Ramsey County Law Library Blog

With the Minnesota Legislature now in session and March being Women’s History Month, its timely to consider how women’s suffrage opened the door to allowing women to hold elected positions. Minnesota granted women the right to vote in 1919, but only in presidential elections. The following year saw the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and women’s suffrage became universal in all states.  (Minnesota might have been a tad slow on women’s suffrage, because of its brewing industry. Some camps feared that votes from women would tilt outcomes on questions that involved liquor.)

In the 1922 election, four women were elected as Minnesota’s first female legislators: Mabeth Hurd Paige, Sue Metger Dickey Hough, and Myrtle Cain from Hennepin County, and Hannah Kempfer of Otter Tail County.  Women started to slowly trickle into the Minnesota House of Representatives thereafter, but none would represent a Ramsey County district until 1975 with the election of Margaret Mary “Peggy” Byrne. (Possibly the Ramsey districts were slow to elect women due to the long-held position of the Catholic Church against women’s suffrage and public roles for women in general. )

Mabeth Hurd Paige served the longest of the original four, completing a total of ten terms.  Born in Massachusetts in 1869, she finished high school there before moving to Nebraska to care for her ailing grandmother.  She attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln before going on to study art at the Academie Julian in Paris, France. Upon returning to the United States, she accepted a job teaching art in the Minneapolis public schools.  She then married University of Minnesota Law School Professor James Paige in 1895. It was at her husband’s urging that she enrolled and obtained a law degree from the University, graduating in 1900. Later she became president of the Women’s Christian Association in Minneapolis, and also founded the Minneapolis chapter of the Urban League.  Upon the passage of universal women’s suffrage in 1920, she successfully ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1922 along with the other-named three.  She retired from the Legislature in 1945 and died in 1961.   Her legislative profile from 1923 presents more information on her.

Since this is the last week of Black History Month, it is appropriate to celebrate historical legal milestones of local black Minnesotans, such as Frederick McGhee, Stephen Maxwell, and Alan Page. But it is equally appropriate to look at some of our region’s less-celebratory milestones. It may surprise many to learn that Minnesota hasn’t always been on what we consider to be the “right side of history.”  It may surprise even more to learn that our local community often stood in the way of what we now consider progress.  Consider these examples:

• Minnesota had a prominent role in the Dred Scott case which ended with the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that the “black man had no rights that the white man is bound to respect.”  Scott had  been the slave of a military surgeon posted at Fort Snelling in the 1840s.  In this historical case, Scott had essentially argued that by virtue of his “master’s” death and of living for years in free states and territories, he become a free man.

• That hundreds of Minnesotans died fighting on the Union side of the Civil War is well-known.   Less well-known is the fact that that in 1863, a Missouri steam ship docked at Lowertown carrying a load of escaped slaves. No welcome mat greeted them, but instead the travelers were confronted with a mob of angry white laborers demanding that they return to the South.*

• Minnesota may be free of confederate symbolism on its flag, but a popular lake in Minneapolis immortalizes a slave owner with its name. John Calhoun of South Carolina promoted slavery as a “positive good.” Calhoun is relevant to local history as the founder of Fort Snelling, where we know that military personnel were welcome to keep their slaves at hand.

• It’s easy to think that mob lynchings of black men are just a shameful stain on the history of southern states, and certainly not part of our fair state’s history. Yet on June 15, 1920, three black circus workers were hung in Duluth by a citizen group following allegations of their raping a white resident. The men had not yet been tried, and little evidence was available to back up these allegations.

• The City of St. Paul is 15% African American, but had no black legislators until 2010. That was the year that voters elected John Harrington to the Minnesota Senate and Rena Moran to the House of Representatives.  Miinneapolis did better on this measure, by electing Frank Wheaton as the first African American legislator in the state of Minnesota in 1898.

When it comes to history, it is understandable that we might gravitate to the facts which paint our community in its most positive and flattering light.  But our history includes those not-so-positive events as well.  We cannot take lessons from our history unless we confront it entirely, and use it as the blueprint in planning our future.

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*  This event and others are captured in Degrees of Freedom: The Origin of Civil Rights in Minnesota by Dr. William Green.  This, plus Dr. Green’s other book, A Peculiar Imbalance: The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in early Minnesota are both excellent resources for researching some of the more obscure details of Minnesota’s early history.