Racial Justice in the National Guard
In February 1941, the controversy between prominent Black Minnesotans and Minnesota governors over remedying discrimination in Minnesota’s home security force came to a head and alumnus Maceo Littlejohn was at the center of it.
After the Minnesota National Guard was federalized and deployed to fight in World War I, the state was left without any military unit to help guard the state against invasions. The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, charged with the responsibility of identifying and punishing alleged traitors, which were usually German and other immigrants, formed the Minnesota Home Guard on April 28, 1917.
Despite the Home Guard’s exclusion of African Americans, the Minnesota African American community, led by Clarence Wiginton, persuaded Governor J.A.A. Burnquist to form an all-African American battalion of the Minnesota Home Guard, the 16th Battalion. The legislature approved formation of a separate battalion on April 25, 1919, and the 16th Battalion became the First Infantry Battalion of the Minnesota Militia, which continued on after the Home Guard was disbanded in 1920 but still segregated from the Minnesota National Guard.
When World War II came, Black Minnesotans decided to challenge the segregation in the National Guard. Several of them applied to be enlisted in the white Guard, and were refused on the basis of their color. A Minnesota Negro Defense League was formed to take this protest to the Governor, then young Harold Stassen, who had upset Thomas F. Gallagher in the gubernatorial race of 1938. The national NAACP provided a Chicago attorney, Irving Mollison, to prepare a lawsuit challenging the exclusion of Black Minnesotans from the Guard.
On May 30, 1941, the Minnesota Negro Defense Committee, organized by fellow alumni Maceo Littlejohn and J.W. Pate, among others, held a meeting to discuss why Governor Stassen refused to meet with them about the unwillingness of the National Guard to admit Black Minnesotans.
Originally, the Governor’s office refused to grant a meeting with the protesters. In response, the Negro Defense League began meeting to plan a public protest, a march on the Capitol, to the governor’s office. At the second meeting of the League, filled to overflowing with community members, the organizers announced that they were halting the march on the Capitol because the Governor had sent a wire to one of the organizers, Reverend C.T. R. Nelson, advising the group that he was willing to meet with them. While the Governor denied that he had ever received a request to meet with the group, the Defense Committee passed around letters at its mass meeting showing that there had been a long correspondence with the Governor’s office on this topic.
Governor Stassen also claimed that his administration had not discriminated against any African Americans, and pointed to his office’s help in establishing the Phyllis Wheatley camp for “underprivileged children.” As evidence of his commitment to racial justice, he also cited his refusal to grant extradition of a Black Minnesotan, Paul DeWalt, who had escaped constant torture in prison in Arkansas and lived quietly for many years in Minnesota before being discovered.
Stassen also charged that there was political motivation in agitating for the desegregation of the Home Guard, claiming, “[i]t appears to me that possibly some of your people for political purposes are endeavoring to stir up false issues and the tragedy is that in doing so, they will hurt their own people more than they will their political opponents.” In reply to this charge, the Negro Defense Committee members pointed out that many of them had supported the Governor in his campaign.
While this meeting was being arranged, the Governor’s office announced that Raymond Cannon of Minneapolis and Lawrence Tarver of Saint Paul were being appointed to study “the defense situation.” The Governor’s letter stated:
I am requesting you to advise me regarding a sound manner to grant an opportunity to our fellow citizens, who are of the Negro race, to participate in the defense of our state and our country in the emergencies that are ahead of us, particularly arising through our National Guard leaving the state to enter Federal service. I wish you would give this matter careful thought. Confer with other veterans of the last war, with the Legion Posts and with other leaders whom you may wish to confer with and then report to me for a conference in which I will determine the action the state will take.
Cannon backed up the Governor’s statement that he had not refused to meet with any Black Minnesotan individuals or groups, and was not opposed to having Black Minnesotans admitted to the Minnesota Defense Force. Some members of the Negro Defense Committee expressed themselves as not satisfied with the Governor’s continued refusal to see them. While nothing came from the Governor’s investigation, ultimately, the National Guard was desegregated by order of President Harry S Truman in 1948, along with the rest of the Armed Forces.
Littlejohn as a Union Activist
Maceo Littlejohn was employed as a waiter on the Northern Pacific Railroad while working his way through St. Paul College of Law, where he graduated in 1926. His railroad experience impelled him toward a life of union-building and civic activism. Given St. Paul’s critical location as a key point for many railroad companies, including The Great Northern, Burlington and Northern Pacific Railroad’s, Littlejohn’s decision to try to organize railroad workers probably made sense. He followed in the footsteps of A. Phillip Randolph, who had begun to organize the largely Black sleeping car porters nationally in 1925.
However, Littlejohn’s first efforts to integrate the local railroad unions failed, because the Teamsters refused to admit Black dining car workers to their union. Undeterred, Littlejohn decided to organize Black workers in the hospitality industry, successfully getting the key union in that area, Hotel and Restaurant and Bartenders International Alliance of America, to accept Black Minnesota workers into their union as affiliates. In 1938, Littlejohn worked with fellow SPCL alumnus Hector Vassar, and with Maceo Finney and Anthony Cassius to organize Local 516 of the Dining Car Employees Union and the Bartenders International Union, and he served as the general secretary for Local 516 from 1940-47. Among those union disputes was the 1938 decision of the St. Paul Hotel not to hire Black waiters until their “service, appearance and conduct improve.” Littlejohn participated in brokering a deal that made railroad car waiters available to St. Paul hotels.
Despite his efforts, Littlejohn was passed over for a vice-presidency in the national union because he was Black.
Littlejohn also organized the first mass meeting of the Joint Labor Negro Council at the Wheatley House in March 1940. That year, Littlejohn was appointed to chair the St. Paul Joint Labor Council.
Legal and Civil Rights Work
However, Littlejohn also practiced law, doing family law among other things. At one time, he was in practice with Evan Anderson, son of James Anderson, one of the first three Black lawyers to graduate from St. Paul College of Law. Littlejohn used his law degree to organize efforts to fight for civil rights for African Americans as well. In 1941, he worked on several racial bias cases for the NAACP and served as chair of its legal redress committee for a few years. Among the cases that the committee worked on was a 1942 lawsuit on behalf of Dorothy Blair who was refused service at a downtown St. Paul eatery due to her race.
Littlejohn also helped sue the Eagles Lodge in St. Paul, which refused a party room rental for Reginald Harrison, a Black Army soldier departing for the war, when the hotel learned that both White and Black guests would be at the party. In 1943, on behalf of the NAACP Legal Redress Committee, Littlejohn successfully petitioned the St. Paul parks commissioner to overturn a refusal to allow Eugene Ross into the skating rink on St. Paul’s Harriet Island based on his race.
An active member of the Farmer Labor Party and supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s run for president in 1944, Littlejohn fought for an extension of the Minnesota equal rights bill proposed in April, 1943, serving on a coordinating committee to pass the bill and testifying at the legislature. In light of rampant discrimination against Jewish as well as Black residents, the bill would have broadened the state’s racial discrimination law to include bias based on religion and national origin and prevent anonymous handbills inciting racial and religious bias. The bill was tabled in the House Judiciary Committee even though fifty citizens, including prominent religious, labor and business leaders, showed up to testify on behalf of the bill.
In his testimony on the civil rights bill, Littlejohn said, “It is you who have the power to say whether justice shall be done, and whether you have the courage to do it.” Within the week, the bill was forced out of committee and passed, but the $500 civil damages remedy was removed, and the criminal portion of the bill was reduced from a gross misdemeanor to a misdemeanor, greatly reducing the “teeth” of the amendment.
Personal Life
Maceo Littlejohn was born June 4, 1897 in Clarendon, Arkansas. Like many Black children of his generation, he was probably named after African-Cuban General Antonio Maceo, the second-in-command in the Cuban army fighting for independence from Spain, who was greatly admired by many Black Americans of that time. There is little record of his early life until he went to law school. He was married to Alberta O. Horne Littlejohn in 1925 and his son Maceo Jr was born the same year. Maceo Sr. died on February 17, 1967, and Alberta preceded him in death in 1944.
References
Minneapolis Spokesmen articles: Governor names two to investigate part Negroes would play in defense, February 14, 1941 (also available at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, _ <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025247/1941-02-14/ed-1/seq-1/>); Littlejohn named new St. Paul Labor Council Chairman, April 26, 1940, p1; Negroes to hold Defense Mass Meeting Sunday afternoon at Wheatley, May 30, 1941, p1 c1; St. Paul NAACP Launches All-out War on All Types of Racial Discrimination, January 30, 1942 p.1; Receives Divorce from Ernest Johnson, March 27, 1942, p1 c3; Minnesota House Allows Equal Rights Bill to be Buried in Committee, April 2, 1943, p1 c7; Public Opinion Forces Equal Rights Bill out of Committee but with “Teeth Extracted,” April 9, 1943, p1; Truax Prompt in Ending Race Bar at Park, August 6, 1943, p1 c7; Negroes Active as Political Camps Organize, April 7, 1944 p1 c6; All-Party Group is Formed for Re-election of President Roosevelt, October 27, 1944, p1 c2
Negro Waiters Face Loss of St. Paul Hotel, Chronicling America V.6 n.9, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025247/1939-10-13/ed-1/seq-1/ocr.txt
Peter J. DeCarlo, Sixteenth Battalion, Minnesota Home Guard MNopedia, https://www.mnopedia.org/group/sixteenth-battalion-minnesota-home-guard
Luke Mielke, Racial Uplift in a Jim Crow Local: Black Union Organizing in Minneapolis Hotels 1930-1940, Macalester Digital Commons, https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=amst_honors
David Riehle, ‘300 Afro-American Performers’ The Great Cuba Pageant of 1898: St Paul’s Citizens Support the Struggle for Civil Rights, 33 Ramsey County History 35 (1999)