Three to four times a year, the city’s human rights officer Carl Crawford offers a Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial tour that starts in downtown Duluth near the site of the old jail and ends at the spot where the men were killed by a lynch mob. While Minnesotans were sheltering in place, Crawford offered his tour virtually.

“I want you to walk with me,” he says at the start. “I want you to close your eyes and open your hearts. I want you to go back when you had your first job. Your first experience of working. And I want you to walk with me now as we turn the corner to the memorial, but as you do so I want you to do it in silence. I want you to feel that alone. That loneliness that those boys felt. As they were marched up that hill.”

The Duluth Lynchings is edited by Samantha Erkkila and is a product of the Duluth News Tribune. This episode includes reporting by Samantha Erkkila and Christa Lawler.

Music for the podcast is “We Three Kings,” composed by “Rudy” Perrault and performed by the Gichigami Piano Trio with Josh Aerie on cello, Sam Black on piano and Laurie Bastian on Violin.

In the post-lynching period, Duluth’s already small number of African Americans grew smaller — and has never grown to more than 3 percent of the city’s population. Jeanine Weekes Schroer, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota Duluth called Duluth a “sundown town” — a place where its lack of diversity seems accidental, but can be tied to historic events. While creating this podcast, multiple racially-motivated events happened in the United States — and as close as Minneapolis, where George Floyd died after a police officer detained him by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

“I think lynchings happen today all the time,” Weekes Schroer said. “That is to say, the practice of white people who take themselves to be acting with moral authority, ending the lives of brown and black people that in ways, that in retrospect, or even at the moment in the eyes of everyone else involved seem clearly to be the opposite of carrying out of justice — seem clearly to be to the rest of us violations of justice.”

The Duluth Lynchings is edited by Samantha Erkkila and is a product of the Duluth News Tribune. This episode includes reporting by Samantha Erkkila, Brady Slater, Melinda Lavine, Christa Lawler and Clint Austin. Excerpts of books and newspapers are read aloud by Barrett Chase.

Music for the podcast is “We Three Kings,” composed by “Rudy” Perrault and performed by the Gichigami Piano Trio with Josh Aerie on cello, Sam Black on piano and Laurie Bastian on Violin.

In the decades following the lynching deaths of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie, no one really talked about it. Then Michael Fedo, a Duluth native, started writing a novel set in Northern Minnesota in the years following World War I. He recalled that his mother had once mentioned the lynchings, but the details and context of the conversation were gone. Fedo began digging and found not just silence, but in some cases a concerted effort to suppress details about the events of June 15, 1920. Fedo's book started a sort of information relay that led to developing proper grave markers and ultimately creating a memorial near the spot where the men were murdered.

The Duluth Lynchings is edited by Samantha Erkkila and is a product of the Duluth News Tribune. This episode includes reporting by Samantha Erkkila, Jimmy Lovrien, Brady Slater, Melinda Lavine and Christa Lawler. Excerpts of books and newspapers are read aloud by Barrett Chase.

Music for the podcast is “We Three Kings,” composed by Rudy Perrault and performed by the Gichigami Piano Trio with Josh Aerie on cello, Sam Black on piano and Laurie Bastian on Violin.