We lost a local giant this month. Matthew Carter, who spent most of his career working on ore boats for U.S. Steel, passed away on Nov. 13, surrounded by family. He was 98.
I never had the good fortune to meet Carter, and his name is not one that most Duluthians recognize. But they should. In a city that infamously witnessed the 1920 lynchings of African American circus workers Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, Carter, together with his wife Helen, played a critical role 42 years later in desegregating the city’s deeply segregated housing market — though it took a ruse to finally do so.
The remarkable story of how it all happened, together with Minnesota’s shameful history of racial exclusion, was uncovered by Chad Montrie, a Massachusetts-based historian who wrote an important book and article on the subject.
Duluth, Montrie notes, was inhospitable to African Americans when the Carters moved here in the mid-20th century. Nearly 40% of the city’s Black residents, who numbered roughly 500 in 1920, fled in the two decades following the three lynchings. And no wonder. Black Duluthians were largely restricted to menial jobs, and most of the city’s housing was closed off to them. The Black population then was concentrated in the Gary, downtown, and Central and East hillside neighborhoods. Black residents, moreover, knew well what might befall them if they transgressed the city’s color line. Duluth had one of the state’s largest Ku Klux Klan chapters, with approximately 1,500 members by 1922, including over two dozen police officers on the 1925 and 1926 rolls.
Most restaurants in the city refused to serve African Americans, and Duluth’s movie theaters allowed them to sit only in the first rows or the balcony. Minstrel shows featuring blackface were regularly performed through at least the late 1950s, including by the Masonic Trinity Lodge in the Denfeld High School auditorium, by the B’nai Brith women’s group at the Covenant Club, and at the Morgan Park Goodfellowship Clubhouse, an institution to which a number of African American workers had to pay dues as Minnesota Steel employees, yet were nevertheless excluded.
The Carters moved from Chicago to Duluth’s Central Hillside in 1960. Helen, who taught in Chicago and had been active in civil-rights issues, was initially told by the Duluth Public Schools that the district did not employ “colored” teachers. Fortunately for her, a special-education professional, Richard Weatherman, befriended the Illinois transplant and offered her a job at the since-closed Jefferson School. This made her the first Black teacher in the district.
Matt, who had been working on Great Lakes boats since the end of World War II, was forced to ship out of Two Harbors, as the Duluth union local representing lake-boat workers refused to allow African Americans to join its crews.
With a growing family — the Carters raised three children — and hoping to be at least a little closer to Two Harbors, the young couple looked for a home in the eastern reaches of Duluth. Their early efforts in these all-white neighborhoods were rebuffed. Then, thinking they might build, they attempted to buy a lot on London Road in Lakeside. This was in 1962. The owner, though, Edmond H. Hebert, refused to sell to them.
The Carters thus had to find a straw buyer who could surreptitiously make the deal on their behalf. The Rev. Thomas L. Smith, a white minister for the local Unitarian Universalist Congregation and a fierce supporter of racial equality, agreed to do so. He purchased the land with the Carters’ money and turned it over to them — much to the chagrin of Hebert and other nearby residents.
In 1963, following a campaign of resistance by more than 50 of their neighbors, the Carters managed to build their home. Yet the hostility did not end. In 1966 and then again in 1967, their home was vandalized with racist graffiti. It was at this point that the Carters’ neighbors decided to turn, well, more neighborly, coming to their aid and even befriending the couple.
Nearly six decades later, and 17 years after the death of Helen, Matt Carter finally left us this month.
As a Lakeside resident, I walk by his house on occasion and wonder now what will become of it. It’s an ordinary-looking home, the sort most folks wouldn’t pay much attention to, let alone have any idea of its historical significance.
The same could probably be said of Matt and Helen Carter. They were just ordinary people who, in attempting to live their ordinary lives, did something extraordinary.
We should all be grateful. Duluth has yet to fully overcome the segregation that has long been one of its defining features, but the city is a better place for the Carters having lived here.
Scott Laderman teaches history at the University of MInnesota Duluth. He wrote this for the News Tribune.
Scott Laderman
