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

by Chad Montrie

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681342108
Publisher:	Minnesota Historical Society Press
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,078,522
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Chad Montrie is a professor in the history department at the Universityof 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.

Read an Excerpt

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.”

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1 “The Master Race of the World Is Caucasian”: Indian Uprising, Mass Hanging, and Forced Removal
Chapter 2 “They All Must Be Taught Their Duty”: Barbers, Porters, Washerwomen, and Inmates
Chapter 3 Not “a Negro Town”: Packinghouse Workers and Whiteness in Austin
Chapter 4 “In That Very Northern City”: Making the Color Line in Duluth
Chapter 5 “A Bigoted, Prejudiced, Hateful Little Area”: Racial Exclusion in Edina
Chapter 6 “This Vicious Vice”: Black Removal in St. Paul
Chapter 7 “The First Negro Family on Our Block”: A Housing Integration Campaign in Bloomington
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

An earnest look at the subtle, insidious, and sometimes violent ways in which Minnesotans engaged in segregationist policies. Chad Montrie explains how the fear of Black labor that White Southerners held post-Reconstruction gripped the North and led to pervasive exclusion of Black Minnesotans from social, political, and economic life.”
JoJo Bell, board president, African American Interpretive Center of Minnesota

"A new book by Chad Montrie, a history professor at the Universityof Massachusetts Lowell, might well have been titled "The Shame of Minnesota." It is a detailed description of how Black Americans, over nearly two centuries, were either barred from living in communities across Minnesota, or driven out of communities, or forced to live in the most dilapidated sections of Minneapolis and St. Paul so as to preserve the white-only character of more attractive neighborhoods in the cities and surrounding suburbs. . . . 

"When it came to the state's growth and development, it would seem that people of color were nearly always expendable. Given the current state of affairs — the vast disparities in employment, home ownership and income between whites and minorities — not to mention the gigantic issues of policing in our state, a just society appears to be a long way off. Montrie's groundbreaking book is extremely useful in helping us understand how we got to this point."
Star Tribune

"The thing I most appreciate about Chad Montrie’s book, Whiteness in Plain View  . . .  is its broad scope. Too often when discussing Minnesotan racism, we focus only on the core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which have long been home to the majority of the state’s people of color."
Bill Lindeke in MinnPost

From the Publisher