On June 15, 1920, three African-American circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, suspects in an assault case, were taken from the jail and lynched by a White mob of thousands in Duluth, Minnesota. Rumors had circulated that six Black men had raped and robbed a 19-year-old white woman. The accusations of rape were later discredited by a doctor.
The 1920 lynchings are the only widely known recorded lynching of African-Americans in Minnesota. Twenty other lynchings were recorded in Minnesota, whose victims included mainly Native Americans and Whites. Three men were convicted of rioting, but none served more than fifteen months. No one was ever prosecuted for the murders.
The state of Minnesota passed anti-lynching legislation in April 1921, and lynchings have not been recorded in Minnesota since. In 2003, the city of Duluth erected a memorial to the lynched men. In 2020, a circus co-worker of the three murdered men, Max Mason, who had been convicted of rape after the lynchings, was granted the first posthumous pardon in the history of the state.
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