Thousands of African Americans were victims of lynching and racial violence in the United States between 1877 and 1950, including in St. Louis County, Minnesota. During this era, lynching was a form of racial terrorism intended to intimidate Black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation, as violent resistance to equal rights after the Civil War led to decades of political, social, and economic exploitation. White mobs often acted with impunity, sometimes with the cooperation or inaction of law enforcement, and many victims were killed without trial, often under false accusations. More than 4400 racial terror lynchings have been documented nationwide. On the night of June 15, 1920, in Duluth, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, three young African American men in their early 20's, were lynched by a mob of white residents. The men were working with a traveling circus when two white teenagers falsely claimed that six Black circus workers had assaulted them and raped a local white woman. Without physical evidence, six Black men were arrested and held in the old Duluth jail on Superior Street. In a period of Black migration and racial tension, with Duluth's Black population less than 1 percent, sensational reports inflamed white residents. A mob of at least 5,000 broke into the jail, kidnapped Elias, Elmer, and Isaac, then stripped, tortured, dragged, and hanged them from a lamppost before a crowd estimated at 10,000. The Minnesota National Guard arrived the next morning to secure the area and guard the surviving Black men, but no one was ever arrested or convicted for the lynchings, and Elias, Elmer, and Isaac lay in unmarked graves for 70 years in nearby Park Hill Cemetery.
