Publication Title
Minnesota History
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2015
Abstract
In 1903 an African American man came to Montevideo, Minnesota from out of state and was accused of physically assaulting a European American woman. The townspeople formed a posse and searched for the alleged assailant in southern Minnesota. At the time the African American population was in the single digits. None of the African American residents knew the alleged attacker or were related to him. Nevertheless, the victim's family approached those residents and told them to leave town, and their subsequent departure left Montevideo without African Americans for well over half a century. The local press covered the alleged attack as a consequence of African American migration from the South to the North and bemoaned the impending arrival of the ethnic tensions that had plagued the South for generations. The removal of African Americans from Montevideo predated the lynching in Duluth by seventeen years, showing that the tension had seeped into life in Minnesota. This article looks at violent vigilantism in southern Minnesota during one of the most violent periods that African Americans faced in American history.
Recommended Citation
Lehman, Christopher P., ""The Contemplation of Our Righteousness": Vigilante Acts against African Americans in Southwest Minnesota, 1903" (2015). Ethnic and Women's Studies Faculty Publications. 4.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/ews_facpubs/4
Comments
This article was published in the fall 2015 issue of Minnesota History, a magazine published by the Minnesota Historical Society. The article was originally published at https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/64/v64i07p268-276.pdf.