The Duluth Lynchings of 1920

On the evening of June fifteenth, nineteen twenty, a mob that observers estimated at anywhere from one thousand to as many as ten thousand people gathered in Duluth, Minnesota, stormed the city jail, and lynched three Black men. Their names were Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie. All three were young workers with a traveling circus that had passed through the city.

They had been accused of assaulting a white woman near the circus grounds. A physician who examined the woman found no evidence of assault. The accusation alone was enough.

The three men were dragged from their cells while police officers stood by and did not intervene. They were beaten and hanged from a lamppost on First Street. A photographer took a picture that circulated widely. Postcards were made of the image. It was one of the last documented lynchings in the upper Midwest.

Three members of the mob were later convicted of rioting, which was the maximum charge pursued. No one was convicted of murder. Three other Black circus workers who had been held in the jail were not harmed only because a small group of police officers managed to move them to another facility before the mob reached their cells.

The event was not widely taught in Minnesota schools for most of the twentieth century. In two thousand three, the city of Duluth dedicated a memorial near the site of the lynching. The three names, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, Isaac McGhie, are carved in stone. A fourth panel names other victims of racial violence whose cases are less documented. Minnesota writer Michael Fedo published the most thorough account of the event in a book first released in nineteen seventy-nine and reissued by the Minnesota Historical Society Press in two thousand.