Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

Summary

Ghost of a Chance: Episode 1 - "Falling Down the Rabbit Hole"

Release Date: January 13, 2025
Host/Author: The Minnesota Star Tribune
Hosts: Eric Roper & Melissa Townsend

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Introduction: Unearthing the Past

In the inaugural episode of Ghost of a Chance, reporter Eric Roper shares the genesis of his deep dive into the history of his 113-year-old Minneapolis home. Purchased in March 2020, right at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Eric's curiosity about the house's previous occupants sets him on an unexpected journey. As Melissa Townsend notes, "I love going down history rabbit holes" (00:12).

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The Robinson Mystery Begins

While researching, Eric discovers that the house was owned by Harry and Clementine Robinson, a Black couple who settled there in 1917, amidst America’s entry into World War I. This revelation piques Eric's interest, especially since his predominantly white neighborhood hadn't acknowledged the presence of Black families historically. Melissa expresses her awe upon finding photographs of the Robinsons: “Both of them are looking just beyond the camera... very regal, in a kind of Victorian kind of way” (02:24).

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A City in Turmoil: George Floyd’s Impact

In May 2020, the tragic murder of George Floyd by Officer Derek Chauvin thrust Minneapolis into the global spotlight as a center of racial unrest. Eric recounts the intense emotions and community reactions during this period:

“I remember sitting up late at night... I just felt very awkward, partly because I'm a journalist. I don't really make big statements.”
— Melissa Townsend (04:26)

This tumultuous backdrop reignites Eric's obsession with uncovering the Robinsons' story, leading him to believe that their history could shed light on the longstanding racial dynamics in Minneapolis.

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Tracing Clementine Robinson’s Roots

Eric embarks on a meticulous search to piece together Clementine Robinson’s lineage. Utilizing resources like Ancestry.com, he constructs a family tree, revealing that Clementine was born free in Mecca, a small town in Missouri, prior to the Civil War. His journey takes him to the remnants of Mecca Cemetery, now the only vestige of the once-thriving Black community:

“She was the first generation in her family born free... before emancipation.”
— Melissa Townsend (12:08)

With the assistance of Gwen Greene, a descendant linked to Clementine’s family, Eric uncovers that Clementine's father, Washington Estes, was emancipated in 1854 through a will by the slave owner, Thomas Estes.

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Harry Robinson’s Journey: Triumph and Tragedy

Parallel to Clementine’s story, Eric delves into Harry Robinson’s past in Mitchell, Indiana. Harry emerges as a beacon of promise—valedictorian of his class and a scholarship recipient to the Nashville College of Law. However, racial barriers abruptly halt his aspirations:

“Harry Robinson... was turned down on account of his color.”
— Melissa Townsend (24:30)

Despite his academic excellence, Harry faces systemic racism that stifles his legal ambitions. His subsequent move to Kansas City, Missouri, marks a pivotal shift as he meets Clementine, leading them to concoct a plan to relocate to Minnesota—a place perceived as a land of opportunity.

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Navigating Racial Tensions and Pursuing Dreams

The union of Harry and Clementine in Kansas City unfolds against a backdrop of escalating racial hostility. Historian Chris Phillips provides context, explaining that Missouri had become increasingly hostile for Black residents post-Civil War:

“They are trying to have a life where you can have some joy, but also having these social barriers and levels of racism that keep you from fully experiencing this American dream.”
— Sharita Mosley Mitchell (17:19)

Melissa Townsend captures the essence of their struggle:

“Harry may have gotten the message that life is short. Use your gifts, shoot your shot.”
— Eric Roper (22:01)

Their plans to move to Minnesota symbolize a quest for a better life amidst pervasive racial challenges.

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Legacy and Reflection

As Eric delves deeper, he reflects on the interplay between historical racism and the personal triumphs of the Robinsons. Conversations with therapists like Brandon Jones highlight the intergenerational trauma experienced by Black families:

“There was this tension between knowing your place and standing your ground.”
— Eric Roper (17:11)

The episode poignantly concludes with Eric meeting Bob Harris, a local elder, whose reflections on legacy resonate deeply:

“You don't understand a lot of things now, but later on you will.”
— Bob Harris (28:10)

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Conclusion: A Continuing Journey

Ghost of a Chance sets the stage for an intricate exploration of Harry and Clementine Robinson’s lives, intertwining personal narratives with broader historical contexts. As Eric and Melissa prepare to uncover how the Robinsons navigated their new lives in Minnesota, listeners are left anticipating the revelations to come.

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Notable Quotes:

• Melissa Townsend (00:18): "We're all going to be locked in our homes now for quite a while."
• Sharita Mosley Mitchell (05:49): “This is in Minnesota. I remember my father sleeping in the living room with a shotgun.”
• Melissa Townsend (10:03): "It's very beautiful out here."
• Sharita Mosley Mitchell (16:04): “You're not property anymore. That's a different. That's a very different disposition on life.”

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Production Credits:

Ghost of a Chance is reported by Eric Roper and written and produced by Melissa Townsend, with Executive Production by Jenny Pinkley and editing by Mary Jo Webster. Special thanks to contributors and the local community for their invaluable insights.

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Learn More:

For additional content, pictures, documents from the podcast, and to subscribe, visit startribune.com/ghostofachance.

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Timestamps Overview:

• 00:02 - 00:30: Introduction to Eric's purchase of the house and initial curiosity.
• 02:24 - 03:07: Discovery of the Robinsons and the backdrop of George Floyd’s murder.
• 05:05 - 06:46: Eric’s deepening research and the shift to an official Star Tribune project.
• 07:47 - 13:37: Exploration of Clementine Robinson’s family history and emancipation.
• 13:59 - 24:45: Harry Robinson’s educational achievements and racial barriers.
• 25:22 - 28:10: The meeting of Harry and Clementine, their plans, and reflections from community members.

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Note: Advertisements and non-content segments have been omitted to focus on the core narrative and discussions.

Transcript

[Eric Roper]

Lemonade. It all started when a man named Eric Roper bought an old house in south Minneapolis. It was March of 2020.

[Melissa Townsend]

And we all know kind of what's happening in March 2020. We're all going to be locked in our homes now for quite a while.

[Eric Roper]

It was right at the beginning of the pandemic. And he was really curious about who lived there before him.

[Melissa Townsend]

Because I'm interested in local history. I love going down history rabbit holes.

[Eric Roper]

So he started Googling.

[Melissa Townsend]

And at some point, I stumble across a website. And this website had a map showing that there was a group of black families who lived in and around my neighborhood in southwest Minneapolis in the early 20th century. And then by 1940, almost all of those families are gone. And when I look closer at this map, I can see that one of these families lives, lived in my house. Their names were Harry and Clementine Robinson.

[Eric Roper]

They were a black couple who bought his home back in 1917. For a little perspective, that's just as the US was entering World War I. Now, Eric is white, and he had never really thought about it before, but his neighborhood is pretty white too. And he started wondering what happened to this black couple and all these black families who disappeared from the map. Eric Roper is a reporter at the Minnesota Star Tribune newspaper. So he put his reporting skills to work to try and learn everything he could about Harry and Clementine Robinson.

[Melissa Townsend]

So I quickly become obsessed with this. And it was the pandemic. And I remember I would come downstairs, you know, my husband would be making lunch, and I would say, this thing, you can't believe this other thing.

[Eric Roper]

And then he struck gold. He found photos of them.

[Melissa Townsend]

Let me pull them up here. In both cases, they are wearing some nice clothes.

[Eric Roper]

Well, you can't see these photos, so let me just tell you. Clementine appears to have a very light skin tone. She's wearing a large, elegant, sweeping, dark colored hat.

[Melissa Townsend]

I can't get over that hat. It's winged. It kind of goes over her shoulders.

[Eric Roper]

And she's got a high collared top that goes about halfway up her neck. Harry's skin is more of a darker tone. He also has a high cream collar. It's starched. He has a little tie. It's a very formal look.

[Melissa Townsend]

They project to me, sort of a refinement.

[Eric Roper]

Both of them are looking just beyond the camera, you know, the way they do in old photos. Chin up with a dead serious expression, very regal, in a kind of Victorian kind of way. Now, by this time, Eric had lived in the house for a couple of months. It's May 2020, and one afternoon, less than a mile away, a young black.

[Melissa Townsend]

Woman, Darnella Frazier, standing on the sidewalk.

[Eric Roper]

In front of Cup Foods convenience store, uses her cell phone to videotape a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, across the street, kneeling on the neck of a black man, George Floyd.

[Melissa Townsend]

For nearly 10 minutes.

[Eric Roper]

For nearly 10 minutes.

[Melissa Townsend]

Not that far from my house on 38th in Chicago.

[Eric Roper]

Relax, man.

[Melissa Townsend]

I can't breathe.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

My face.

[Melissa Townsend]

Just get up.

[Eric Roper]

Over the next few days, the cell phone video circulates on social media, and south Minneapolis residents begin to gather in protest. What's his name? George Floyd. What's his name? George Floyd.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

What's his name?

[Melissa Townsend]

And then unrest starts to erupt, and then the whole world erupts. I remember seeing, like, protests in Paris and in Europe.

[Eric Roper]

When George Floyd was murdered, South Minneapolis became ground zero for a global racial reckoning. George Floyd. George Floyd. The only overdose that killed George Floyd was an overdose of excessive force and racism from the Minneapolis Police Department. And Eric Roper was there in his little house just a few blocks away.

[Melissa Townsend]

I remember sitting up late at night. I mean, maybe it was like 2:00 in the morning because the fires were getting closer. And I was watching live TV at, like, 2:00 and sort of seeing, okay, how close is it getting? Right? At what point do I have to, like, react? Around that period, there was a lot of pressure for people to post on social media to make a statement in relation to racial justice. And, you know, I just felt very awkward, partly because I'm a journalist. I don't really make big statements. And also, I hadn't really grappled with this issue very much. I didn't know what to say.

[Eric Roper]

As the dust started to settle, Eric began to think about the Robinsons again.

[Melissa Townsend]

And he thought maybe this Robinsons thing would add up to something that can contribute as we try to understand the many decades of events that led up to George Floyd's murder. And it wasn't clear to me that that would actually happen, but at least I was learning something at that point.

[Eric Roper]

Nobody was thinking it would be a podcast for the Star Tribune. It was just Eric's passion project, Eric's.

[Melissa Townsend]

Curiosity on the side, you know?

[Eric Roper]

But Eric started talking with people, lots of people. He'd go out for coffee, he'd tag along at community events, and he'd listen to people tell stories that he had never heard before.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

I remember my father.

[Eric Roper]

I remember the hate mail. Sharita Mosley Mitchell was at one of the community meetings. She's a black woman who grew up in Minneapolis in the 1960s.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

This is in Minnesota. I remember my father sleeping in the living room with a shotgun. I'm just saying there are multiple stories that you can reach out and get.

[Eric Roper]

For more than four years, Eric's been searching for every detail he can find about the Robinsons and understanding how their story tells a hidden history of Minneapolis. And that's when this became an official Star Tribune project. It and I came on board to help Eric turn his search into this podcast.

[Melissa Townsend]

You're listening to Ghost of a Chance from the Minnesota Star Tribune. This is the story of my search to find out what happened to Harry and Clementine Robinson. I'm Eric Roper.

[Eric Roper]

I'm Melissa Townsend.

[Melissa Townsend]

This is episode one.

[Eric Roper]

The first question Eric had was, who were Harry and Clementine? And the second question was, what brought them to Minnesota? To find out, Eric had to go all the way back to the beginning of their story. Most people have heard of the Great Migration, the wave of African Americans who moved north between roughly 1910 and 1970. People were escaping Jim Crow in the south and looking for a more stable life with better jobs, better schooling, better places to live. But many people don't know that. Well, before this Great Migration, there were smaller waves of African Americans moving around the country, and some of them made their way to Minnesota. Not very many, but some. Eric found out that the Minnesota Historical Society had a whole collection of old interviews of people who were part of these migrations. So we started listening.

[Melissa Townsend]

It sort of blew my mind just hearing these people talk, you know? I mean, they passed away a long time ago, and they're telling us their experiences.

[Eric Roper]

My name is Raymond Winfred Cannon. C A N he heard Raymond Winfred Cannon. He said his family were free people in North Carolina, but they could see that the Civil War was coming, so they moved to Minnesota before it was even a state.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

Do you know why he happened to choose Minnesota? They were going as far north as they could get.

[Eric Roper]

I think that was the idea that they had in mind at that time, as far north as they could get. Eric found another interview from a woman named Marvell Cook.

[Melissa Townsend]

Marvell Cook's family moved to Minnesota around 1900.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

My father felt that there were many opportunities there. The university was there, and they bought.

[Brandon Jones]

A piece of property there and built.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

A beautiful house, which we grew up in, very close to the Mississippi river, and it was just lovely.

[Eric Roper]

So Marvell's family moved because they thought there were opportunities in Minnesota. Eric searched high and low for a recording Of Harry and Clementine Robinson, and he came up empty. So he really needed to figure out for himself who were they and what brought them to Minnesota. He says part of his search started on a popular genealogy website.

[Melissa Townsend]

So Ancestry.com, obviously, a very powerful database. And you have to start by building a family tree. So I have a whole house history, family tree, and Clementine, you know, she gets a profile. Okay, now we're gonna start building in, like, between newspaper clips, census records, Whatever we can find.

[Eric Roper]

Luckily, Eric found a record of Clementine's brother. His name was Gideon brown. And through him, he was able to locate Clementine's birthplace.

[Melissa Townsend]

I found out that Clementine was born in this small, rural town north of Kansas city, Missouri, called mecca or shady grove.

[Eric Roper]

Eric found there wasn't much online about this town, so he went there.

[Melissa Townsend]

And so we are sort of driving through farmland, rolling countryside. It's very beautiful out here. Very beautiful day. And I can see that we're approaching the lake, which means that we're close to mecca cemetery.

[Eric Roper]

Eric learned that in the 1970s, after many families had already left mecca, the army corps of engineers flooded the town to make a lake. Smithville lake. The town had shrunk to just a few residents, but still some were very unhappy about their town being wiped out.

[Melissa Townsend]

So let's go. Maybe, like, over here. I feel like I can hear it more.

[Eric Roper]

All that's left of mecca is the black cemetery. So Eric went there to see if he could find out more about Clementine's family. He met up with a woman named Gwen greene. Her great grandfather grew up alongside Clementine here in the 1880s and 90s. Do you see why they would call this mecca? It's quiet, serene, calming. I don't know. I just feel the spirits here.

[Melissa Townsend]

Yeah, the fact that it's closed off, and it's very pleasant.

[Eric Roper]

After they left the cemetery, Gwen and Eric went somewhere where they could talk. Gwen had some records about Clementine's family. Yes, this is from 1885. I was told they'd taken kids that were being abandoned. Like, if one of the parents died, then the Estes family would keep them for a while until they found a home for them to go to.

[Melissa Townsend]

Clementine's mother, Laura, isn't. She was Laura Estes. So she came from that family.

[Eric Roper]

Before the civil war, Missouri was a slave state. Many of the people in the black community there today Are descendants of slaves, Including Gwen's family. With Gwen's help and his own sleuthing, Eric was able to piece together Clementine's family history. And he found out she was the first generation in her family born free.

[Melissa Townsend]

In the United States, as far as I can tell. And these records are notoriously difficult to find. Clementine's father was born in Kentucky, and I presume that he was enslaved there.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

Something like 20% of the black population of Kentucky leaves in the first year after the war. Most of them are driven out by violence.

[Eric Roper]

Eric and I reached out to an historian named Chris Phillips. He's done quite a bit of research into what happened in this region right after the Civil War ended.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

We have lots of descriptions of the roads filled with black people just trying to flee Klan violence.

[Eric Roper]

Eric found that by 1870, Clementine's father was living in Mecca, Missouri. He was a farmer and a Baptist minister. Clementine's mother had a very different story.

[Melissa Townsend]

Clementine's mother was probably born into slavery as a baby, but soon after that became free because her father, Clementine's grandfather, was freed in 1854, before emancipation.

[Eric Roper]

Eric knows that Clementine's grandfather was freed because he actually found the will that freed him. It's written by the slave owner, Thomas Estes, and he is freeing Washington Estes. That's Clementine's grandfather.

[Melissa Townsend]

My Negro man, Washington, about 27 years old. I will to be free on the first day of April, A.D. 1854.

[Eric Roper]

Just five words that changed the lives of every generation after. I will to be free. Eric also pieced together Harry Robinson's family story, and he was also the first generation in his family born free, but he was not raised in Missouri like Clementine.

[Melissa Townsend]

Yeah, he's from a small railroad town called Mitchell in southern Indiana. Both his parents were enslaved in Kentucky, just like Clementine's father. And they were both freed by the 13th Amendment and then fled Kentucky and moved to Indiana.

[Eric Roper]

So Eric headed to Mitchell, Indiana, to learn more about Harry's life before he moved to Minnesota. And there he met a man named Jeff Routh. Jeff Routh works at the Lawrence County Museum of History. Mitchell is in Lawrence county immediately following the.

[Melissa Townsend]

Why would a family come to Mitchell in particular, do you think? Because. And this is a railroad town, right?

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

From what I've been able to learn, Mitchell was the first place north of Louisville, Kentucky, that a black person could get off the railroad and feel welcome. If you went to Washington county, which is the next county southeast of here, they had basically the sundown laws. You know, they could be there during the daylight, but if they were there at night, they were fair game.

[Melissa Townsend]

I mean, think about those words. Fair game. This is a really dangerous landscape that Harry's family is walking into. And they're just trying to find the safest place to put down roots and make a life, but it's really difficult. And this, this is where Harry is born.

[Eric Roper]

Jeff had found an old newspaper article describing Harry's father.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

It says he was tall and well built, a whitewasher by trade, a Baptist by religion, and Republican in politics, industrious, good natured and honest.

[Eric Roper]

So at this point, even though Harry was in Indiana and Clementine was in Missouri, Eric could see that they had a lot in common.

[Melissa Townsend]

It's sort of weird how much they had in common. They claimed to both be born on the very same date, May 2, 1881. And they were both from large families. Clementine was one of 18 children, and both their fathers were preachers, Baptist preachers.

[Eric Roper]

And Eric and I both wanted to know what was it like to be part of that first generation of black citizens born free in the United States.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

You're not property anymore. That's a different. That's a very different disposition on life.

[Eric Roper]

Brandon Jones is a therapist we talk to. He's based in Minneapolis, and he has a particular focus on intergenerational trauma.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

You also have opportunity to experience some of what you couldn't do before. Like, you could read, you could go to school, you could travel without papers. And now you might not have the same opportunity or access as a white family at that time may have had. But you had an opportunity like that had to be a different experience.

[Eric Roper]

But at the same time, Brandon told us that the expectation was that black people would, quote, unquote, know their place.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

You know, stay out of trouble, keep your head down, don't make eye contact, don't let anyone know that you are smarter than you are because you may be considered a danger because you're getting uppity or too lippy.

[Eric Roper]

So Brandon told us there was this tension between knowing your place and standing your ground.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

That's kind of the tug of war that many black people had to face during that time period of the Jim Crow era. Trying to have a life where you can have some joy, but also having these social barriers and levels of racism that keeps you from fully experiencing this American dream, so to say.

[Eric Roper]

So how did Harry and Clementine manage this tug of war between the racism that was keeping them down and the freedom that was giving them wings? And what does any of this have to do with Minnesota? That's after the break. Foreign.

[Brandon Jones]

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[Eric Roper]

When Eric was in Missouri with Gwen Greene, she told him that Clementine wouldn't have had much of a future if she had stayed in that small town. I think that they wanted to, you know, make something of their self. If they stayed in Mecca, there's nothing there for them but domestic worker farming. I think that they wanted to venture out and see what was out there. And so he went off to figure out when Clementine left. And he told me for this he needed to use both the census and old city directories. And I said, what's a city directory?

[Melissa Townsend]

Yeah, they don't exist anymore. City directories are a lot like phone books, except that they list your occupation and they list your address, a lot of which have also been digitized now so we can do searches for people addresses and other things.

[Eric Roper]

And this is where Eric found Clementine in official documents from 1900.

[Melissa Townsend]

She's living in Kansas City, and she's a domestic servant, also described as a nurse girl. And we can see that in the city directory. She's got different addresses almost every year.

[Eric Roper]

So Clementine had flown the nest. By the time she was 19 years old. She had moved about 30 miles away to find new opportunities. But Eric found Harry's path to leaving his hometown was a little more complicated. The urge to uproot may have come from a tragic accident that happened when he was just A boy.

[Melissa Townsend]

The historians in Lawrence county helped me locate this article in the Indianapolis journal newspaper from 1890, when Harry was about nine years old. He and his entire family became essentially poisoned by accident after rat poison sifted off a shelf into their dinner and Harry's father died.

[Eric Roper]

It was a tragedy, but Eric found it wasn't rare.

[Melissa Townsend]

The poison powder that the Robinsons had accidentally eaten was called rough on rats. And like other rat poisons of the era, it was made with arsenic. Arsenic has no distinguishing taste, so it becomes notorious for accidental poisonings in this era. In another case in Indiana around this time, a man died after making gravy. Turns out he had mistakenly mixed in rat poison, thinking that it was flour.

[Eric Roper]

Harry's father died on February 4, 1890. We asked that therapist, Brandon Jones, how did he think that would have affected Harry.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

You see a parent lose their life, it's gonna leave an imprint on you. No matter how old you are or the parent is, to die from something that's preventable, like rat poisoning, that can be pretty traumatic for Harry.

[Eric Roper]

Brandon says sometimes something this traumatic can sink a young person. It can bring on depression and anxiety. But other times, it can have a different effect.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

It probably motivated him to, you know, do as much as he can, because you don't know how long you have to live in this world, which is not uncommon for a lot of black men to think.

[Eric Roper]

In other words, Harry may have gotten the message that life is short. Use your gifts, shoot your shot.

[Melissa Townsend]

I found all these newspaper clippings from the local newspapers in Mitchell, Indiana, from Harry's high school years. And this is right before the turn of the century in 1899, 1900, and he's a local superstar. Throughout Harry's senior year. It's noting that he's kind of a leader in the class, like, he's among the top of the class. And then it kind of culminates with him being the top of the class, getting the top honors of the class, the valedictorian. And so this gets him a special thing. This means that he actually receives a scholarship to a law school.

[Eric Roper]

Eric learned that at the time, the Nashville College of Law was offering scholarships to promising students in communities around the country. So as valedictorian in Mitchell, Indiana, Harry won that scholarship. People in Mitchell, Indiana, are still proud of Harry. Marla Jones works alongside Jeff Routh at the Lawrence County Museum of History. Again, Mitchell is in Lawrence County.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

You know, he was excelling in every way. And that very much impresses me that, you know, time or situation wouldn't hold that boy down. That he was going to do big things. It shows he has a lot of moxie.

[Eric Roper]

In 1900, Harry Robinson was on his way to becoming a lawyer. It was a huge accomplishment. But Harry never went to law school. Eric found an announcement in the local newspaper dated three weeks after Harry's graduation ceremony.

[Melissa Townsend]

And it's a picture of Harry. It's on the top of the front page of the paper and it says Harry Robinson, the Mitchell colored boy who won the scholarship offered by the Nashville, Tennessee law school and was turned down on. On account of his color.

[Eric Roper]

On account of his color. The law school did not accept black students. Marla Jones.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

The elation turned to disappointment must have been palpable. I mean he.

[Eric Roper]

I can't imagine. Harry Robinson was a 19 year old young black man from a small town in Indiana. Eric wondered what did this tell him about the world? It says, come here, come here. Resma Menikum is another therapist we talked to. He's a best selling author based in Minneapolis.

[Melissa Townsend]

This is how you make it. Come here.

[Eric Roper]

You may be able, from your hard work, be able to achieve some things.

[Melissa Townsend]

But when you get there, you find out that you can't have access to the things that you thought you could have access to. And you've played the game the way.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

That they said you should play the.

[Eric Roper]

Game and it's still not enough. That summer Harry left Mitchell, Indiana. It looks like he moved around the Midwest for a while. And then in 1907 he landed in Kansas City, Missouri. And that's where he met a young woman named Clementine Brown.

[Melissa Townsend]

She's living in this boarding house at 1107 Harrison street and who else is living in this boarding house? Harry Robinson.

[Eric Roper]

Eric likes to imagine the scene where they struck up their first conversation.

[Melissa Townsend]

In my imagination, they're both working hard jobs and you know, you're coming home and you're sort of taking a load off. You get to know people and they clearly made a connection. If they were actually born on the same date, I'm thinking that's the connection. Like, oh, actually, hello, we were both born on the same day. I mean, if I was single and I met someone who had my same birth date, I'd at least have a conversation with them, you know, oh my God, we have the same birthday. Oh, we were born the same year. And then it's just like love ever after after that. Right. Like they're just, they're, they're soulmates, right?

[Eric Roper]

Theoretically. Theoretically. But racial tension was ratcheting up in Kansas City.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

Historian Chris Phillips it becomes the Confederate capital of Missouri at about that point. Meaning that all of these ex Confederates rise through the system. They come political leaders, they create their own cemeteries. They glorify the lost cause. And so if you're black in Kansas City at that moment before the great Migration, it's a really tenuous place to be and moment to be there.

[Eric Roper]

So Harry and Clementine hatched a plan to move to Minnesota. Maybe Harry planned to enroll at the University of Minnesota. There were some black students there at the time. And Eric found that Clementine seemed to have her own plan.

[Melissa Townsend]

You know, she had been a domestic servant her whole working life. And so she makes this stop on her way to the Twin Cities in Chicago. And it looks like she enrolled in the Mohler School of Dermatology. It's a course that lasts a few weeks. And you would learn in this course about, you know, hairdressing, facial, massage, electrolysis, all sorts of things. But they're all in the realm of hair care and beauty.

[Eric Roper]

Historian Tiffany Gill has written about black women in the beauty industry in the early 1900s. We called her to get an idea of what Clementine was doing here.

[Sharita Mosley Mitchell]

She really is at the very first wave of black women entering into formal beauty work. And there were not many black women owned beauty colleges that she would have been able to attend. And so she went to the Mueller School, which was a way of teaching black women, along with white women, the trade of beauty work.

[Melissa Townsend]

So what I sort of take away from this is that she's not just moving out of Kansas City, but she's trying to move up in the world. And maybe there's this impression that Minnesota is sort of a barrier free place. I mean, it's all the way almost as far north as you can get.

[Eric Roper]

What would Harry and Clementine find in Minnesota? That's next time. One more thing before we go. When Eric was in Missouri learning about Clementine's history, he met a man named Bob Harris. He was a respected elder, and he had a literal suitcase full of history of the town that's now underwater. And when he sat down to talk with Eric, he was inspired to talk about his grandparents and their favorite songs. And to Eric, one of those songs really spoke to the journey that he was on. My grandfather's song was the hymn. He'll understand it by and by. Do you know that by and by when the morning comes all the saints love God's gathering home we will tell the story how we've overcome and we'll understand it better by and by See, you don't understand a lot of things now, but later on you will Bob Harris died on May 9, 2024. It was just a few months after he and Eric spoke. He was 81 years old. This is Ghost of a Chance. Our website is startribune.com ghostofachance there you can see pictures and documents from the podcast, and you can also sign up to receive news about discussion guides and events. Our email is ghostofachancetartribune.com get in touch if you have a question or feedback or a tip related to the Robinson story. We'd also love to know if this story motivated you to do something in your community, so let us know. You can help pay for this incredible story and others like it with a subscription to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Go to our website startribune.com ghost of a chance is reported by Eric Roper and written and produced by me, Melissa Townsend. Our Executive Producer is Jenny Pinkley. Our editor is Mary Jo Webster. Fact Checking by Eric Roper and Mary Jo Webster Sound design by Marcel Malakeboo. Our contributing editors are Star Tribune Managing Editor Maria Reeve and Star Tribune Editor and Senior Vice President Suki Dardarian. Legal review from Randy Lebedoff. The art for our show comes from Anna Boone and Brock Kaplan. Special thanks to Kendall Harkness, Zoe Jackson, Laura McCollum, James Schiffer, Nancy Yang, Casey Darnell, Laura Ewan, Tame Danger, and members of the local community who served as our advisors.

[Brandon Jones]

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