Clayton, Jackson, McGhie, The Lynchings of Nineteen Twenty
Near Duluth, Minnesota
On a warm June night in nineteen twenty, the John Robinson Circus came to Duluth. In the hours after the performance, a white teenager named James Sullivan told police that a group of Black circus workers had assaulted him and his girlfriend at gunpoint. The Duluth police arrested six Black men from the circus and held them at the city jail.
Doctors who examined Sullivan's girlfriend that same night found no evidence of assault. The complaint, as legal scholars would later establish, was almost certainly fabricated. It did not matter.
By ten o'clock, a crowd of several thousand white men and boys had gathered outside the jail. They broke through the doors, pulled three men from their cells, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, all young workers with the circus, and dragged them into the street. Dozens of men were indicted, including a dozen for murder.
Three were convicted of rioting. None served more than a year and a half. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent Walter White to investigate.
His report documented the fabricated accusation and the failure of Duluth civic leadership to intervene. The story was buried for decades. The reckoning came slowly.
In the nineteen nineties, a playwright named Michael Hoyt wrote a play about the events. On October tenth, two thousand three, the city of Duluth dedicated the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial at the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East, near where the men were killed. Three life-sized bronze figures by sculptor Carla Stetson stand with their hands at their sides.
Their names are carved in granite. A timeline etched into the stone wall names the men who were indicted and tracks what happened to each. The memorial does not soften what occurred.
It calls the event a lynching and names it plainly. A plaque at the base reads, in part: We Cannot Undo the Past, But We Are Responsible for the Future. The memorial has become a gathering place for conversations about race and accountability that the city spent eight decades avoiding.
Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were never accused of any crime that was substantiated. They were twenty years old, nineteen years old, and twenty-one years old when they died.
