When local (and community) newspapers go away, local and community stories go away, too. There was a story in today's Star Tribune that reminded me of that reality, and I'm glad long-time reporter Randy Furst was there to write it, and that we still have local papers and other community press here in the Twin Cities, though not nearly as many examples as I'd like.
This is in Minnesota, of course, the North, the place where racism supposedly doesn't and didn't exist:
The fire station was built in 1907 and Fire Chief J.R. Canterbury assigned three Black firefighters to it. One was John Cheatham.... Cheatham was born a slave in St. Louis in 1855 and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.... He was promoted to captain in 1899.
The two other Black firefighters were Frank Harris and Lafayette Mason.... Harris was working at the station in 1910, but no records can be found on Mason.
After [Chief] Canterbury assigned the all-Black crew, a man named Thomas Walsh presented a petition to the City Council opposing it. His reasoning reflected hurtful racist stereotypes.
Walsh “said the streets near the firehouse are poorly lighted and are not patrolled by the police,” the Minneapolis Tribune reported. “This, he said, made it bad where there are so many factory girls and women who have to walk up these dark lanes at night.”
[Chief] Canterbury responded, according to the version in the Minneapolis Journal, that “white and colored firemen won’t mix.”
The Tribune quoted Canterbury at length: “No white men will wash in the same bowl and sleep in the same beds with the colored men, so I thought a step could be taken in the right direction by placing the colored station by themselves.” He added “that with the development of the city it was absolutely necessary to find places for a few colored firemen in the department.”
“What are we going to do with them?” the chief asked. “They must be provided for. This is the most perplexing problem.”
Requiring the white firefighters to work with the Black men as a condition of employment was, of course, out of the question, I suppose. The racist petitioner (and the petition's signers) and the hapless fire chief were not the only ones on record at the time, however:
Some council members said “it was an affront to the colored members of the force who are being credited with being first rate men to segregate them to one station,” the Journal noted.
Other citizens came to the Black firefighters’ defense a few weeks later, according to the Tribune.
“There are at least sixty women living in the vicinity of the new fire station in the Twelfth Ward who are standing by the colored firemen on duty there,” the paper reported. “Yesterday afternoon a petition was presented at the meeting of the fire committee signed by the women in which they voiced their disapproval of the agitation over the installation of colored firemen at the station.”
Those women were the real allies of the day, rejecting the usual white men's excuse for oppressing Black men as a defense of (assumed white) womanhood. The station remained segregated or mostly segregated, it sounds like from the Star Tribune story, for years or decades, and it's clear that affected its status when it came to funding. And then things got even worse:
Station 24 was the last station to use horses and the last to get motorized fire apparatus, Richard Heath wrote in his book, “Mill City Firefighters.” In 1941, the building was closed, he wrote.
By the mid-1940s, the city had no Black firefighters. The department remained all white until 1971, when U.S. District Judge Earl Larson ordered it desegregated.
Welcome to the North, where some people think racism doesn't and didn't exist.
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