Origins of the NAACP in Minnesota, 1912–1920

In the years leading up to and immediately following World War I, African Americans in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Duluth established separate chapters of the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

About seven thousand African Americans lived in Minnesota during the early decades of the 1900s. The vast majority of them resided in St. Paul and Minneapolis. In recent years, a small core of community leaders from the cities’ black professional class had established a series of organizations to promote civil rights, but those groups had all declined due to some combination of neglect, indifference, and ineffectiveness.

It wasn’t until 1909, when a new organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed, that significant numbers of African Americans in the Twin Cities began actively participating in a viable, nationwide civil rights movement.

The NAACP was an outgrowth of the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization founded several years earlier by prominent black leaders including W. E. B. Du Bois and St. Paul attorney Fredrick McGhee. On March 12, 1912, McGhee, physician Valdo Turner, and several other members of St. Paul’s African American community met to create a new organization called the Twin City Protective League. Despite opposition from members who objected to the activist policies of Du Bois and his allies, the new group voted to affiliate with the NAACP.

McGhee died several months later, but his colleagues carried on his cause. In the fall of 1913, the St. Paul group applied for and received its NAACP charter, officially becoming a branch of the national organization. A few months later, another group of prominent black leaders including attorney Gale P. Hilyer established a separate NAACP branch in Minneapolis.

Both NAACP branches struggled to build membership and raise funds during their early years. But they still managed to mount several high profile campaigns on behalf of the cities’ African Americans. Most notably, they fought to prevent public showings of the groundbreaking but blatantly racist motion picture The Birth of a Nation, in 1915. Gale Hilyer, for one, objected to the movie’s demeaning depictions of African Americans, calling it “prejudiced and unfair.”

The two branches failed to stop the exhibition of the movie. They did, however, gain several concessions. In St. Paul, exhibitors agreed to cut two particularly offensive scenes from the film. In Minneapolis, Mayor Wallace Nye set up a board of censors to consider the black community’s objections. Other campaigns conducted by the two NAACP branches included an attempt to gain the release from prison of a black teenager convicted of forging a seventeen-dollar check, and a successful effort to reinstate an African American public school teacher in St. Paul.

The two branches’ focus shifted with the United States’ entry into World War I. Although labor shortages on the home front forced employers to open positions that had previously been closed to African Americans, NAACP leaders feared hiring discrimination would return once the war ended.

Minneapolis NAACP Secretary R. Augustine Skinner was among several Twin Cities black leaders who believed African Americans could best protect their wartime gains by demonstrating patriotism. He called for them to unite in support of the NAACP as an advocate for their rights.

The Twin Cities NAACP branches played what may have been their most urgent early role in the aftermath of racial violence 150 miles north, in Duluth. On June 15, 1920, a mob broke into the Duluth city jail and lynched three black circus workers who were being held there as suspects in an alleged rape. In the days that followed, seven other black men were indicted in the rape, despite a lack of physical evidence. The NAACP branches in St. Paul and Minneapolis mobilized to defend them. The branches solicited donations and hired attorneys to represent the accused.

In the end, the lawyers secured by the NAACP succeeded in getting charges against five of the men dropped. Of the two defendants who went to trial, one was acquitted and one was convicted. The Twin Cities branches’ efforts on behalf of the accused helped overcome skepticism about the NAACP in Duluth’s African American community and led to the establishment of that city’s NAACP branch in 1920.