Kirsten Delagard and asked her, What do you make of this?

We have his race is in the headline. He's identified as a cook. He's not charged. There's no follow-up story. If you're hairy, it's throwing you under the bus in a sense, especially- Oh, yeah.

I mean, if Black people are almost only in the newspaper when they commit crimes, and they're always identified by race. Those articles show that the reporter was just basically taking verbatim whatever the police told him.

To the point where the address is wrong in the same way in both. And his name is also spelled wrong with two Bs in both. So they took something verbatim from the police records.

Without questioning or talking to anyone.

Yeah, just used it straight up, which is just, yeah.

There's a faulty police report that was used to write two faulty articles in two different newspapers, and they both make Harry look reckless at best. It's at this point that Eric decided he needed to do his own investigation. That's next time.

Why would someone shoot Roy Mattis, who seems to have everything to lose by shooting Roy Mattis? Well, maybe Roy Mattis did something to him.

This is Ghost of a Chance. Our website is startribune. Com/ghostofachance. There you can see pictures and documents from the podcast, and you can also sign up to receive news about discussion guides and events. Our email is ghostofachance@star-tribune. Com. Get in touch if you have a question or feedback or a tip related to the Robinson story. We'd also love to know if this story motivated you to do something in your community, so let us know. You can help pay for this incredible story and others like it with a subscription to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Go to our website, startribune. Com. Ghost of a Chance is reported by Eric Roper and written and produced by me, Melissa Townsend. Our executive producer is Jenny Pinkly. Our editor is Mary Joe Webster. Fact working by Eric Roper and Mary Joe Webster, sound designed by Marcel Malakabu. Our contributing editors are Star Tribune Managing Editor Maria Reeve, and Star Tribune Editor and Senior Vice President Sook Yee Dardarian. Legal review from Randy Lebedoff. The art for our show comes from Anna Boon and Brock Kaplan. Special thanks to Kendall Harkness, Zoe Jackson, Laura McCollum, James Schiffer, Nancy Yang, Casey Darnell, Laura Yuin, Taine Danger, and members of the local community who served as our advisors.