Place, institutions, and memory · Minnesota and African American History

Minnesota’s African American population is modest in absolute terms — about 350,000 Black Minnesotans as of 2024, or about 6 percent of the state — and culturally significant and historically deep.

Places

Minneapolis — especially North Minneapolis (the Near North side: Hawthorne, Jordan, Near North, Willard-Hay, Sumner-Glenwood, Harrison), the Black cultural and demographic heart of Minneapolis since the 1910s. MNopedia: the Near North community “has had a major African American presence since the early 1900s.”

South Minneapolis — historically a smaller Black community; Bryant, Bryn Mawr, Field-Regina-Northrop, Powderhorn, Phillips, and Central have all had significant Black populations. The murder of George Floyd at 38th and Chicago in May 2020 put South Minneapolis at the global epicenter of racial justice consciousness.

St. Paul — Rondo was the historic Black community of St. Paul, destroyed by I-94 construction in the 1960s — a generational trauma Black St. Paul still commemorates annually with Rondo Days (the third Saturday of July). Frogtown, Summit-University, and Dayton’s Bluff continue to have significant Black populations.

Brooklyn Park, Brooklyn Center, Robbinsdale, Crystal, New Hope — rapidly diversifying first-ring northwest suburbs, now home to large and growing Black communities, both African American and East African. Eden Prairie, Plymouth, Maple Grove — outer-ring suburbs with growing Black middle-class populations. Duluth, St. Cloud, Rochester — smaller but distinct Black communities, often university or healthcare related.

Minnesota’s Black history includes

Dred and Harriett Scott — enslaved by Dr. John Emerson at Fort Snelling (1830s–1840s); Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) was a critical step toward the Civil War.

Roy Wilkins — born in St. Louis, raised in St. Paul; long-time executive secretary of the NAACP.

Lena O. Smith — Minnesota’s first Black female attorney (1921); civil rights pioneer.

Nellie Stone Johnson — labor and civil rights leader; first Black person elected to a city office in Minneapolis (1945).

Prince Rogers Nelson — born in North Minneapolis, 1958; one of the greatest musicians in American history.

August Wilson — playwright, raised in Pittsburgh, spent significant years in St. Paul; two Pulitzer Prizes.

Sharon Sayles Belton — first Black woman mayor of Minneapolis (1994–2001). Melvin Carter III — first Black mayor of St. Paul (2018–present). Andrea Jenkins — first openly transgender Black woman elected to public office in the United States (Minneapolis City Council). Keith Ellison — Minnesota Attorney General; first Muslim elected to Congress (2007); prosecuted the George Floyd case. Toni Carter, Rena Moran, and other contemporary African American political leaders. East African Minnesotans in public office, including Ilhan Omar, have their own community pages; shared race in the United States is not shared culture.

Walter “Fritz” Mondale and Hubert Humphrey — white Minnesota political leaders whose civil-rights advocacy was profoundly shaped by Black Minnesota organizing.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the subsequent uprising, and the global Black Lives Matter mobilization centered Minnesota in American racial discourse. Minnesota’s racial story is now globally known. The state’s African American community navigates both the legacy of the Migration generation and the weight of being where Floyd died.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the foundational African American sociologist and intellectual (1868–1963), wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903):

“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.”

Double consciousness

Being both Black and American — sharing in the American story while standing outside the dominant white narrative of it — is foundational to African American identity. Understanding African American culture means understanding this double consciousness: the ongoing tension and synthesis between full participation in American life and the maintenance of a distinct, valued, deeply rooted Black cultural identity.

Not one life

What follows is a generalization. Individual variation always supersedes it. Diversity within Black America — across region, class, age, education, religion, sexuality, generation, urban and rural, political orientation — is vast. Always defer to the person in front of you.

These concepts and values recur across African American culture. They express themselves differently across regions, classes, religious communities, generations, and individual circumstances. They are hypotheses — not a script for the person in front of you.

Blackness

To be Black in America is to live in a culture where racial identity has been a central organizing fact of social existence since 1619. Blackness is at once a racial ascription imposed by a society that categorized people of African descent as “other”; a self-claimed identity affirmed through Black is Beautiful (1960s), natural hair, African heritage, and distinct cultural forms; a political solidarity that crosses class, region, religion, and generation; and a cultural inheritance of music, language, food, religion, family, art, sport, and intellectual tradition.

Blackness is not monolithic, and it is shared. African Americans of all classes, regions, and walks of life recognize each other across difference through the Black nod — the silent acknowledgment between Black strangers in white spaces — the shared vocabulary of references, the common touchstones of Black history.

The race

Older Black Americans, especially those raised before the 1970s, often refer to “the race” — Black people collectively. The usage carries a Du Boisian sense of collective consciousness: that one is responsible to and for the race, that individual successes and failures matter to the race, that one carries the race into white spaces. Racial uplift, sometimes called the “talented tenth” mentality after Du Bois’s controversial term for the educated Black leadership class, shapes much Black middle-class life: “making the race look good,” “representing,” “lifting as we climb” (the motto of the National Association of Colored Women, 1896).

Soul

Soul is one of the most important and least translatable Black cultural concepts. Coined in the 1960s but reflecting a much older sensibility, soul names distinctive emotional depth, expressive authenticity, communal feeling, and spiritual resonance. Soul food, soul music, soul brother / soul sister, having soul — the concept pervades Black self-description. To have soul is to be authentic, to feel deeply, to express truthfully, to be in genuine connection with the community and the ancestors. To lack soul is to be cold, fake, disconnected, or assimilated past recognition.

Respect

Respect is among the most important values in Black social life. To be disrespected — by police, employers, teachers, strangers, family — is a foundational injury. Respect is earned and also fundamentally owed: every human being deserves baseline respect for their personhood. “Respect my Black” names the demand for acknowledgment of full humanity.

Interpersonal respect is signaled through titles and last name (Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Brown, Sister, Brother) until invited otherwise; listening when elders speak; acknowledging people’s presence; not embarrassing people in public; honoring lineage. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (1967) became an anthem because it articulated this demand.

Ubuntu

W.E.B. Du Bois devoted considerable time to cooperative economics, an approach rooted in African traditions such as ubuntu — often translated as “I am, because we are.” African American thinkers have embraced the South African / Bantu concept as articulating a sensibility that runs through Black American life: individual flourishing through collective flourishing.

Making a way out of no way

A foundational Black American expression — the recognition that African Americans have survived and even thrived through 400 years of conditions designed to destroy them. The capacity to endure, adapt, improvise, and find joy in hardship is celebrated as a core cultural strength. Black resilience is not stoic suffering but creative survival — making something out of nothing, turning pain into art, dancing at the funeral, laughing through the storm. The Black church song “We’ve Come This Far by Faith” captures it: faith as lived practice of getting through what should not have been gotten through.

Black Excellence

A term that crystallized in the 2010s but expresses a much older sensibility — the celebration of Black achievement in fields where systemic barriers have made achievement extraordinarily hard. It is not assimilationist. It is affirmative: look what we have done despite everything. Invoked at graduations, weddings, professional milestones, and communal — our excellence, not just mine.

Code-switching

The practice of shifting language, demeanor, accent, and presentation between Black and non-Black spaces is a near-universal experience for Black Americans navigating predominantly white institutions. It can mean speaking African American Vernacular English at home and Standard American English at work; wearing professional hair in white workspaces and natural hair at home; adjusting humor, references, tone, volume, body language. It is a survival skill, an art form, and often a source of fatigue. Younger generations increasingly resist it, asserting the right to show up as fully Black in all spaces.

The hustle

Entrepreneurial, multi-job, side-business resourcefulness is a recognized cultural pattern, rooted in centuries of exclusion from mainstream employment and capital. Hustle culture is celebrated in hip-hop. The concept honors economic creativity born of necessity.

Sankofa

The Akan (Ghanaian) word sankofa — “go back and fetch it,” symbolized by a bird looking backward — has been adopted across the African American cultural community as a touchstone for knowing one’s history and honoring ancestors in order to move forward. It appears on Black cultural institutions, in HBCU graduation regalia, in Black bookstores, and in everyday discourse about heritage.

The ancestors

Honoring those who came before — particularly the enslaved generations whose labor and survival made the present possible — is a quietly central practice. “The ancestors are watching” or “do it for the ancestors” invokes their moral presence. Pouring libations — a small amount of water, juice, or alcohol on the ground while naming ancestors — is observed at weddings, funerals, Kwanzaa, and other significant events. Visiting historic Black sites (Tuskegee, Selma, the cotton fields of the Black Belt, the African Burial Ground in New York, the Whitney Plantation, the National Museum of African American History and Culture) is a contemporary form of pilgrimage.

Joy as resistance

Black joy — celebration, pleasure, laughter, dance, beauty, and play — is increasingly named as resistance. To be joyful as a Black person in a society that has tried for centuries to make Blackness synonymous with suffering is itself a political act. The cookout, the family reunion, the wedding, the homecoming, the praise dance, Saturday morning music — all are expressions of joy as resistance.

The Talk

The conversation Black parents have with their children, particularly Black boys, about how to interact safely with police is a tragic and central cultural ritual. Every Black American parent has some version of it: keep your hands visible; do not run; do not reach for your wallet; address officers as Officer and Sir/Ma’am; do not argue; comply first, complain later; come home alive. That the Talk is universal is itself a commentary on the racialized texture of American life.

The cookout

Cultural shorthand for Black community gathering and inclusion. To be “invited to the cookout” means to be accepted as a welcome guest in Black social life. Because of Them We Can: whether Labor Day, Memorial Day, or Independence Day, it means a cookout. No gathering is more sacred; there must be a Spades table.

The Black vote

Black Americans are the most politically cohesive racial-ethnic voting bloc in U.S. politics — voting Democratic at rates around 85–95 percent in presidential elections since 1964. That cohesion reflects the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act (1965); shared experience of structural racism across class; the strength of Black political institutions — the Black church, the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Divine Nine, Black media; and lived political consciousness around policing, housing, education, healthcare, and economic justice.

Pride in Black institutions

Fierce pride in institutions built within and against a hostile society: HBCUs — Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, Hampton, Tuskegee, Fisk, Florida A&M, North Carolina A&T, Xavier, Dillard, and 100-plus others. Black churches, taken up in Religion. The Divine Nine — Alpha Phi Alpha, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi, Omega Psi Phi, Delta Sigma Theta, Phi Beta Sigma, Zeta Phi Beta, Sigma Gamma Rho, Iota Phi Theta — central to Black professional and political life. Black-owned businesses — barbershops, beauty salons, restaurants, funeral homes, banks, newspapers, radio stations, publishing houses. Black media — Ebony, Jet (historic), Essence, The Root, BET, The Defender, The Amsterdam News, hundreds of Black newspapers, podcasts, YouTube channels. The NAACP (1909), the National Urban League (1910), SCLC (1957), Black Lives Matter (2013), the Movement for Black Lives.