Minneapolis historically has been home to a small but vibrant African American population. From the 1930s to the 1970s, an African American neighborhood flourished on the city’s Southside, between East Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Sixth Streets and from Nicollet Avenue to Chicago Avenue.
In the early twentieth century, restrictive housing covenants in deeds discriminated against Blacks and limited them to living in certain areas. Homeowners and realtors refused to sell houses to them in white neighborhoods. As a result, three distinct Black neighborhoods developed in Minneapolis. The first two emerged on the near Northside and in Seven Corners.
By the 1930s, African Americans had begun to move to South Minneapolis. They came along with an influx of Blacks from southern states who were moving north in a demographic shift known as the “Great Migration.” The city’s third Black neighborhood developed on the Southside, between East Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Sixth Streets and from Nicollet Avenue to Chicago Avenue. The area, first populated by Swedes and Norwegians, now attracted many African Americans. In the 2010s, the Central, Bryant, and Regina neighborhoods make up what was historically known as the Southside.
The Southside was a stable neighborhood of working and middle-class African Americans, many of whom owned their homes. Residents formed a tight-knit community with businesses, churches, and social clubs. The corridor along Fourth Avenue South was the Black community’s residential heart. Thirty-Eighth Street and Fourth Avenue was the center of the Black business district, with over twenty Black-owned businesses from the 1930s to the 1970s.
One of the neighborhood’s first businesses was Dreamland Café, which opened in 1939 and was owned by Anthony B. Cassius. Later, Cassius operated a private club on the Southside called the Nacirema (“American” spelled backwards). Local artists performed at the Nacirema before they became famous, including Prince, Flyte Tyme (The Time), and Alexander O’Neal.
Alvedia Smith, the daughter of Anthony and Florence Cassius, said the Southside was a nice neighborhood. Smith worked at Dreamland Café when she was a teenager, making sandwiches for customers. Her aunt owned Bea’s Beauty Shop, her father and uncle owned a real estate company, and her father was chairman of the Associated Negro Credit Union, which was established in 1937.
Another pioneer Southside business was the 38th Street Delicatessen, owned by Donald (Pat) and Pearl Schofield. Sandra Schofield Miller said her father opened a bakery specializing in wedding cakes before closing it and opening the delicatessen in the 1940s.
Miller and her sister, Marcia Schofield Dudley, worked at the restaurant, which was a community meeting place. Men stopped by for coffee in the mornings, and in the afternoons, students from Bryant Junior High ate the “blue plate special” lunch. Miller said out-of-town Black entertainers dined at the restaurant when they stayed with Black families on the Southside because they could not stay at white hotels downtown. Miller recalled that Frankie Lymon ate at the restaurant and kissed the back of her hand.
The Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder (formerly the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder), the oldest continuously operated Black newspaper in Minnesota, was founded in 1934 by Cecil Newman. In 1958 it moved to 3744 Fourth Avenue South. In 2015, the Spokesman-Recorder celebrated its eightieth anniversary and was designated a historic landmark.
Construction of I-35W in 1959 razed more than fifty square blocks and divided Southside residents from one another. The neighborhood changed further in the 1980s and the 2000s, when it was negatively impacted by rising crime, harsh economic conditions, and the crack cocaine epidemic. The closing of the last local school, Central High School, in 1982, destroyed the neighborhood’s cohesiveness. All of the African American businesses closed except the Spokesman-Recorder. The demographics of the Central and Bryant neighborhoods changed as the white and Black populations decreased. The Hispanic population also increased, surpassing both the Black and white populations.
In 2015, community members expressed interest in preserving the African American history in the neighborhood. The City of Minneapolis explored a historic designation for the Tilsenbilt Homes, a group of over fifty houses in the Bryant and Regina neighborhoods. They were built from 1954 to 1956 by Edward Tilsen and sold to Blacks with the assistance of Archie Givens and the Minneapolis Urban League. Another historic landmark in the neighborhood is the home of Lena O. Smith, who was the first female African American attorney in Minneapolis.
For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.
What a wonderful history to learn about! Thank you for sharing!!
If you have not read it, please pick up Ntl Public Radio’s Michele Norris’s The Grace of Silence which tells about her growing up on the other side of the “color line” in south Minneapolis and her father’s story as well. You could add a reference to it in this very nice piece.
Very interesting and as usual very well researched journalism. Lived in a Twin Cities apartment building with many older black ladies, devout Christians, and much depended upon care givers and respected by younger people. Also worked with older black ladies raised in a different time, at Control Data, who had similar backgrounds. Saw a Netflix documentary last night about the introduction of cocaine and crack in the 80’s and what horrid destruction it visited upon Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. As a moderate ( yes I’ll admit it, not a tendy left wing or right wing zealot), I felt great empathy for our people, including Governor Walt, who has to try to cope with these times.
This time I caught my own typo – Governor Walz – not Walt. Like these ladies, some of whom I still keep in touch with, I pray for our people. ( And again that doesn’t imply I’m blind to the false prophets pretending to be Christians to enrich themselves or take advantage of other people, in different ways, or to my own spiritual shortcomings)
What happened to the shop on the corner of 46th and 4th in the 70s? I was just a kid, but I believe it was burned down in some racially motivated incident.
My brother worked at that shop delivering groceries during the 60’s. The owner was a Jewish guy named Sam. If I recall correctly, he sold it to a black guy, also named Sam. My recollection is that the residents of the apartment above had a fire that took the whole place down. I don’t know about the racial issue, my admittedly flawed memory recalls it having been drug-related. I think it had to have burned in the late 80’s because it was still there in the early 80’s when the Jesse Jackson campaign office was located a couple of doors down and I was working on that campaign.
What else happened after the 70’s, economically?
The destruction or severe weakening of many unions. The general deindustrialization of the Midwest and the disappearance of good jobs for people without a college degree. And, a generalized separating of the majority of people from the economic gains of the corporatization and financialization of society, with a collapse in job security, wages and benefits.
Nice story.
My father Claude Mason was one of Cassius’s partners in a business name Acirema, which owned the Nacirema, which operated as a separate business. They often met at our house in the 60’s and 70’s, since we lived barely half a block from the Nacirema. My father, along with my 105 year old uncle, Richard Mann also operated the Treasure Inn during the 50’s (it was covered in a 1990’s documentary on TPT) in Roseville that hosted many local and national Black bands.
Pat and Pearl Schofield were my aunt and uncle. I came along too late to have seen their bakery, but I heard about it from my family as well as from Marcia and Sandra. Pearl and Pat eventually bought a quadruplex a few blocks north of our house on 5th Avenue. They are, in some sense, the mentors I had when I bought my rental property in St Paul. There were plenty of other black-owned shops and businesses in that area, including beauty salons and barbershops.
Thanks for putting this together, it’s nice to see history preserved.
I did not know this story. Two black communities divided by interstate development (Rondo and Southside). Not a coincidence.
A little-known story; at the same time, also a story that’s sadly all too well known. Thriving black neighborhoods razed for freeways.
The subject of reparations may never be answered. People may continue to say, “Well, I didn’t do anything to hurt them.” If we prospered and profited because of these neighborhoods’ destruction, we have a hand on this.
This is where I proudly grew up, I attended Warrington Elementary School, Bryant Jr. HS and the magnificent Central HS.
Jet records, Crown and Young Brothers barbers, St. Peters ame church, Mays superette. I loved going to Hosmer library that still stands, football games and track meets at Central field, I used to have cream sodas at Schofield a truly magical place as a boy. Sam Pentel grocery treated us well as I remember. The Spokesman,
Webb barbershop. I first came across a James Brown album in jet record window on my 1st journey on my own as a little boy 9 or 10 years old. I lived at 38th and 4th, 38th and Portland, my Grandparents lived at 36th and 3rd. And 35th and Clinton. A truly beautiful place as a kid. I drive through there when I visit with a combination of pride and sadness.
Too many memories remember Sabathani?