This week in state history

Historic Minnesota events with anniversaries this week.

July 11

1999 Duluth’s state representative Willard Munger dies of liver cancer at age 88. He had served in the Minnesota House since 1955 and was known as Mr. Environment for his reputation as a pioneer, leader and activist in environmental legislation. The Willard Munger State Trail, which runs through Carlton County, is named in his honor.

July 12

1829 Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Taylor ends his command at Fort Snelling, which had begun May 24, 1828. He would later lead the U.S. Army in the war against Mexico, and “Old Rough and Ready” would take that fame to the White House. Taylor is the only U.S. president to have spent a significant amount of time in what would become the state of Minnesota. He described the territory as “a most miserable & uninteresting country” and an “out of the way part of the world.” He was elected president in 1848 and died in office at age 65 on July 9, 1850.

July 14

1901 A special act of the state legislature releases Jim and Cole Younger from the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater. They had been incarcerated for the murder of an employee during a Northfield bank robbery as part of the Jesse James Gang. Jim would commit suicide in St. Paul, but Cole would tour on a Wild West show with Frank James, lecturing on “What My Life Has Taught Me.” He died in 1915, his body still holding seven bullets.

July 15

1929 African American lawyer William T. Francis, appointed U.S. minister to Liberia by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927, dies of yellow fever in Monrovia. Born in Indianapolis in 1869, Francis moved to Minnesota in 1888 to work for the Northern Pacific Railway, first as a messenger, then stenographer, and then clerk in the legal department. He attended law school and by 1912 took over Frederick McGhee’s law practice. As a well-known St. Paul attorney, Francis participated in many racially charged trials, including the 1920 appeal of the Duluth lynchings trial, in which he represented Max Mason, who earlier this year was exonerated with a pardon. Mason was convicted and sentenced to serve seven to 30 years at Stillwater State Prison, serving four years, from 1921 to 1925. He was released on the condition that he would leave the state. On June 12 of this year, the Minnesota Board of Pardons granted Mason the first posthumous pardon in the history of the state of Minnesota. Francis’ wife, Nellie Griswold Francis, was a suffragist and social activist who wrote the state’s first anti-lynching bill and lobbied it through the Minnesota Legislature. The bill passed in 1921, less than a year after the lynchings in Duluth. The statute created a civil action for the survivors of lynching victims, allowing them to recover up to $7,500 (more than $100,000 in 2020 dollars) from the county where the victim had been held by police authorities. The statute said that police officers or sheriffs from whose custody the victim of the lynching had been taken “who shall fail or neglect to use all lawful means to resist such taking, shall be guilty of malfeasance and shall be removed from office by the Governor.” It was the first such law in the nation.

This column is derived from MNopedia.org and developed by the Minnesota Historical Society.