The black-and-white booklet is meant to fit easily into the pocket or slip into the palm of a polite stranger whose willingness to make eye contact has left them open to learning about race relations in America. On the cover two men in suits sit across from each other at a desk, one white and the other open to interpretation. All our infinite shades of blackness reduced to microscopic crosshatching and a best guess. Inside are flip-book advocacy, a gallery and guide to challenges like “industrial relations” and “racial tension” softened through sparse mid-century modern paintings. The Minneapolis Urban League wanted the message to be clear, but not threatening: “To improve social, economic, and spiritual conditions among the Negro people through interracial cooperation,” read the cover.
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I developed the habit of photographing documents and clippings I discovered during my time at various archives, at least those I could access in the winter of the first year of COVID. On its own, it was shocking that an appeal for the humanity of black people was sung to the same tune as a 1940s motor lodge postcard promising color TV. There was a whiff of something familiar in the visual language of the booklet, black and white literally coming together for a fair shake.
In this new phase of “interracial cooperation,” what price will Black families have to pay to find people who believe in your right to exist?
I too was fed this diet of market harmony from a young age. I also played a role in the campaign. My Aunt Carla had discovered a photo of me in high-tops and a baggy polo, saying it must have been from my high school years, sitting and chatting with Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton in the 1990s with a coalition of perfectly diverse teens. I couldn’t remember why I was there or what was discussed. But we were all clearly there to help tell a story. It’s the same in brochures for after-school programs, bus ads for clinics, the campaign literature that fills mailboxes during election season. The settings and causes may have changed, but the cast of characters was always the same, a rainbow of humanity working together for a purpose greater than all of us.
But the Urban League’s Guide to Interracial Cooperation from the 1940s was an artifact of an era when it was important to find willing partners who could support equal rights not just in theory, but in the practical world. The decade that ended World War II and ushered in America’s expansionist era domestically was the embodiment of a liberal dream, a government that could wrap its arms around Americans and help build enough stability to pull the country out of the Depression. Whether that prosperity will be shared among all Americans is a different matter altogether.
Waves of new families would join the Great Migration after the war and northern cities would find it difficult to ignore the complexity of black life. Chicago’s black population was more than 277,000 in 1940; Detroit’s number was 149,000. In Minneapolis the number was 4,646. Statistically we were the laggards.
If state laws state that Minnesota does not discriminate, the reality outweighs the lie. Jobs were scarce for black workers outside the service industry in Minneapolis and there was patriotic desperation for wartime conscription. Police harassment was common for black families and their Jewish neighbors. For black families who entered the middle class, it was almost impossible to buy a home.
In the origin story of progressive politics in modern Minneapolis, these years were a difficult time. Black workers would begin to find a home in the city’s labor movement and the Democratic Party. Philanthropic capitalists will raise the issue of fair housing. The city will attempt to untangle the ways it fails black families by adopting a vague and seemingly race-blind concept of “human relations.” It will try to analyze its way out of isolation.
All of this was made possible through newfound allies in the fight for equal access to the American dream. These were the good whites that were promised. The question remained, how committed were these allies to improving “social, economic, and spiritual conditions among Negroes” and what sacrifices would they be willing to make in the fight? Simple mathematics in Minneapolis meant that black people could not ensure their future. But in this new phase of “interracial cooperation,” what price will black families have to pay to find people who believe in your right to exist?
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If you find yourself in the corridors of the Curtis Hotel or the Minneapolis Athletic Club in the 1930s, you can see the prosperity of this city as it began to reach its peak. The Curtis occupied one city block, a massive classical-revival-style hotel complex, said to be “the largest in the Upper Midwest.” Down the aisles you’ll find lounges and a coffee shop before stepping into the East Ballroom, which will feature the Kimball Pipe Organ for wedding receptions, awards dinners for insurance underwriters, or the Swedish Society of Minneapolis’ receiving line.
While working as a waiter at the Curtis Hotel, Anthony Cassius learned that white waiters were making $50 more per month than black wait staff. This was probably no shock to him. Cassius found work in hotels early in his life after moving from Oklahoma with his brother at the age of thirteen. He began cleaning spittoons and toilets while sleeping on a mattress in the basement of the Merchants Hotel in St. Paul. But if he wanted to fight for equal pay, Cassius knew he would have to act by the book, and that meant first pleading his case to the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. He forgave him. Minneapolis gained a reputation as a union town after the Teamsters’ fight to form a union in 1934, where a general strike turned into an open street fight, injuring more than sixty unarmed union members and killing two. The Teamsters finally gained recognition and better pay. But black workers were rarely given such protections, because most unions excluded minorities.
The willingness to accept black members was not universal among unions within the city or state. It was imperfect, but it was a start.
Cassius formed a union specifically for black workers at the hotel and sued the Curtis Hotel for unpaid wages. Around the same time he began meeting other workers who were marginalized or otherwise left out of the bargaining table. In 1935 Cassius’ group broke with the Bulgarian-Macedonian Workers’ Club and the Swedish Workers’ Club, and shortly afterwards he decided to form Local 665 of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ International Union, one of the earliest integrated unions in the state. Cassius found a home with radical labor activists, lawyers who were sympathetic to black workers at Curtiss, even forming an alliance with the Teamsters. Their show of strength and solidarity paid off; In 1940 the hotel agreed to a wage increase for black waiters, increasing wages by $3,500. Interestingly, it received little mention in the city’s daily newspapers, the exception being the Black Press, where the story was given a front-page story worthy of such a significant victory: “Veterans Raise $13,000.”
It felt like a fertile time to organize in Minneapolis, especially if you found yourself on the bottom rung of the caste system within Minnesota. The jobs available to black people in Minneapolis were merely an echo of the recent past; The corridors of the larger house were traded to paying customers. It was little better for Jewish workers. Minneapolis was rapidly gaining a reputation as an outpost of anti-Semitism in the new West. That’s what made an integrated union possible, a place where black workers, Jews, and Eastern European immigrants whose English kept them outside the bounds of politeness could come together to improve the prospects for all. Socialists, communists, everyone came together to find the cause. They occupied the same place at the back of the house. They had only poor salaries and nothing to show for it, while they served a class of politicians and bank presidents who would otherwise not give them the time of day. Solidarity became a numbers game.
A similar scene to Curtis’s event was being played out at the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Founded as a men’s club dedicated to fitness, the fourteen-story building became a gilded clubhouse. The lobby was decorated with lush mahogany, and the ceilings above had panels in ivory and bronze tones to evoke the earlier Greek Empire. Wandering throughout the building you’ll find squash courts, a bowling alley and an underground pool. On the thirteenth floor there was a four hundred-seat dining room, surrounded by columns extending from the floor to the spectator deck, where you could fully enjoy the nightly entertainment. Money strolled the corridors, made himself comfortable in the lounge, hung out with friends. And behind the scenes, in the elevators and kitchens and basements, you’ll find the people who kept it going. Porters and coat check attendants, service elevator operators, all black. The waiters and maids, the managers who ran the departments, white. “Black department” is the phrase that some people will start using to describe the status quo. An informal label for secession in which no clear laws existed. When the day started they would have lunch at different places, and by the end of the day they would change uniforms at their respective places.
Nellie Stone Johnson was a service elevator operator at the Minneapolis Athletic Club when George Naumoff, a Greek employee who operated freight elevators at the club, approached her. He was plotting with Cassius about the idea of a unified hotel workers union, and they needed more people to join the cause. When it came to organizing, there were many causes that caught Johnson’s attention. She was the daughter of black farmers who organized an agricultural cooperative in Dakota County, twenty miles south of the Twin Cities. While studying at the University of Minnesota, Johnson was as interested in meetings with young socialists and communists as he was in the classroom. She was curious and had a talent for bringing people together. Her job as an elevator operator at the Athletic Club meant that a day spent riding between floors would put her face to face with nearly every black worker in the building. This Face Time gave them the opportunity to make a union pitch.
Like Cassius, Johnson found something solid in unions. Joining Local 665 gave her the leverage she needed to help raise wages for black workers as well as women at the Athletic Club. In 1936 Johnson was elected vice president of Local 665, a move that elevated him into statewide union discussions for restaurant and hotel workers. Here she could have a seat at the table and help set the conditions of life for black workers. This was real agency, no pretense of good will and charity. The willingness to accept black members was not universal among unions within the city or state. It was imperfect, but it was a start.
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From The Cruelty of the Good: Why Minneapolis is America’s Story By Justin Ellis. Copyright © 2026 by Justin Ellis. Published by HarperCollins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted with permission.
