Deterred but not Defeated grave marker dedication

On June 15, 1920, police arrest several young black men accused of raping a white woman. That evening, three of them – Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie – are taken from jail by a mob and lynched. It was the John Robinson Circus that brought Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie to Duluth. They and other young black men were employed by the circus as cooks and “roustabouts,” laborers who performed a variety of physical tasks. On the warm summer night of June 14, Irene Tusken, age nineteen, and James Sullivan, eighteen, went to the circus in Duluth. At the end of the evening the pair walked to the rear of the main tent. Nobody is sure of what happened next, but in the early morning of June 15th, Duluth Police Chief John Murphy received a call from James Sullivan’s father saying six black circus workers had held the pair at gunpoint and then raped Irene Tusken. Little evidence would be found to corroborate these claims. An examination of Tusken that morning by Dr. David Graham, a family physician, showed no physical signs of rape or assault. Six blacks were immediately arrested by the Duluth Police and held in the Duluth city jail, located inside the police station on the corner of Second Avenue and Superior Street. Already reported in the local newspaper, news of the alleged rape spread rapidly. That evening a white mob estimated between 1,000 and 10,000 people gathered on Superior Street outside the police station. They met little resistance from the police, who had been ordered not to use their guns. Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie – are taken from jail by a mob and lynched. The lynchings made headlines in newspapers throughout the country. Many were shocked such an atrocity happened in Minnesota, a northern state. Many citizens of Duluth were similarly outraged. Not everyone expressed regret. Despite lacking evidence, some believed Irene Tusken was raped and that the three victims, although never tried in court, were guilty and deserving of their fate.

The video documents memorial initiatives in the 1990s surrounding the 1920 lynching victims falsely charged with the rape of a white woman. In an effort led by Craig Grau, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, the unmarked graves in Park Hill Cemetery of McGhie, Jackson and Clayton could be corrected. Grau, members of First Lutheran Church, NAACP and Bob Baldwin, plus other area citizens established a fund for markers, held a ceremony to place the gravestones, and used the remaining money to establish a small scholarship fund at UMD in the victims’ names. Because of his part in this effort, Professor Grau was later invited to witness the ceremonial naming of an overpass in Topeka, Kansas, in memory of Elmer Jackson, the only victim whose life history has been discovered with any completeness. The NAACP chapter was formed in Duluth almost immediately following the lynchings of June 15, 1920.