Evolution & change

By Michael Lagerquist

When you see newspaper articles about Mankato from the first years of the 20th century, you don’t think, “This is a town that will be a strong supporter of civil rights.”

Looking at events that have happened here shows how that assumption has played out.

When in 1903 the Mankato school superintendent received a “neatly and legibly written” letter “free from rhetorical or grammatical errors,” he nonetheless decided to tell the young Black teacher who sent it in search of a job that “it would be impossible to make arrangements to have colored teachers in any of the schools under his jurisdiction.”

The Mankato Review declared in the closing paragraph of the Sept. 9, 1903, article: “It would seem that just such an educated negro woman as wrote this application would be useful in negro schools in the south to teach children of their own race how to read, write and figure.”

The attitude had hardened by 1911 when the Mankato Review ran the headline, “THE NEGROES IN MANKATO MUST KEEP THEIR PLACES” over a July 7 article that doesn’t bother itself with attribution for the ideas expressed.

It began: “The negro population of Mankato has been growing quite rapidly of late, and some of the specimens of that race that have located here are anything but desirable as citizens.”

Just a few days later in the Weekly Ledger there appeared an item that said, “The bunch of (n-words) imported to this city by the management of the Saulpaugh, have been making themselves obnoxious to women both young and old.”

They were “imported” because management of the downtown Mankato hotel said they could not secure white waiters.

Attention has been drawn to the battle for civil rights in recent years, in part due to the creation of the “MLK 11.12.61” documentary in which Martin Luther King’s visit to Mankato in November 1961 was used as a touchstone to chronicle local efforts.

“This documentary uses a historical visit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Mankato as a way to honor anti-racist activism as well as to point out that this work remains incomplete and must continue,” said Jameel Haque, director of the Kessel Peace Institute and executive producer of the film, just before the film’s release in January 2022.

Even with the value gained by having such a historic leader as King speak in Mankato, it certainly did not end discrimination. Stories of discrimination here continue to be shared that are similar to those heard around the country.

Facing hatred

Mankato State College alumnus Lou Bellamy, who went on to found the Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, told The Free Press in 1994 of what he faced while here as a student just a year after King’s visit.

“As soon as I moved off campus, there were real problems with finding housing,” he told The Free Press. “You’d call about an apartment, show up and all of a sudden it would be rented. Those kinds of things.”

On several occasions, he found citizens trying to run him over with their cars, he said.

“Some of it was ignorance, but most of it was actually hate,” he said then. “That stare that says, ‘I would like to kill you.’ You’d go into a bar, and you would see the neck starting to get fat, as though one were encroaching on someone else’s territory.”

Henry Morris, who is now vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Minnesota State University, spoke of experiencing similar treatment when he arrived in Mankato as late as 1990. He recalled going to look at apartments that were suddenly rented when landlords saw his face and security guards at department stores who followed him through the store.

The Cobb era

These incidents certainly echoed experiences of Blacks in the 1960s. In many cases, they were worse than previous decades.

By the end of the 1960s, for example, it seemed that progress was being made. Linda Cobb came to Mankato from Nashville, Tennessee, with parents Robert and Florence Cobb. Robert was hired to lead the health science department at Mankato State and Florence, it appears, was a spousal hire in dance.

Florence went on to start a dance program that today boasts one of the region’s few Master of Fine Arts programs. She was honored in December when the Highland North 225 dance studio was named in her honor.

Linda Cobb attended Wilson Campus School, an experimental high school that was in today’s Wiecking Center, graduating in 1970. Like her mother, she was a dancer who found herself utilizing those skills in campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. Her experiences enhanced her education.

“It was a great experience for me because I had come from a parochial girls’ school,” Cobb said. “(At Wilson) we were able to write our own curriculum. We had great teachers.”

Because they could take college classes, Cobb found herself deeply involved with the politics on campus. Anti-war protests abounded; students shut down the college and the Main Street bridge in town. Military policemen came to campus seeking students who were hiding from the draft.

“So it was a very volatile time, and politically a very divided time. But it was very exciting,” she said.

Her sister, Joyce, was already in college when the family moved north, so she doesn’t have the same memories of Mankato as Linda does.

“I think (my father) had several offers,” Joyce Cobb said. “He was ready to move on after 19 or 20 years at Tennessee State. But I think the main source of my father wanting to go to Mankato State is that part of his job was to recruit minorities.”

Expanding diversity

Just as in the early 21st century when MSU President Richard Davenport made a concerted effort to recruit international students to broaden the intellectual base of students, in the 1960s and ‘70s administrators recognized the importance of having a student body that reflected society as a whole.

One of the students who came to Mankato through that recruitment was Obie Kipper. He acknowledges today the importance of that recruitment effort, but also recognizes his status as a recruited athlete limited his difficult interactions with community members.

“I interacted with people in the community,” he said, “but through athletics primarily. People in the community were not as involved in diversity as they are today.”

Kipper grew up in South Minneapolis, graduating from Minneapolis Washburn High School, and his parents were highly educated. He earned degrees in vocational rehabilitation and special education while competing on track and field and football teams.

“Without the degrees I would be nowhere,” he said. After a long career with the state of Minnesota, he has served in various other positions and now operates Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Consultants Inc. He also has served on various committees for his alma mater.

He credits several people with helping him and other Black students not only get to college but to graduate. Among them is Michael Fagin, who he called “a special advocate and educator” who is probably the most important educator/vice president in regards to people of color in the institution’s history.

Fagin’s leadership

Fagin began at the university’s new Minorities Groups Studies Center in 1970. The center was the brainchild of the Black Students Union, which wanted to see more faculty of color, more students of color and more retention for both, it was reported upon Fagin’s 2015 retirement.

Fagin created a major in minority studies as well as a graduate program in the subject. He created the Pan-African Conference, which was named for him in 2010.

In 2015, Kipper said, “Many of us wouldn’t have gotten our degree without him. Dr. Fagin set the table.”

Changing vibes

Jerry Lee came to Mankato from New York City in the early 1970s, following a high school friend who had ended up in Albert Lea the year before. That friend was older, so he sat out for a year while Lee completed his first year in Mankato and then joined him as a sophomore.

“The mood on campus was, you know, the campus was trying to move in a direction of acceptance and integration of different types of people,” Lee said. “So the campus was very, very, very different than I think it was a few years before.”

Lee had come to Mankato because it had a strong reputation for its students passing the CPA test. For that reason, he kept a lot to himself and his studies. But there were exceptions.

“Yeah, I had to punch a few people in the face. You know, that happened. That kind of goes with the territory,” he said matter-offactly. “There’s people who think they’re smarter than they are (and) their mouths run faster than their brain.”

Much of the protest in Mankato seemed to be focused on the Vietnam War, students of the time said. But racial issues were always simmering, albeit below the surface of demonstrations.

It’s possible many took the same approach that Lee did: “I think that everything I did was an attempt to make a statement — not a physical statement, not a dramatic statement, but a historical context statement.”

As mentioned, Minnesota State University works to recruit international students primarily, but in the process is likely more receptive to BIPOC students from the U.S. as well.

Proactive measures

And in Mankato Area Public Schools a class has begun that works to make another statement to younger students. The social studies class began last year and is alternated between East, West and Central high schools, according to West teacher Matthew Moore. It’s called Race, Ethnicity and Civil Rights.

“Our department had been talking for a number of years of trying to offer an African-American history class, or maybe like a special topics class that focused on civil rights,” he said.

The class has a theme-based structure, where general topics are discussed and then students have the opportunity to choose the theme they want to research, such as oppression and power.

Use of case studies, whether from the more distant past or from current events, allows students to guide the discussion into areas where they may have questions or that they think are most relevant.

Studying the documentary on King’s visit was more relevant to students because he spoke at West High School.

“I think they felt the fact that he spoke in our building,” Moore said, “that important civil rights work has been done in our community.” MM