African Americans in Minnesota

George Bonga was an influential Minnesota fur trader of mixed Ojibwe and African descent, born in 1802.  

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 

St. James African Methodist Episcopal has a more than 150-year history in Minneapolis—it was founded in 1863, only five years after Minnesota became a state. Credit: Minnesota Historical Society.

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.)⁷

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation’s first Black denomination, was founded in Philadelphia and 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.

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.

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 1970.⁸