Whiteness in Plain View: A History of Racial Exclusion in Minnesota - Softcover

Montrie, Chad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1681342103 ISBN 13: 9781681342108

Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2022

Synopsis

An examination of White Minnesotans' efforts to exclude African Americans from local communities, jobs, and housing across the state and through the decades.

Minnesota is a paradox. Widely seen as a progressive stronghold of the Midwest, the state also has some of the greatest racial disparities in the nation. Those disparities have their roots in Minnesota's earliest days as a territory and in the decades that followed. From enslaved people brought to the territory by military officers to migrants traveling to the North Star State after the Civil War, African Americans have long been present in Minnesota's history. Yet while many came here looking to establish new lives, they were often met with White resistance and attempts to exclude them.

Whiteness in Plain View examines the ways White residents across Minnesota acted to intimidate, control, remove, and keep out African Americans over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their methods ranged from anonymous threats, vandalism, and mob violence to restrictive housing covenants, realtor deceit, and mortgage discrimination, and they were aided by local, state, and federal government agencies as well as openly complicit public officials. What they did was not an anomaly or aberration, in some particular place or passing moment, but rather common and continuous. Chapter by chapter, the book shows that Minnesota's overwhelming Whiteness is neither accidental nor incidental, and that racial exclusion's legacy is very much woven into the state's contemporary politics, economy, and culture.

About this title

About the Author

Chad Montrie is a professor in the history department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is the author of four books, including The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism. His article "In that Very Northern City: Recovering a Forgotten Struggle for Racial Integration in Duluth" appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Minnesota History magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When workers in Austin began organizing a union at the George A. Hormel plant in the early 1930s, there was not a single African American in the packinghouse, although John Winkels, an employee there, later claimed that the company briefly employed a group of Black men from out of town during the campaign. He was involved in chasing them away. “They hired forty of them and they put them in the plant all at one time,” he remembered, and the whole lot lived in “the jungles,” a wooded area just east of the packinghouse. “We told them after work, ‘You better get the hell out of town because you’re not going to come in here tomorrow.’” To make good on the threat, that night Winkels and other White workers armed themselves with clubs, went to the woods, broke up the cooking fires, and ran the African American workers out. “After that,” he said, “they didn’t come in no more because they knew [Hormel] couldn’t hire them.” Likewise, the remaining local Black residents also knew not to bother. “We had Frank,” Winkels recalled. “He was shining shoes in the barbershop and then afterwards he would bellhop for the bus, and everybody liked him.” But, he noted, Frank would “never go in the packinghouse because he knew we didn’t want him there.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1681342103
• ISBN 13: 9781681342108
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272