Strange Fruit in Duluth : Race Riot, Reputation, and Remembrance of the 1920 Duluth Lynching

Abstract

On June 15, 1920, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were lynched by a white Duluth mob over the false claim of rape of a young white woman. After decades of silence, the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial was erected in October of 2000. How can we explain the silence and the eventual remembrance of this tragedy? The historiographies on public commemoration and on racism and mob violence are extensive; in contrast, comparatively little has been written on the Duluth lynching and the memorial. The argument of this thesis is twofold: First, the Duluth lynchings stemmed from a political and racial climate which resulted in a series of race riots from the Red Summer of 1919 to the early 1920s. The lack of accountability for both the mob’s behavior and the murders of three young men enabled the community of Duluth to efface the memories of the lynchings for nearly seventy years. Second, it was only in the late twentieth century that the community sought redemption for the crimes in the face of renewed critical attention. The resulting memorial is well-intentioned but ultimately a failed attempt by a community to atone for its tragic past. This thesis utilizes court records, oral interviews, newspaper accounts, and archival collections to interpret the lynchings, the effacement of collective memory, and the eventual memorialization of the tragedy. In doing so, this project contributes to historical understandings of the rationales behind commemoration and its limitations in recognizing and atoning for injustice.