Ninety-five years after a mob nearly lynched Ernest McDuffey at the Anoka jail, community members gathered to remember what happened and consider its lasting significance.
The gathering took place Sept. 5 at Riverfront Memorial Park in Anoka. Speakers discussed what the attempted lynching meant for Anoka County and how newspapers covered McDuffey’s case.
The events of 1931
According to the Anoka County Historical Society, two boys and a girl were playing at a warehouse and commercial garage in Anoka on the afternoon of Sept. 5, 1931. McDuffey, a 22-year-old Black man employed at the garage, drove a tractor to the building and began repairing a flat tire. He asked the girl to place a jack under the vehicle.
After one of the boys said he should do it because he was stronger, McDuffey told both boys to leave. The boys later heard the girl crying and ran to her mother, who notified police.
Police Chief John Melberg interviewed the girl, who was examined and found to have suffered no physical harm. The Anoka Union reported at the time that she had been given a nickel to buy candy and had not been frightened.
Melberg found McDuffey at the garage and accused him of molesting the 8-year-old. McDuffey maintained his innocence but was taken to the Anoka jail.
While the Anoka Union reported that authorities did not fear violence, the Anoka Herald reported that men were threatening McDuffey. Both publications reported that two men approached jailer John Larson and falsely claimed an accident had occurred at a Mississippi River bridge.
Larson left in a patrol car but became suspicious and returned to Anoka City Hall. The Anoka Union reported that he found men armed with shotguns, ropes and ladders. Some threatened to shoot or hang McDuffey while using a racial slur. The Minneapolis Tribune reported that members of the mob attempted to scale a rear wall of the jail.
Larson called Sheriff Oscar Olson, and law enforcement officers helped Melberg disperse the crowd. McDuffey was transported to Hennepin County. He later pleaded guilty and received a sentence of one to seven years at the St. Cloud Reformatory.
Historical newspaper accounts conflict over the allegations and even McDuffey’s identity. Newspapers at the time referred to him as both Earnest McDuffey and Earnest McGuire, with several variations in spelling. Earnest McDuffey is the name that appears in St. Cloud Reformatory records.
According to research presented at the event, researchers could not find any of those names in the 1930 Anoka census or genealogical records. Because McDuffey was discharged from the reformatory in 1938, he did not appear in later census records in St. Cloud. Researchers also have not found an online record of his burial site.
Recognizing a lynch mob
Brendan McBride, chair of the Anoka Human Rights Commission, began by noting that most people have a particular image of a lynch mob.
“Maybe we think of Atticus Finch staring down a crowd in the movie of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” McBride said. “The people who came for Ernest 95 years ago today, they were a lynch mob, an angry crowd formed to terrorize or murder a person without any legal process at all.”
That clichéd image allows people to dismiss lynch mobs as something obviously or even comically evil, McBride said. He said mobs often target powerless people because they cannot retaliate against those blaming them.
“Because the powerless cannot make us pay for blaming them,” McBride said. “But the powerful people can, and it makes it easier and safer to go after the powerless.”
McBride said two men had lost their jobs at the garage where McDuffey remained employed. They responded by accusing the one Black employee who still had a job, he said.
“Because the mob was never really about Ernest,” McBride said. “It was about everything else that was going wrong. Looking for one man small enough to land on, who they thought the law would not protect.”
McBride also pointed to the work of Nellie Francis, a Black suffragist and civil rights activist from St. Paul. Following the 1920 lynchings in Duluth, Francis helped secure passage of Minnesota’s anti-lynching law in 1921.
McDuffey pleaded guilty four days after the attempted lynching without access to an attorney at a time when the right to counsel was not guaranteed, McBride said. He also faced the threat of renewed mob violence if he returned to Anoka.
“A lynch mob doesn’t have to look the way we assume to still destroy human life,” McBride said. “And it’s not something limited to a few dark decades of our past. Going after the powerless is not something we outgrew. We still do it. We still form lynch mobs. They’re just more sophisticated now.”
McBride said modern mobs can form on social media or at political rallies where rhetoric convinces people that certain neighbors are responsible for their problems.
“That is the importance of remembering Ernest McDuffey,” McBride said. “Not because remembering fixes anything by itself, but because a city that looks honestly at what we once did can recognize the shape of it the next time it starts to form.”
A shared responsibility
Chase Coleman, a minister at Zion Baptist Church in Minneapolis, said the violence and injustice inflicted on McDuffey were part of a long history of terror.
“When we face head-on what happened to Ernest McDuffey, we open the door for something transformative,” Coleman said. “We believe that God would not only help us forgive, but would offer actual healing, pouring out his love on us so that we may live in love toward each other.”
Coleman called on attendees to work together to prevent similar atrocities from happening again.
Samba Fall, chair of the Minneapolis NAACP Education Committee, discussed how McDuffey was imprisoned and his story largely forgotten even after he survived the attempted lynching.
“Today, we bring his name back into the light,” Fall said. “Black history is American history. And Black history will always be American. It reveals both our nation’s promise and its worst nightmare.”
Fall also discussed the girl at the center of the allegation. The historical record does not clearly establish her identity, testimony or experience, Fall said, but her dignity and human rights also mattered.
“Every person connected to this story deserves truth, dignity and justice,” Fall said.
Newspapers and historical context
The final speaker was Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights activist who previously served as president of the Minneapolis NAACP.
Armstrong acknowledged the work of Ed Wehling, who researched newspaper accounts, attempted to locate McDuffey’s family and sought information about his life.
“He normally doesn’t focus on racial justice, but once he found out about this case, he couldn’t let go,” Armstrong said. “And he reached out and organized today’s gathering to bring us to a place of remembrance.”
Armstrong also discussed how reading Black newspapers changed her understanding of racial disparities in Minnesota.
“I will never forget when I stopped focusing primarily on reading the Star Tribune, and I started picking up the Black newspapers,” Armstrong said, “like the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. And when I started reading the Black newspapers, I saw a completely different side of Minnesota and the Twin Cities. I saw racial disparities across every key indicator or quality of life.”
Armstrong said newspaper stories can appear neutral while reflecting the views of people harboring prejudice and racial hatred. She criticized the racial language used in coverage of McDuffey’s case and accounts that appeared to justify the mob’s actions.
“We’re not necessarily reading those articles against the backdrop of American history,” Armstrong said. “And as was said earlier, Black history is American history. And when you look at the atrocities that have been committed against African Americans, instead of us taking all the stories at face value and believing them as true, we ought to have a healthy skepticism.”
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