Remembering Minnesota’s Freedom Riders
The Minnesota Freedom Riders were part of a second, expanded stage of the original Freedom Rides.
Paul Nelson is an amateur historian and the author of Fredrick L. McGhee, A Life on the Color Line, 1861–1912 (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002), as well as numerous articles for Ramsey County History and Minnesota History magazines.
The Minnesota Freedom Riders were part of a second, expanded stage of the original Freedom Rides.
The house is famous for its beauty inside and out — and as the site of one of Minnesota’s most notorious murders.
Quarried in Renville County, Morton gneiss is one of the oldest stones on the planet: about 3.5 billion years old.
Among successful Minnesota politicians there have been orators, Easterners, professorial types and Jews. Only Wellstone was all of these.
On September 27, 1839, Dakota boys found a body washed up under Dayton’s Bluff, near Carver’s Cave (Wakan Tipi).
The stone is characterized by its gray color, rough texture, and many fossils.
Along with mounds in Crow Wing, Itasca, and Beltrami Counties, they are some of the northernmost burial mounds on the Mississippi River.
The Cloquet and Moose Lake fires left over 450 dead, fifteen hundred square miles consumed, towns and villages burned flat.
One of America’s great retail empires was built on a foundation of Minnesota farmland.
Hill assembled a rail network that stretched from Duluth to Seattle across the north, and from Chicago south to St. Louis and then west to Denver.
Melvin Maas was first elected to Congress in 1926, becoming its youngest member at age twenty-eight.
Johnston left a built legacy unmatched in Minnesota.
There have been four Roman Catholic cathedrals in St. Paul. The first three were built between 1841 and 1858. The fourth, and the most architecturally distinctive, opened in 1915.
St. Paul lawyer Fredrick McGhee organized the meeting and hoped that it would produce a more united and effective national civil rights organization. The opposite occurred.
The church was started by a community of Rusyns who immigrated to Minneapolis from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century.
It’s a gathering place, in death, of people from the full range of St. Paul history, from the city’s founders to recent immigrants.
The 1889 death of inmate Taylor Combs led to a scandal, and then major reforms, at the Rochester State Hospital for the Insane.
From 1885 to 1961, St. Paul had a Central Park.
The prosecutor himself wrote of his “grave and serious doubts as to whether the defendant has had a fair trial.”
No lynching is known to have occurred in the Twin Cities, but St. Paul came close with the near-lynching of Houston Osborne in 1895.
By Paul Nelson
Feb. 13, 2017