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SPEAKER: Gregory Reed is with the Afro-American Cultural Arts Center in Minneapolis. And he has agreed to join us today on midday because we're observing February as Black History Month, Gregory. And as part of that, we have been featuring a number of reports on again, off again, not on any real deliberate basis, about Black history not only in Minnesota but in the United States. And I'd like to spend about the next 10 to 15 minutes talking with you about Black history in Minnesota because I believe that it is a largely overlooked topic. I imagine many people do not associate Blacks and their history in Minnesota because many of us may think that there haven't been many Blacks in the state in years gone by. I was going to ask you, for example, I have rattling around in my head the fact that one of the first Blacks in the state was a fur trader.

GREGORY REED: Yes. That's very true. In fact, the first recorded Black that we know of in what is now known as Minnesota, was a man by the name of George Bonga. But we should keep in mind that this whole fur trade, there was a fur trade industry in Minnesota, and that was one of the things that led to Black people coming to this area. In fact, there were two reasons that Blacks primarily came to Minnesota. One, the fur trade, and two, as a result of slavery, either in an attempt to escape from slavery or as a part of the slave system.

SPEAKER: Now that's another point that I suspect many of us in Minnesota do not either realize or care to admit to, and that there was slavery in Minnesota. About when would you say?

GREGORY REED: Indeed there was. And throughout the 1800s, what we had was Minnesota as a resort area for Southern Whites. And they would come to the area, and of course, they would bring their slaves. Now even though Minnesota was not a slave state, the slaves were in fact in bondage to the individuals while they were here.

SPEAKER: Does history show any records of farmers or other people in the state having slaves or paying money to own the services of people?

GREGORY REED: To my knowledge, that is not the case, but I'm not going-- the record is just too thin. There's a lot of research that needs to be done yet. So far, our record shows that, in fact, slaves were here, but primarily that they were brought here with other folks. I haven't seen any exchanges of slaves while here.

SPEAKER: And I imagine that these records are fairly difficult to find, number one, and that secondly, there are few records. Is that right?

GREGORY REED: The records are few. They're far and few in between. Most of the things that I've been able to come up with, we've dug up out of the Historical Society or out of writings of military personnel that were in the area. You have to really dig deep in order to come up with Blacks in Minnesota.

There's been one or two publications done, one put out by Spangler in the '50s, which touches upon Blacks in Minnesota. But when we started our research on Blacks in Minnesota, we found some contradictions in terms of events.

SPEAKER: For example.

GREGORY REED: Well, in terms of the minor things but important things. The relationship between the Bonga's. There are a large number of Bonga's in the Minnesota area. And trying to fit together their interaction with one another, we haven't been able to really resolve that. Spangler had indicated one set of circumstances that existed in terms of where the Black people lived in the state and what the relationship was. And we found that that may not be the case, but the records aren't clear enough yet to really sort it out.

SPEAKER: The Bonga's being a family name.

GREGORY REED: Yes. In fact, there are Bonga's still living in the Mille Lacs Lake area. Which is important because at the turn of the 17th, 18th century, you had a large number of Blacks and Native Americans intermarrying in this whole region called the Upper Northwest, the Great Northwest.

The Bonga family, George Bonga, when he moved into Minnesota proper, he married a Chippewa woman, and they had several children who had several children and who intermarried again with Native Americans. And so the Native American-Black interaction there had been very strong through the turn of the 19th century or the 20th century, excuse me.

SPEAKER: It's interesting, again, our ignorance is displayed by the fact that we did not know, I did not know, for example, where Blacks had participated in life in early Minnesota history. And I presume, for example, that the major concentrations of Black populations now are in the Metropolitan areas, in the state, the Twin Cities, the Duluth area, and Rochester. Were there indeed some rural groupings of Black people in early history?

GREGORY REED: There were. One of the largest that we've run across thus far was in Fergus Falls. In fact, there were a number of Blacks who had come again at the end of the Civil War who were invited up by an organization that had been formed in Minneapolis to encourage Blacks to move north. And these were farmers coming from, I believe it was Lexington, Kentucky.

And they came to Minneapolis, and later settled in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and became very active in the community there. There were a large number. I mean, 30 or 40, large in that sense. Some of them moved on to Sioux Falls. We know there's a trail, but we haven't been able to dig up substance on the individuals yet.

SPEAKER: So they kept moving then and didn't really stay.

GREGORY REED: Well, there's still folks, Blacks in the Fergus Falls area, in the Fargo-Moorhead area. And even from my family background, they told me that there were a large number of Black people in Moorhead, Minnesota and in Fargo, North Dakota.

SPEAKER: One of the communities I forgot to mention is having an important Black population. What about the reception that many Blacks received in Minnesota? I presume, for example, that in the earliest of times, the fur traders who came through and also the Black people who were held by the southern people who came to Minnesota for vacationing, that the reception was perhaps not friendly at all.

GREGORY REED: It's conflicting. You had some of the non-Blacks who accepted Black people quite readily. That fur trade, of course, we have to keep in mind that they were here for a particular purpose, to make money. The fur trade industry was big money going into the 1800s, and anyone involved in that, of course, was essential to making money for the European markets.

Well, Blacks who later came into the area and started to settle would run into some individual conflicts, but we have it on both sides. There's the tragic incidents of course as late as the 1920s in terms of the lynching in Duluth. And this was a lynching of Black people, three Black men who were part of a circus that had come through Canada and down into Minnesota. And they were accused of assaulting a White woman.

There was a kangaroo court. The jail was mobbed by 5,000 Whites, ended up with three Black people being lynched. In fact, that was the last lynching of north of the Mason-Dixon line in the 20th century that we know of in Minnesota or in the north. But that's one of the more tragic events in terms of the interaction between Blacks.

It's been mixed. Individuals such as William Scrutchin, who was a Black lawyer, went to Bemidji in 1889, was a very successful criminal lawyer there. In fact, he came to a great deal of recognition for his cases of workmen compensation cases. He's the only Black person that we know of in the state that had a permanent monument erected on his behalf.

SPEAKER: Standing to this day?

GREGORY REED: To this day, as far as we know. We haven't been able to substantiate where it is. But hopefully, as we're able to get into research a little further, we can get some of this.

SPEAKER: You have some sheets with a variety of names on those sheets it looks like. Do you have other names of people in other communities, Black people in other communities in Minnesota that you haven't given us already?

GREGORY REED: Oh, there are many, many. And in fact they all fit into this general discussion in terms of what the reception has been for Black people historically. For instance, Robert Hickman, who came up from Boone County, Missouri in the late 1800s and is the founder of the oldest Black institution in the state of Minnesota, which is Pilgrim Baptist Church.

He led a group of 200 Black people to settle eventually in St. Paul in 1863. But they first attempted to settle at St. Anthony Falls and were met by a group of Polish people who just refused to let them land. Later the group went on and became a very active part of the St. Paul community. But again, now if we look at the social circumstances of the time, the Polish people at that time were considered to be the lowest folks on the totem pole, and Black people were coming up, and they felt extremely threatened. And that was one of the causes. So racism had its ties in with the economic condition of the time.

SPEAKER: So the group led by Hickman really was the nucleus of St. Paul's Black population. Is that a safe statement?

GREGORY REED: It's one of the contributing factors. All of these things fit together. There's no single factor that you can say was responsible for Black settling in the area. There are many, many factors. Of course, an escape from slavery, which was what Hickman and his groups were doing. Many of the Black people that had other Blacks had used the river to escape from slavery. Blacks that had come up with Whites and then had escaped while they were here and later joined the community. The military bringing Blacks with them and then later freeing those individuals. Well, the Bongo's become a classic case of that in the early part of the state's history.

SPEAKER: I was going to ask you about that, Greg, the military and how many Blacks were in the military. I'm thinking especially of Fort Snelling, one of the earliest settlements in Minnesota. What was the prevalence of Blacks' participation in the military?

GREGORY REED: Well, again, toward the end of the Civil War, what we saw happening was a movement of Blacks away from the south due to what I guess we can say the Hayes-Tilden Compromise that had gone on in 1877 I believe it was and what brought Hayes to the presidency when he said he was going to move federal troops out of the south.

Well, a lot of these troops were Black troops, and a lot of the local militia were Black people. Now you had a group of Black men who were in the army, had guns. What are you going to do with them? They started moving them west. Minnesota at that time was considered to be west. Fort Snelling was considered to be west. And consequently, they ended up with a group of Black soldiers at Fort Snelling in 1882, and they were here between 1882 and 1888.

Now this had a tremendous stabilizing effect upon the Black community here. One is that it provided security for the Black folks here because now you have a group of armed people who, on the one hand, are here to defend the frontier. But at the same time, they're going to, of course, defend their people.

Secondly, you have these individuals who have a very cosmopolitan, for that time period, outlook. You have Black men who have come from all around the country of east, south, further west. And these men have brought with them their fraternal organizations, their different outlooks. And so you see some substance developing in the particular community.

Secondly, they're plugging in to the already existing community, the churches. So you have folks like Hickman who had, 1863, had come up with a group, and they founded a church. Well, the church provided a focal point for many, many activities. In fact, because of segregation and racism that in fact was prevalent, Black people use the church as a center for many social political activities, and these troops plugged into that. So you start seeing that one activity benefits another, and all of it helps form what we call community.

SPEAKER: I want to return to your point that you raised about the importance of the church in the Black community in Minnesota's history, but we diverted you for a moment from your recounting the issues surrounding the Civil War. Before we went on the air, we were talking briefly about Minnesota as part of the Underground Railroad. And you pointed out to me that Minnesota really wasn't an outlet for the Underground Railroad as such.

GREGORY REED: Not from what I understand of the Underground Railroad in terms of Harriet Tubman. What I'm saying is that historically, we have not found that kind of train. However, we should keep in mind that the rivers play a very important role, and there is no doubt in my mind that Blacks utilize the river as a way of escaping slavery in the south.

So in terms of how formal it was, we're really not sure. We know that there were some interactions. I mean, there were whites that had aided Blacks in escaping from hostile Whites in the area. Now whether we want to call that an Underground Railroad in the sense of what we understood it on further east, our records thus far don't indicate it.

SPEAKER: And the point too that we heard you make just a few minutes ago was about the importance of the church, and that's one of the things I wanted to return to. And it's a question I have that may take you away from historical recounting of Blacks in Minnesota to present day. How has the church evolved for Black people? As you pointed out, it used to be the center of a lot of political organizing political activity for Blacks, and I have the impression that in the Black culture today, the church is still really quite important, especially to some of the older Black people. What's your impression of what has happened to the church?

GREGORY REED: If you'd have asked me five years ago what the situation was, I'd have probably told you that the church wasn't that important of an institution from my limited knowledge then. However, just in terms of watching what has been happening recently just here in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the church is still a very viable and important part of our community.

I think during the '60s, of course, there was a great deal of questioning in terms of how many different groups were supposed to relate with one another, and it may have lost a little, some of its effect with the younger Black community at that particular time in some quarters of the country. However, now the church seems to be extremely strong, extremely strong and viable.

SPEAKER: We have to tie up a couple of details too, Gregory, before we conclude this conversation. You mentioned a book that has some points of Black history in it. What is the author and the name of that book?

GREGORY REED: OK, well, there are a couple of books. One of which is called Negroes in Minnesota, and that was by Spangler. I just don't remember his first name. We've put out a publication called Blacks in Minnesota, which is an interpretation of what has happened from our historical accounts, and that's a combination of individuals. Musa Foster, Ralph Crowder, Mahmoud El-Kati, Quintard Taylor. All of these individuals contributed to that, and they are local historians.

SPEAKER: Blacks in Minnesota through the Afro-American Cultural Arts Center in Minneapolis.

GREGORY REED: Correct. And then there's one other publication by Mahmoud El-Kati that becomes very important. It's called Lola Shine Discovers Kwanzaa. And that's a very important publication seeing how Kwanzaa is a part of our Afro-American contemporary history, and it's a growing celebration in each year. And again, it's written by a Black historian here. And there's very, very few places in which you can get that publication, and that's through the African American Culture Center. By the way, our name is African American Cultural Center.

SPEAKER: Good. Thanks for correcting me. That is Lola Shine Discovers Kwanzaa. How do you spell Kwanzaa?

GREGORY REED: K-w-a-n-z-a-a.

SPEAKER: Kwanzaa, gotcha. All right, very good. Well, Gregory Reed, thanks for joining us. You are with the African American Cultural Arts Center in Minneapolis, and we've been talking to Gregory as part of NPR's observance of Black History Month. Go ahead.

GREGORY REED: We have a permanent exhibit on Blacks in Minnesota at the African American Cultural Center. Much more detailed and time can be spent in terms of discussing the interaction between the different institutions in the state and the individuals in the state, and it's the interaction of these folks that is very important in terms of understanding the history of both Minnesota and Blacks in the country as a whole.

SPEAKER: What are the hours, and what's the location?

GREGORY REED: We're located at 258 Hennepin Avenue. And the hours are 9:00 until 8:30 Monday through Friday, 9:00 until 4:00 on Saturday. If you're interested in getting a tour, then contact our education director after 1 o'clock.

SPEAKER: All right. Very good. Thanks for that information. I appreciate your stopping by.

GREGORY REED: Thank you.