Duluth lynchings

On June 15, 1920, three African-American circus workers—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie—were taken from the Duluth, Minnesota city jail and lynched by a white mob estimated at between 1,000 and 10,000 people. The men had been arrested as suspects after rumors spread that six Black circus workers had raped and robbed a 19-year-old white woman, Irene Tusken, near the John Robinson Circus grounds the previous night. A physician who examined Tusken on the morning of June 15 found no physical evidence of rape or assault, and the rape accusation was later discredited.

The lynchings occurred against a backdrop of postwar racial tension in Duluth, a rapidly industrializing city where a small Black population, drawn in part by jobs at U.S. Steel, competed with a large immigrant workforce for employment. Two years earlier, in September 1918, a Finnish immigrant, Olli Kinkkonen, had been lynched in Duluth after being accused of draft evasion; authorities did not pursue murder charges in that case. The Duluth lynchings occurred in the aftermath of the 1919 "Red Summer," a period of widespread racial violence across the United States.

On the night of the lynching, Duluth Commissioner of Public Safety William F. Murnian ordered police not to use their guns to protect the prisoners. The mob broke into the jail using timbers, bricks, and rails, seized Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie, held a mock "trial," and hanged the three men from a light pole at 1st Street and 2nd Avenue East. The Minnesota National Guard arrived the following day to secure the city and protect remaining prisoners.

A special grand jury found Murnian "not competent" and criticized the police department. Thirty-seven indictments were issued against mob members—twenty-five for rioting and twelve for first-degree murder—but only three men, Louis Dondino, Carl Hammerberg, and Gilbert Stephenson, were convicted, all on rioting charges; none served more than fifteen months, and no one was convicted of the murders. Separately, of the circus workers originally arrested on rape allegations, charges against five were dismissed, William Miller was acquitted, and Max Mason was convicted and sentenced to seven to thirty years, serving four years before release.

Minnesota passed anti-lynching legislation in April 1921, providing for compensation to victims' relatives and for suspension of police officials who failed to protect prisoners from mob violence; no further lynchings have been recorded in the state. That law was repealed in 1984. In 2003, the city of Duluth dedicated the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial to the three men. In 2020, on the 100th anniversary of the killings, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sought reversal of Max Mason's 1920 rape conviction, and the Minnesota Board of Pardons granted him the first posthumous pardon in state history.