Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, 1865–1912

by William D. Green

He had just given a rousing speech to a crammed assembly in St. Paul, but Frederick Douglass, confidant to the Great Emancipator himself and conscience of the Republican Party, was denied a hotel room because he was black. This was Minnesota in 1873, four years after the state had approved black suffrage—a state where “freedom” meant being unshackled from chains but not social restrictions, where “equality” meant access to the ballot but not to a hotel or restaurant downtown. Spanning the half century after the Civil War, Degrees of Freedom draws a rare picture of black experience in a northern state of this period and of the nature of black discontent and action within a predominantly white, ostensibly progressive society. William D. Green brings to light a full cast of little-known historical characters among the black men and women who moved to Minnesota following the Fifteenth Amendment; worked as farmhands and laborers; built communities (such as Pig’s Eye Landing, later renamed St. Paul), businesses, and a newspaper (the Western Appeal ); and embodied the slow but inexorable advancement of race relations in the state over time. Within this absorbing, often surprising, narrative we meet “ordinary” citizens, like former slave and early settler Jim Thompson and black barbers catering to a white clientele, but also outsize figures of national stature, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, all of whom championed civil rights in Minnesota. And we see how, in a state where racial prejudice and oppression wore a liberal mask, black settlers and entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists maneuvered within a restricted political arena to bring about real and lasting change.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2014

About the author

William D. Green was the M. Anita Gaye Hawthorne Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Professor of History at Augsburg University until 2022. Devoting his career to writing about race and Minnesota, he has published four books—A Peculiar Imbalance: The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Early Minnesota, Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits on Black Opportunity, and Nellie Francis: Fighting for Racial Justice and Women’s Equality in Minnesota.

Degrees of Freedom and The Children of Lincoln won the Hognander-Minnesota Book Awards in 2016 and 2020, respectively. He holds an MA, a PhD, and a JD from the University of Minnesota, and a B.A. in History from Gustavus Adolphus College. He served as Superintendent of Minneapolis Schools and vice president of the executive council of the Minnesota Historical Society. He has published articles, op-ed pieces, and book chapters on history, law, and education, and has spoken widely at such places as the Ramsey County Bar Association; Friends of the Ramsey County Library; Unity Unitarian Universalist Church in St. Paul, and William Mitchell Law School. He has also lectured at Peabody College-Vanderbilt University, St. John’s University, and Lincoln College-Oxford University. While serving as Superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools, he studied school reform at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minnesota is full of contradictions when it comes to race. A state with a significantly smaller black population than most of the Midwest, it nevertheless played a significant role in the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. and produced such civil rights advocates as Roy Wilkins and Hubert Humphrey. It is a state that has long boasted of at least a superficial commitment to equality, yet today it ranks as one of the worst states in the nation for racial disparities in education and income, and it is consistently rated as one of the worst places for black professionals to live.

In this well-researched book, William Green explores the roots of those contradictions in the fifty or so years following Minnesota's admission to statehood. He shows how Minnesota's superficial liberalism hid a deep well of bigotry that translated into deficient schools, a lack of economic opportunity, exclusion from public venues, and sometimes mob violence. He tracks the frustrations of black community leaders who fought for passage of civil rights laws only to find they were widely ignored and largely unenforceable, and who spent decades supporting progressive political parties only to be blocked from elective office. For these reasons, this book should be read by anyone who has a serious interest in Minnesota history.

However, it is not without flaws. Especially in the early chapters, Dr. Green has a tendency to blur the line between fact and speculation, and he isn't always clear about which is which. The narrative as a whole could have used a stronger editorial hand. It frequently wanders, repeats points or incidents that have already been discussed, and sometimes bogs down in tangents. (As a case in point, Green spends something like ten pages explaining technical aspects of the Homestead Act only to say that African-Americans by and large did not make homestead claims. This is not an insignificant point: Minnesota owes much of its cultural heritage to the Northern European immigrants who did migrate here as homesteaders. But that point could have been made more forcefully had the irrelevant technical details been left out.)

For its contribution to the collective understanding of Minnesota history, this book is invaluable. However, I think it would have been a stronger work had it been about a hundred pages shorter.

[Lucille · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written overview of the early history of African Americans in Minnesota. I thought I knew a lot about Minnesota history, but now I realize that my understanding was woefully euro-centric.