IN SEARCH OF ROCHESTER’S
RACIAL ROOTS A WALK THROUGH A COMPLEX HISTORY BY NICOLE NFONOYIM-HARA
IN 2016, THE SUMMER PHILANDO CASTILE WAS KILLED IN FALCON HEIGHTS, MINNESOTA, I HAD BEEN IN ROCHESTER BARELY A YEAR. I often think back to that
summer as we live through this unsettling pandemic and the labor pains of reckoning and nascent revolution. Racism has deep and intractable roots coursing through the American story. It is all too familiar, even as some deny it. History is full of the silence of this denial. And it is the silences I am often listening for. Today, cities across the country and the world are reflecting on their own racial pasts with fiery debates about monuments and public spaces. And so I went in search of Rochester’s racial roots, wondering what we might pull up when we dig our hands deep into the city beneath our feet. Rochester’s history is intertwined with that of the Mayo Clinic. Rochester is a community with a powerful master narrative—a story of origins and identity so rooted in the development of its world-class hospital that it can unwittingly obscure the vibrant patchwork of other stories carried by all who call this place home. So I scoured archives from old city papers and publications looking for clues that might point to the early existence of people of color in the area. What follows just skims the surface. For generations, the city’s population was over 90% white. Today, that figure is edging closer to 78%. There remains, however, a myth that there has never been racial and ethnic diversity in Rochester, and it is not easy to put together a clear and comprehensive history of race in the city. But confronting the myth of racial homogeneity is valuable. Rethinking our
In 1862, thirty-eight Dakota prisoners were executed in Mankato.
collective histories helps to combat ideas of diversity as a new phenomenon and a uniquely modern “challenge.” Diversity is a core part of our past and our future.
NATIVE NARRATIVES
The myth writes people of color out of the narrative. Perhaps the starkest silence is about Native people in Rochester. This area was a crossroads for many Native tribes in the region throughout history. For hundreds of years, it was home to the Dakota (Sioux Wahpeton). Reclamation of the history and recognition of Dakota presence in the area can be seen by the work done in Indian Heights Park. The Mayo Clinic has its own complex history with local Native communities. In December 1862, a month before President
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he ordered what remains the largest mass execution in our nation’s history to date. Thirty-eight Dakota men, captured prisoners in the Dakota War of 1862, were killed in Mankato. Among the executed was Mahpiya Akan Naži (Stands on Clouds). Dr. William Worrall Mayo received the body of Mahpiya Akan Naži as part of a practice of offering cadavers to local physicians. Dr. Mayo dissected the body and later had the skeleton prepared for display. As part of the Native Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Mayo Clinic returned these remains to the Dakota tribe for reburial in 2015.
BLACK LIVES IN PRINT
One of the first stories I came across about a Black person in the city looked as if it
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