Other Minorities of Minnesota

African Americans in Minnesota

African Americans have a long and rich history in Minnesota and have long brought diversity to Minnesota religious and secular life. People of African descent have been in Minnesota since the Fur Trade era. George Bonga (b. 1802) was a prominent trader who founded an extended family intermarried with Leech Lake’s Ojibwe community. As a territory, Minnesota was free after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and it was admitted to the union as a free state. Still from its earliest days, Fort Snelling had dozens of slaves working, among them Dred Scott, whose marriage to Harriet Robinson in 1836 at the fort was exhibit A in his unsuccessful claim to legal personhood before the Supreme Court.¹ And as Christopher Lehmann has shown, Southern slaveowners flocked in summer to the cooler shores of Minnesota’s lakes, bringing their enslaved servants with them.²

Though relatively small, Minnesota’s nineteenth-century African American community organized itself around religion. A number of freed blacks, believed to have come to the area as workers on steamboats, founded St. James African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in Minneapolis in 1863 at Sixth Ave. Southeast and Second Street (The congregation has been at 3200 Snelling since 1959.)³

In 1920, following tensions raised when companies hired a number of African Americans to help break a strike by dock works, a white mob broke into the St. Louis County Jail in Duluth and publicly lynched three African American circus workers accused of raping a white woman. Church leaders and newspapers promptly condemned the lynching of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, but it facticity remains a powerful reminder of the long history of white supremacy in Minnesota.The African Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation’s first Black denomination, was founded in Philadelphia led by Rev. Richard Allen. Forced to worship in separate galleries in Episcopal parishes, a group of devout free black Christians reluctantly sought to begin their own congregation, but church authorities later shut them out of access to donors. Allen was named bishop of the A.M.E. church in 1816. Mother Emanuel AME Church was founded the following year in Charleston, South Carolina, the symbolic place was white supremacist Dylan Roof fatally shot nine bible study members in 2015. St. Paul’s African American community built another A.M.E. dedicated to St. James in 1876. In Duluth, African Americans founded St. Peter’s A.M.E Church in 1900.

Minnesota’s African American community grew visibly as a result of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North was felt in Minnesota, if not as dramatically as other more industrial midwestern cities in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio. Minnesota’s African American population grew especially after World War Two, growing 150% between 1950 and 1970.⁴

Jews in Minnesota   

Although Jewish presence in North America goes back well before the nineteenth century, two waves characterize the large part of Jewish immigration, including to Minnesota. Jews had long been important minorities within predominantly Christian societies in Europe and Muslim societies in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.  Enlightenment Modernity in Germany and France brought the possibility of fuller Jewish citizenship in German, French, and English societies and many embraced modern transformations within Judaism known as Haskalah.  But Jews were also forcibly reminded of their outsiderhood, in the Dreyfus Affair in France, organized pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia, and, ultimately the twentieth century’s Holocaust.  Immigration to the United States meant for many Jews a fuller throated embrace of their religious freedom; but life in the U.S. was hardly immune from anti-Judaism, a Christian critique of Jews and their religion, or the racialized bigotry of anti-Semitism that could often go hand in hand.

In the first wave of immigration, roughly one quarter million largely middle-class German-speaking Jews immigrated to the U.S between 1820 and 1880. Only about 1,000 of those settled in Minnesota by 1880, but they founded important early congregations, Mt. Zion Temple in St. Paul in 1856, a Minneapolis congregation that what would become Temple Israel in 1878, and, in Duluth, Temple Emanuel in 1871. 

In the second wave of Jewish immigration, between 1880 and 1924, roughly 2 million mostly Yiddish speaking and largely working-class Eastern European Jews arrived in the U.S. In 1882, 200 Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe arrived at the St. Paul depot, their settlement supported by the region’s established Jewish community.⁵ Many attended the Sons of Jacob synagogue founded by Polish Jews in the 1860s. In Minneapolis, Orthodox Jews founded Adath Jeshurun in 1884. Duluth’s sizeable Jewish community in the last decades of the 19^th century was large of Eastern European heritage. A group of Lithuanian Jews founded the orthodox Adas Israel synagogue in the 1880s; a group of Russian Jews founded Kofereth Israel in 1893. The latter congregation, later known as Tifereth, voted to join the Conservative movement in the 1940s, and later merged with Emanuel to form today’s Temple Israel in Duluth.⁶