Duluth by Tony Dierckins

Author:Tony Dierckins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

A Duluth police officer stands guard outside a heavily damaged police headquarters and jail the day after a lynch mob stormed the building. MNHS Collections

A month into Prohibition the Duluth Herald boasted that “Duluth today stands as one of the leading cities of the Northwest, with prospects for the future which are unrivaled. Fifty years of steady growth have resulted in wonderful accomplishments for a city industrially, financially, and from a civic standpoint.” Nearly all of its 98,917 residents—99.3 percent—were of European descent. Thirty percent were immigrants: 7,455 Swedes, 4,708 Canadians (including 1,093 French-Canadians), 4,283 Norwegians, 3,210 Finns, 1,566 Russians, 1,444 Poles, 1,315 Germans, 878 English, 836 Italians, 731 Jugo-Slavs, 541 Irish, 510 Scotts, 473 Austrians, 417 Danes, 230 Greeks, 131 Czech-Slovakians, 74 Hungarians, 65 Romanians, 54 Dutch, 58 Swiss, and 549 from other countries. Meanwhile, the local Ojibwe population had mostly either moved out of the city or avoided enumeration; just eighteen Duluthians identified themselves as Native Americans. The census counted just 495 African Americans.

Prohibition quickly caused problems. In July federal agents arrested Duluth police chief John Murphy and ten others, including a former US marshal, for smuggling whiskey across the Canadian border. Public Safety Commissioner John Murnian had appointed Murphy chief in 1918, after previous chief Robert McKercher quit and left town ahead of an official probe into his behavior. Murphy had no previous law enforcement experience, and both he and Murnian were already under pressure for their mishandling of a June riot that led to the lynchings of three innocent men, African American circus workers accused of rape.

During Murphy’s trial the evidence—ninety bottles of whiskey—disappeared from a vault in Duluth’s police headquarters. Murphy then testified that while on a fishing trip he had accidentally stumbled upon bottles of homemade beer and confiscated them. The next day his attorneys produced thirteen sacks of bottled beer to substantiate his testimony. While Murphy and his confederates were exonerated, the chief lost his job; his successor, former federal agent Warren Pugh, promptly fired eighteen patrolmen.

Duluth’s Lack of Diversity

While from 1880 to 1920 Duluth was as much a melting pot as any other industrial city on the Great Lakes, today it could hardly be described as ethnically diverse by modern standards. The population of people of color has never been large. Census data reveals that historically the Zenith City has never had more than a few dozen foreign-born Latinx or Asian people living within its borders at any one time. While Duluth once boasted four synagogues, its Jewish population peaked at four thousand in the 1930s. Today approximately 160 households make up the congregation at the Reform Temple Israel while about seventy-five people worshipped at the city’s Orthodox Adas Israel, destroyed in a fire in 2019. Those numbers do not include Duluthians who identify as Jewish but are not affiliated with a synagogue.

Duluth’s earliest African American residents were also part Ojibwe. In the 1850s, seven of Duluth’s eleven African American residents were members of the George Bonga family. Bonga was the son of Pierre Bonga, a free, black fur trader, and his Ojibwe wife.

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