{"id":101,"date":"2014-01-15T11:20:11","date_gmt":"2014-01-15T17:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/historyapolis.com\/?p=101"},"modified":"2024-01-10T13:43:37","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T19:43:37","slug":"ice-cream-and-civil-rights-fosters-sweet-shop-on-the-1920s-northside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/2014\/01\/15\/ice-cream-and-civil-rights-fosters-sweet-shop-on-the-1920s-northside\/","title":{"rendered":"Ice Cream and Civil Rights: Fosters Sweet Shop on the 1920s Northside"},"content":{"rendered":"
Published January 15, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \n Anthony B. Cassius remembers that the civil rights movement in Minnesota got started over ice cream in a modest North Minneapolis confectionary. In the early 1930s, a man named Herbert Howell, who worked for the African-American newspaper the Spokesman, “got us together and we formed what was known as the Minnesota Club. Clifford Rucker was a prominent man in it. Herbert Howell, Lena Smith, Dr. Brown and myself, there was about eight of us. We met once a month in Fosters Sweet Shop on Sixth and Lyndale. We met in the back and all they wanted us to do if we met there was to buy a dish of ice cream. So we’d meet from about 7:30 at night ’til about 9:00.”<\/p>\n The Minnesota Club protested the screening of “The Birth of the Nation,” <\/a>the film lionizing the Ku Klux Klan that returned to the Twin Cities in late 1930. They must have discussed the situation of Arthur and Edith Lee, who bought a house at 4600 Columbus Avenue South<\/a> only to find themselves confronted by a white mob in 1931. Minnesota Club member Lena Olive Smith came to their defense as an attorney and representative of the NAACP, supporting their desire to remain in the all-white neighborhood in the face of death threats. They surely debated the problem of housing and jobs, as African Americans could only find work on the railroads or in the Athletic Club, the Elks Club or the Curtis Hotel in the 1930s. “Seventy-five percent of all the people living in the city of Minneapolis were on relief,” Cassius remembered.<\/p>\n