Indeed, there are many stories and history that need to be heard and shared. Growing up in the Twin Cities as a child in the 1950s and 1960s in school, I never would have heard of the contributions African Americans made in Minnesota\u2019s history. Fortunately, authors such as Dr. William Green have given us a gift with his biography of Nellie Griswold Francis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Born in 1874 in the Reconstruction world of Nashville, Tennessee, Nellie and her sister Lula were children of parents that strongly believed in public service, such as the establishment of the first African American high school in Nashville, the drive for equitable opportunities for Black schoolchildren, and a cemetery for the Black soldiers and the community at a time when racism\u2019s ugly head roared. That spirit of service and desire of a better life for her community was instilled in Nellie and Lula at a young age by their father, Thomas Griswold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The family relocated to St. Paul in 1883. At her commencement ceremony from St. Paul Central High School in 1891, Nellie gave a stirring speech, a portent of what this 17-year-old girl would become. A light-skinned woman who could pass for white but identified as Black, Nellie\u2019s future would be one of public service and complexity despite the conventions placed upon a woman of her time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1893, she married William \u201cBilly\u201d Francis. Their union brought the couple interacting with notables such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, and Hallie Q. Brown. Billy was an ardent follower of Washington\u2019s accommodationist policies, never speaking out against the overt racism occurring in other parts of the country; he would change his position years later, after Washington\u2019s death in 1915. Ambitious, Billy would become a lawyer and run for public office, with Nellie by his side. In the course of time, they would become the power couple in St. Paul\u2019s Black community and part of the history of Pilgrim Baptist Church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though they were profiled by the Black press of the time (The Appeal<\/em> and the Twin City Star<\/em>), people who saw her \u201cprivilege\u201d never saw her heartache when she and her husband were at odds over their respective views on racial justice, or her pain over their childless marriage and her mother Maggie\u2019s poor health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Nellie, her work so often did not garner the recognition it richly deserved as an officer of the Minnesota Federation of Colored Women\u2019s Clubs and the Everywoman Suffrage Club, nor that many speeches Billy gave were written by Nellie. When it came to securing the funds for Pilgrim Baptist Church\u2019s pipe organ, it was she who obtained the balance through an audience with philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. And with the Rondo community being small as it was, jealousies from within it were frustrating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, she was active in women\u2019s suffrage and addressing the duplicity of white suffragists as it pertained to race, not only leading to the passing of the 19th<\/sup> Amendment, but her crowning achievement in public service: being the author of Minnesota\u2019s anti-lynching law, a law that has yet to reach the federal level to date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thank you, Dr. Green, for your intense, in-depth study of this complex woman, her accomplishments, and the milieu of African Americans in Minnesota during the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> centuries. If we don\u2019t share these stories, who will?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Indeed, there are many stories and history that need to be heard and shared. Growing up in the Twin Cities as a child in the 1950s and 1960s in school, I never would have heard of the contributions African Americans made in Minnesota\u2019s history. Fortunately, authors such as Dr. William Green have given us a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[98,29,32],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","tag-african-americans","tag-minnesota","tag-twin-cities","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":764,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions\/764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}