Lynching’s in Duluth
When I first bought “The Lynching’s in Duluth” by Micheal Fedo I was extremely skeptical of how good of a book it would turn out to be. The reason for my skepticism is that this seemed like a rather big event in history and I had never heard of it before this point. Seeing as though Duluth is less than two hours from my hometown, I figured anything with this much historical significance I would have read something about it earlier in my life or at the least I would have been told of this story long before my second semester at Saint Cloud State. After the first few pages in the book it goes through a series of photos in Duluth. The first few photos show Duluth as anyone that has heard of it or has been there and seen the beautiful, quiet, northern town up on the iron range. The first few photos of the book show evidence of this as the streets of Duluth and what the jail looked like being clean and up kept. However, after those photos I was absolutely shocked with the next handful of pages containing pictures of the black men hanging dead, the jail the next morning, the streets during the mob, and the convoy driving the prisoners through town with the national guard standing watch to prevent mobs from starting. After looking through the photos and reading the first few pages I couldn’t put the book down. I had a ton of questions regarding this book like why and how something like this could happen in a very still, northern Minnesota town, in the early 19th century when the state never recognized or was under any slavery. With this I had many questions and with this much interest just a few pages in I felt extremely compelled and excited to read the rest of the book and find out what the outcome came to be. The more and more I read this book I found out that even though it was not the mid 1900’s there was still a ton of hatred for the black population. I realized that during these times that many of the blacks wanted to head north for...