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GRANT WILLIAMS: Historically, Minnesota has been known as a liberal and tolerant state, at least on the surface. After the Civil War, it was one of only a few states to voluntarily grant voting rights to African-Americans and Indians.

During the Jim Crow era when Southern schools were racially segregated, Minnesota schools were integrated. Blacks generally didn't have to ride at the back of the bus or drink from separate drinking fountains as they did down South. But African-Americans who migrated to Minnesota hoping to escape the grip of Jim Crow were disappointed.

ESSIE PASTEL: I was told before I left there that I was going to a better place than the South. But as I got here, I found out it wasn't that much different.

GRANT WILLIAMS: Essie Pastel is a slight woman with short gray hair. A homemade broom sits next to the fireplace in her Minneapolis home. She brought the broom with her from Mississippi where she was born. Pastel says it reminds her of her Southern roots. She moved to Minnesota in the mid 1940s to find a job.

ESSIE PASTEL: Every place I went-- I even went to get a dishwashing job. And they found out that I was Black, and they didn't accept me. I went to one place, they sent me there. And so they went into a room and they says-- and then this lady come out, and they wanted to know who I was and what color I was. And they said, Black. And they said, no.

SPEAKER 2: (SINGING) I woke up this morning, and I was in an awful mood

GRANT WILLIAMS: Pastel wasn't the only African-American having trouble finding work in Minnesota, especially hard to find skilled jobs. In 1930, the Urban League estimated that 75% of the African-Americans with jobs in Minnesota did domestic work. In 1943, governor Edward J. Ty's Interracial Commission sent out more than 2000 surveys to Minnesota employers. The idea was to find out why so many Blacks were unemployed.

Only a fraction of the companies responding said they had any experience employing Blacks. Those that didn't hire Blacks tried to justify their discrimination. Some said their customers wouldn't accept being served by Blacks. Others predicted that white co-workers wouldn't want to work with African-Americans.

At the time of the survey, thousands of young American men were fighting the Germans and the Japanese in World War II. Many companies were in need of workers. But some employers, like this survey respondent, wrote that Blacks wouldn't make good employees because they were too lazy.

SPEAKER 3: Although we have never had any experience with Negroes in our plant, our feeling has always been that the fact that they were Black would make absolutely no difference with us. But the regrettable fact is that from an ambition standpoint, the Negro is definitely quite a different person from a white person. This is his heritage, and to change it means to remake a race. This appears to be as tough a job as making a white person out of a Jap.

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GRANT WILLIAMS: Minnesota law prohibited job and housing discrimination against Blacks. But 75-year-old Saint Paul native Arthur McWatt says many employers found ways around the law.

ARTHUR MCWATT: And they would accept you or your application, but they'd throw it in the wastebasket after they'd taken it or else they'd never call you or we'll call you and-- but it was just done in a more subtle way than in the South just saying, get out of here, we don't hire your kind.

GRANT WILLIAMS: McWatt is a retired social studies teacher who writes about the history of the Civil Rights movement in Minnesota. He says Black Minnesotans learned that racist white people often had smiling faces and polite voices. McWatt says, Blacks eventually learned to read between the lines when talking to white people.

ARTHUR MCWATT: When you're a person who is being discriminated against, you have an antenna that you sense when people are insincere or when people are negative-- basically negative against you. And some way or another, you get used to it, to being able to tell which people are the ones that are genuine and which are the people that are just giving you a facade.

GRANT WILLIAMS: While it was important to be attuned to these racist attitudes, McWatt says Blacks generally felt much safer in Minnesota than they did in the South.

ARTHUR MCWATT: In the North, you could get away with a lot of things. And I remember also another friend of mine who-- Lloyd Hogan who was working on 7th [INAUDIBLE] and Walgreens there, and someone called him a nigger. And he reached over and picked the guy out of his stool and lifted him over the counter and dropped him on his head. And so they were-- I don't think Blacks were afraid of whites.

GRANT WILLIAMS: Assaulting a white man in the Jim Crow South could mean death for a Black man. Why was Minnesota so relatively tolerant McWatt says one reason is that white Minnesotans didn't see Blacks as competition for jobs and housing, and there just weren't many Blacks living here. The 1940 census shows that African-Americans made up less than 1% of Minneapolis and 1.5% of Saint Paul's population.

For the most part, African-Americans were grouped together in parts of urban Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Some of those areas became fertile ground for Black-owned businesses. On streets like old 6 Avenue in North Minneapolis, Blacks could get goods and services from groceries to legal defense. Doris Slaughter remembers old Sixth Avenue. She sits in a plush armchair in the living room of her South Minneapolis home.

Slaughter throws back her head and smiles as she recalls her childhood. But not all of her memories are happy. She remembers being told to stay away from Northeast Minneapolis. In the 40s when Slaughter was a teenager, that part of the city was known for its white immigrant population, which didn't like Blacks. She says she and her friends went to clubs and restaurants where they knew they'd be welcomed.

DORIS SLAUGHTER: We had our own places. Like we had [? Cashiers ?] or it used to be [? Bells ?] and then [? Cashiers. ?] When we socialized when I got to the place where I was going out, there was six Avenue North, and we just never-- I never thought about going down into to the white areas-- going down to the bars downtown or when I wanted to socialize or going to some place down there because we had our own. And we did have a good time, I say.

MELVIN CARTER: Nobody ever told me not to go anywhere, but you know that you weren't safe in certain places.

GRANT WILLIAMS: Melvin Carter was born in St Paul in 1923. He sits in his living room surrounded by pictures of his children and grandchildren. Carter's caramel Brown face is creased with age. In Saint Paul, many African African-Americans lived in the Rondo neighborhood, which was located about a mile Southwest of the State Capitol. Carter says if you lived in Rondo, it was best to stay in Rondo.

MELVIN CARTER: There was a rivalry between the Black neighborhood and what's now called Frogtown North of University Avenue. And there's an old German neighborhood, I guess you could say. And there was friction-- the young kids who were-- at the time who were looking for trouble could certainly find it quick.

So when we had to go through the neighborhood, we'd always go through in gangs on the way to go swimming or fishing or somewhere because we would always walk or ride a bicycle. You never traveled alone

GRANT WILLIAMS: Bernadette Anderson grew up in South Minneapolis in an area that had a concentration of Black families. Anderson's face is smooth and broad. It seems to expand every time she smiles. But she doesn't smile when she recalls some of her childhood experiences with racism in Minneapolis. As a Black child in the 1930s, any given day could bring humiliation. For example, she says white and Black students often played together at school.

BERNADETTE ANDERSON: We were doing a play. I went to when-- we were all having fun. The kids were Black and white kids together. And we were going to practice one evening and this young white girl invited us to her house to practice. And I think I was the only Black one in the play, but we went and she was happy about it. But when we got to the door, her grandmother came to the door and stopped me and said, I don't allow niggers in my house. So it was my first taste of really hitting strong racism.

GRANT WILLIAMS: Employment and housing have generally improved for Black Minnesotans since the days of Jim Crow. But African-American unemployment in Minnesota is still nearly twice as high as the statewide rate. And Black Minnesotans are still far more likely than whites to live in substandard housing. Anderson says, these days racism in Minnesota is more subtle than in the past, but it's still there.

BERNADETTE ANDERSON: I don't have a real trust in white people, just don't have a real trust. I mean, there are some of them that are very sincere, they can continue to be sincere. And hopefully one day, we'll all get along. I don't know when that's going to be, but it isn't happening now.

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GRANT WILLIAMS: During the Jim Crow years, Black Minnesotans didn't have to defend their homes against hooded nightriders like Blacks in the South. They didn't have to avoid looking white people in the eye for fear of offending them. But some Blacks say, that didn't make racism in Minnesota any easier to deal with.

Whether in Mississippi or in Minnesota, overt or subtle, racism had the same purpose and same result. It put limits on Black Minnesotans freedom to live and work the way they wanted to. Minnesota's elder Black generation hasn't forgotten Jim Crow. I'm Grant Williams, Minnesota Public Radio.

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