In new podcast, Minneapolis reporter follows the story of couple who owned his house 100 years ago
Clementine Robinson in the National Advocate in 1920 and Harry Robinson in the Mitchell Commercial in 1900. The Robinsons lived in Minneapolis in the early 1900s and their story is the subject of the new Minnesota Star Tribune podcast “Ghost of a Chance.”
Courtesy of the Minnesota Star Tribune
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It’s a familiar tale: a family moves into a new house that turns out to be visited by the spirits of those who lived there many years earlier. “Ghost of a Chance,” a new podcast by the Minnesota Star Tribune, is not a ghost story. But it brings to life the story of the former residents of reporter Eric Roper’s house, which he bought in South Minneapolis in 2020.
Harry and Clementine Robinson were in the first generation of their families born free in the United States. When they moved into the house in 1919, they were among just a few Black families to own a home in that part of the city. They moved out just a few years later, in 1940.
In the series, Roper and producer Melissa Townsend explore how the reasons for the Robinson’s move — and what happened next — connect to a larger story of segregation that exists in the city today.
For more, MPR News host Nina Moini talked with Roper and Greg McMoore, a community historian in south Minneapolis.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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Audio transcript
NINA MOINI: You might have heard this one before. A family moves into a new house that turns out to be visited by the spirits of those who lived there many years earlier. Ghost of a Chance, a new podcast by the Star Tribune, is not a ghost story, but it brings to life the story of the former residence of reporter Eric Roper's house more than 100 years ago. He bought the house in South Minneapolis back in 2020. Here's a clip from that podcast trailer.
ERIC ROPER: I found Harry and Clementine Robinson. They moved into my house in 1917, and they were gone by 1940.
NINA MOINI: At first, that didn't seem like a big deal. People move all the time, but Harry and Clementine were unique. They were one of the few Black families 100 years ago to own a home in what's now the whitest part of the city. And Eric decided he needed to know what happened to them. And Eric Roper is on the line now. Hi, Eric.
ERIC ROPER: Hi. Thanks for having me.
NINA MOINI: Thanks for being here. And also joining me is Greg McMoore, a community historian in South Minneapolis. He's one of the experts interviewed for the podcast. Thank you so much for your time, Greg.
GREG MCMOORE: Yes, absolutely.
NINA MOINI: Well, I'm fascinated, Eric, by all of this, as apparently you were too. Can you tell us a little bit about Harry and Clementine Robinson, and what were their lives like from your research when they lived in your house about 100 years ago?
ERIC ROPER: So Harry and Clementine Robinson were born in the 1880s. They were the first generations of their family born free, and they were born in Missouri and Indiana. And they came to Minnesota before what we now think of as some of the timeline of the Great Migration that we might think of like post-World War I. They came before then, around 1908.
And they had a lot of success here in Minnesota, but they also faced a lot of challenges. And I think what I learned early on in this process were challenges that they face living in my neighborhood, which is in Southwest Minneapolis. Specifically, one of the things I learned early on is about a protest meeting that occurred around five blocks from my house, about how to get rid of the roughly nine Black families that lived in Southwest Minneapolis.
And so I guess that's a bit of a primer on the two of them. But they were very interesting people whose stories really just pulled me deeper and deeper into history. I mean, I wouldn't have gone this far if I didn't find a lot of things that were very compelling to me.
NINA MOINI: And Greg, the Robinsons, their story might not be that unique. Your own family, I read, arrived in Hastings, south of the Twin Cities, in the 1860s and then in Minneapolis in the early 1900s. Can you tell me a little bit about them, and what brought them to this area?
GREG MCMOORE: Well, yes. My family were enslaved in Virginia. And we were able to escape. And the Minnesota regiment, a Minnesota regiment coming back from the Civil War, my grandfather was able to connect there. And they assisted us in finding our way to Hastings, where my family settled approximately in 1912.
After my grandmother graduated from Hastings High School, we settled in South Minneapolis. And 416 East 25th Street is the family's home on one side of the family. On the other side of the family, the current home that I live in right now was built in, I believe, 1919, and we've had a family member in my house. Heather and I live here through the '40s up into today.
NINA MOINI: Wow. That's amazing. Eric, we heard that the Robinsons, though they ended up moving out of your house in 1940, just over a decade after they moved in, and you've alluded to what they went through, but what did you learn about what led them to move and where they went?
ERIC ROPER: So yeah. They moved by 1940. So the specifics of that you hear maybe around episode four. I think part of the Robinson story sort of feeds into something that Greg is an expert in, which is a place that now is referred to as the Old South Side, which is a middle class Black community that formed around 38th Street and 4th Avenue and really blossomed at a time when the city was becoming increasingly segregated.
And so what was interesting to me about the Robinson stories is that they geographically helped me see the evolution of both my neighborhood and also a neighborhood close to mine that Greg is very familiar with and sort of how they evolved over time. And Greg could speak to the importance of the Old South Side and his memories of it.
NINA MOINI: Yeah, Greg. That's amazing that you were able to bring all of your knowledge to the podcast. Can you describe what the neighborhood was like at that time?
GREG MCMOORE: Yes. As you may well know, at the time, there's been three major African American communities in the Twin Cities. One, of course, is Rondo over in Saint Paul, and then there's the North Side here in Minneapolis and the South Side. We've long been Southsiders.
And the major thoroughfare through our community, and we live in the central neighborhood. And then I was raised in the Bryant and Field Regina neighborhood was 4th Avenue South. And it really went, when you want to talk about our neighborhood, from Lake Street down to the Minnehaha Creek on both sides of 4th Avenue. To our West is 35W. And the interstate, as it went through our community, created segregated societies. One on the West Side of 35W, where our family home is on the East Side of 35W.
We were a middle class community, and I'm talking about probably in the '40s through the 1980s is when our community was really thriving. The center of that community was, as what Eric said, 38th Street and 4th Avenue. And often, people talk about Black Wall Street in Tulsa, which was destroyed.
Well, in some ways, our Black Wall Street was 38th Street and 4th Avenue. The corridor there, the intersection there where there were a number of businesses, social clubs. Down the street, those are religious institutions, and of course, our high schools. So we had everything that was right there in that surrounding neighborhood.
NINA MOINI: Yeah. And then, of course, freeway construction, we know, just made it really hard for a lot of communities and changed a lot. Eric, it must have been just such a labor of love for you to dig into all of this and to share these stories. And you published an essay actually in the Minnesota Star Tribune over the weekend about this process. And you write that you really did not expect the biggest project of your career up so far would be about race. What made you decide to take this on, and what were some of your thoughts around it as you were going through the process?
ERIC ROPER: Yeah. So I mean, I oversee Curious Minnesota here at the paper. I am interested in local history. I've also written a lot over the years about public works. Race was not a number one on my agenda. And maybe it was because I didn't really have the obvious avenue into the conversation, or maybe that's a cop out on my part, I don't know.
But in this case, the Robinson story in moving in, something falls in your lap like that and you have to make a decision, like am I going to-- in order to follow this story, it's going to be a big undertaking, and I'm going to have to do this thing justice. And it took nearly five years to do that.
And I also just want to shout out to our producer, Melissa Townsend, who really came in and turned what for me was a series of interesting but disparate facts and make it into an incredibly compelling story. I mean, I'm serious. It sort of blows me away sometimes when I listen to it.
And it sort of forced me to get out of my comfort zone. And frankly, I mean, Greg and I have had so many interesting conversations, but also other people from that community, from Saint Peter's Church and elsewhere in that area across the freeway.
I've really both opened up myself, but also just listened a lot and learned a lot from people who don't live that far from me. And I learned a lot that I didn't know. And I'm someone who kind of feels like I know a fair amount about the history of Minneapolis because I write about it a fair amount. But I was surprised. And I was also surprised about the history that I learned about my own neighborhood in the King Field area. So yeah. Now I've forgotten what the question is.
NINA MOINI: That's OK. And I'm glad that you mentioned-- of course, Melissa Townsend was the other voice in the clip that we played and special place in our hearts as well as she was one of the producers who helped to start our program, Minnesota Now for NPR News. And it's great that you engaged with community. I understand you held community events and meetings. Obviously, Greg, your input was phenomenal.
Greg, there are many avenues to talk about history. People sometimes don't want to dive into difficult topics, or history gets rewritten in a way. Why is it so important for you to lend your time and your voice to this project as well but also to generally preserve the stories of your neighborhood in South Minneapolis?
Yes. As a historian, I see the use or understand the use of history in some ways that some folks may not. Here in South Minneapolis, of course, we're telling a story, a story of people, of our resilience and our strength, our vitality, and how that existed and how that made our community what it was.
It talks about community building. If you stop and think about 38th Street and 4th Avenue, people there were very entrepreneurial. If you looked at our schools, there was a campus. Warrington School, Bryant Junior High School, which is now Sabatini Community Center, and Central High School. All of them do not exist anymore. The kids are shipped out of our community.
And the churches. Saint Peter's AME Church on 41st and 4th, my family's church. We were strong symbols in the community. And then oddly enough, I'll follow up with our nightlife here. There was Dreamland, which was owned by Mr. AB Cassius, the first Black person in the state of Minnesota. And [INAUDIBLE].
Just so many buildings. Yeah. So much history that you want to share and to preserve, and it takes intentionality and a long time. And I appreciate both of you today for coming on with us, and I can't wait to listen. Eric and Greg, thank you so much. Wish we had all day to chat, but I'm very excited to listen to the pod.
ERIC ROPER: Thank you.
GREG MCMOORE: Thank you very much.
NINA MOINI: Thank you so much. That's South Minneapolis community historian Greg McMoore and Star Tribune reporter Eric Roper. You can listen to the first two episodes of the six- episode series Ghost of a Chance now.
ERIC ROPER: I found Harry and Clementine Robinson. They moved into my house in 1917, and they were gone by 1940.
NINA MOINI: At first, that didn't seem like a big deal. People move all the time, but Harry and Clementine were unique. They were one of the few Black families 100 years ago to own a home in what's now the whitest part of the city. And Eric decided he needed to know what happened to them. And Eric Roper is on the line now. Hi, Eric.
ERIC ROPER: Hi. Thanks for having me.
NINA MOINI: Thanks for being here. And also joining me is Greg McMoore, a community historian in South Minneapolis. He's one of the experts interviewed for the podcast. Thank you so much for your time, Greg.
GREG MCMOORE: Yes, absolutely.
NINA MOINI: Well, I'm fascinated, Eric, by all of this, as apparently you were too. Can you tell us a little bit about Harry and Clementine Robinson, and what were their lives like from your research when they lived in your house about 100 years ago?
ERIC ROPER: So Harry and Clementine Robinson were born in the 1880s. They were the first generations of their family born free, and they were born in Missouri and Indiana. And they came to Minnesota before what we now think of as some of the timeline of the Great Migration that we might think of like post-World War I. They came before then, around 1908.
And they had a lot of success here in Minnesota, but they also faced a lot of challenges. And I think what I learned early on in this process were challenges that they face living in my neighborhood, which is in Southwest Minneapolis. Specifically, one of the things I learned early on is about a protest meeting that occurred around five blocks from my house, about how to get rid of the roughly nine Black families that lived in Southwest Minneapolis.
And so I guess that's a bit of a primer on the two of them. But they were very interesting people whose stories really just pulled me deeper and deeper into history. I mean, I wouldn't have gone this far if I didn't find a lot of things that were very compelling to me.
NINA MOINI: And Greg, the Robinsons, their story might not be that unique. Your own family, I read, arrived in Hastings, south of the Twin Cities, in the 1860s and then in Minneapolis in the early 1900s. Can you tell me a little bit about them, and what brought them to this area?
GREG MCMOORE: Well, yes. My family were enslaved in Virginia. And we were able to escape. And the Minnesota regiment, a Minnesota regiment coming back from the Civil War, my grandfather was able to connect there. And they assisted us in finding our way to Hastings, where my family settled approximately in 1912.
After my grandmother graduated from Hastings High School, we settled in South Minneapolis. And 416 East 25th Street is the family's home on one side of the family. On the other side of the family, the current home that I live in right now was built in, I believe, 1919, and we've had a family member in my house. Heather and I live here through the '40s up into today.
NINA MOINI: Wow. That's amazing. Eric, we heard that the Robinsons, though they ended up moving out of your house in 1940, just over a decade after they moved in, and you've alluded to what they went through, but what did you learn about what led them to move and where they went?
ERIC ROPER: So yeah. They moved by 1940. So the specifics of that you hear maybe around episode four. I think part of the Robinson story sort of feeds into something that Greg is an expert in, which is a place that now is referred to as the Old South Side, which is a middle class Black community that formed around 38th Street and 4th Avenue and really blossomed at a time when the city was becoming increasingly segregated.
And so what was interesting to me about the Robinson stories is that they geographically helped me see the evolution of both my neighborhood and also a neighborhood close to mine that Greg is very familiar with and sort of how they evolved over time. And Greg could speak to the importance of the Old South Side and his memories of it.
NINA MOINI: Yeah, Greg. That's amazing that you were able to bring all of your knowledge to the podcast. Can you describe what the neighborhood was like at that time?
GREG MCMOORE: Yes. As you may well know, at the time, there's been three major African American communities in the Twin Cities. One, of course, is Rondo over in Saint Paul, and then there's the North Side here in Minneapolis and the South Side. We've long been Southsiders.
And the major thoroughfare through our community, and we live in the central neighborhood. And then I was raised in the Bryant and Field Regina neighborhood was 4th Avenue South. And it really went, when you want to talk about our neighborhood, from Lake Street down to the Minnehaha Creek on both sides of 4th Avenue. To our West is 35W. And the interstate, as it went through our community, created segregated societies. One on the West Side of 35W, where our family home is on the East Side of 35W.
We were a middle class community, and I'm talking about probably in the '40s through the 1980s is when our community was really thriving. The center of that community was, as what Eric said, 38th Street and 4th Avenue. And often, people talk about Black Wall Street in Tulsa, which was destroyed.
Well, in some ways, our Black Wall Street was 38th Street and 4th Avenue. The corridor there, the intersection there where there were a number of businesses, social clubs. Down the street, those are religious institutions, and of course, our high schools. So we had everything that was right there in that surrounding neighborhood.
NINA MOINI: Yeah. And then, of course, freeway construction, we know, just made it really hard for a lot of communities and changed a lot. Eric, it must have been just such a labor of love for you to dig into all of this and to share these stories. And you published an essay actually in the Minnesota Star Tribune over the weekend about this process. And you write that you really did not expect the biggest project of your career up so far would be about race. What made you decide to take this on, and what were some of your thoughts around it as you were going through the process?
ERIC ROPER: Yeah. So I mean, I oversee Curious Minnesota here at the paper. I am interested in local history. I've also written a lot over the years about public works. Race was not a number one on my agenda. And maybe it was because I didn't really have the obvious avenue into the conversation, or maybe that's a cop out on my part, I don't know.
But in this case, the Robinson story in moving in, something falls in your lap like that and you have to make a decision, like am I going to-- in order to follow this story, it's going to be a big undertaking, and I'm going to have to do this thing justice. And it took nearly five years to do that.
And I also just want to shout out to our producer, Melissa Townsend, who really came in and turned what for me was a series of interesting but disparate facts and make it into an incredibly compelling story. I mean, I'm serious. It sort of blows me away sometimes when I listen to it.
And it sort of forced me to get out of my comfort zone. And frankly, I mean, Greg and I have had so many interesting conversations, but also other people from that community, from Saint Peter's Church and elsewhere in that area across the freeway.
I've really both opened up myself, but also just listened a lot and learned a lot from people who don't live that far from me. And I learned a lot that I didn't know. And I'm someone who kind of feels like I know a fair amount about the history of Minneapolis because I write about it a fair amount. But I was surprised. And I was also surprised about the history that I learned about my own neighborhood in the King Field area. So yeah. Now I've forgotten what the question is.
NINA MOINI: That's OK. And I'm glad that you mentioned-- of course, Melissa Townsend was the other voice in the clip that we played and special place in our hearts as well as she was one of the producers who helped to start our program, Minnesota Now for NPR News. And it's great that you engaged with community. I understand you held community events and meetings. Obviously, Greg, your input was phenomenal.
Greg, there are many avenues to talk about history. People sometimes don't want to dive into difficult topics, or history gets rewritten in a way. Why is it so important for you to lend your time and your voice to this project as well but also to generally preserve the stories of your neighborhood in South Minneapolis?
Yes. As a historian, I see the use or understand the use of history in some ways that some folks may not. Here in South Minneapolis, of course, we're telling a story, a story of people, of our resilience and our strength, our vitality, and how that existed and how that made our community what it was.
It talks about community building. If you stop and think about 38th Street and 4th Avenue, people there were very entrepreneurial. If you looked at our schools, there was a campus. Warrington School, Bryant Junior High School, which is now Sabatini Community Center, and Central High School. All of them do not exist anymore. The kids are shipped out of our community.
And the churches. Saint Peter's AME Church on 41st and 4th, my family's church. We were strong symbols in the community. And then oddly enough, I'll follow up with our nightlife here. There was Dreamland, which was owned by Mr. AB Cassius, the first Black person in the state of Minnesota. And [INAUDIBLE].
Just so many buildings. Yeah. So much history that you want to share and to preserve, and it takes intentionality and a long time. And I appreciate both of you today for coming on with us, and I can't wait to listen. Eric and Greg, thank you so much. Wish we had all day to chat, but I'm very excited to listen to the pod.
ERIC ROPER: Thank you.
GREG MCMOORE: Thank you very much.
NINA MOINI: Thank you so much. That's South Minneapolis community historian Greg McMoore and Star Tribune reporter Eric Roper. You can listen to the first two episodes of the six- episode series Ghost of a Chance now.
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