Postcards of the hanging: Dylan's Minnesota conjures a complicated past

By R.J. Morgan

Last weekend I ventured north to Mankato, Minn., to see Bob Dylan perform in his native state. 

I’m teaching a course on the singer this semester, and had never seen him play a show in Minnesota. Plus it was opening weekend for the Minnesota Twins baseball team, a park I’d not yet seen in person.

Dylan (then named Robert Zimmerman) was born in Duluth and mostly raised in Hibbing, a mining outpost up in the northernmost part of the state. 

Mankato is about an hour south of Minneapolis, population 40,000. Minnesota State University has its campus there. The Minnesota River runs through its center. 

I stayed at a Super 8 motel, which shares a parking lot with the only remaining Happy Chef, a once proud midwestern breakfast franchise. Despite the current shortage, their eggs were reasonably priced. 

Dylan played his show in the local hockey arena. It was a good one. At almost 84 years old, he mostly sits behind the piano, sing-speaking many of the lyrics and banging out key changes for his backing band like a field general trying to take a hill. More than half the show was songs from his latest album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” released in 2020, which has become standard practice. 

But recently he’s added “Desolation Row," a song from 1965, to his regular set. 

It opens:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

The lyrics aren’t a southern lynching reference. This hanging was in Duluth. On June 15, 1920, the town lynched three Black circus workers for the alleged rape and robbery of a local white teenager. A doctor’s examination found no physical evidence to corroborate the story, but a mob of more than 1,000 men still raided the jail, assigned guilt and hanged the three men from a light pole. 

This ad for John Robinson's traveling circus ran in the June 10, 1920, edition of the Duluth Herald. The day after the event, three Black circus workers were lynched by a local mob.

The public service commissioner told police to stand down and let it happen. Someone gathered members of the mob together for a posed photograph with the bodies and, as was a disturbingly common practice, printed it on postcards to be sold as souvenirs. 

The Chicago Evening Post wrote: 

“This is a crime of a northern state, as black and ugly as any that has brought the south into disrepute. The Duluth authorities stand condemned in the eyes of the nation. They cannot escape condemnation by the plea that an attempt at effective resistance–an attempt involving the use of firearms–would have resulted in blood shed. Blood should have been shed before the mob was permitted to trample law and justice under foot, before possibly innocent men were surrendered to a summary and undiscriminating vengeance.”

The hanging happened two blocks from what would eventually become Bob Dylan’s childhood home. 

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At the ballpark the next day I sat next to two middle-aged local men, both of whom were Twins season ticketholders. They schooled me on the ins and outs of the team’s current lineup. They expect the club to challenge for the division crown this year. We had a great time. 

They asked me why I was there, and eventually the conversation turned to Dylan. Neither had driven down for the previous night’s show, but both knew it was happening and were familiar with Dylan’s current catalog. They seemed proud that one of their own was still out there on the road, innovating and entertaining. 

One scrolled through his phone until he found some pictures he took of Dylan’s boyhood home in Duluth, the same home referenced above, in 2020. 

They asked me about Mankato, so I told them about the Happy Chef. And the Super 8 motel. 

“Yeah, it’s a great little town,” one said. “Of course it’s mostly known for the hangings.” 

That got my attention. I asked them to explain.

The story goes like this: In 1862, after a series of abusive treaties and with their people facing starvation, a group of Dakota braves rose up against the U.S. government and killed more than 500 white settlers in an effort to take back control of the Minnesota River valley. 

They were ultimately defeated, and a hastily assembled tribunal sentenced more than 300 natives to death for their troubles. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the trial transcripts (surely an unwelcome distraction; he was trying to win a civil war at the time) and personally approved the hanging of 38 guilty men. 

They were hanged in Mankato, day after Christmas, 1862. 

It remains the largest single-day mass execution in American history. 

The brutality of the history lesson sat in contrast with the sunny afternoon. The casualness of the gentlemen’s delivery mirrored, at least to my ears, the way Mississippians often speak about our own troubled past. Something less than pride, but something more than shame. 

It also reminded me that southerners do not have exclusive purchase of this nation’s violent history. There has always been an element of cut-and-dried cruelty to America’s policies of state, regardless of region. 

We have justified a lot in the name of manifest destiny. 

Still do, in fact. 

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R.J. Morgan is instructional associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, director of the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.