A Public Accommodations Crusade
In December 1916, Dr. W. Ellis Burton and attorney Lena O. Smith (NwCL 1921) went to the Pantages Theatre on Hennepin Avenue in the heart of Minneapolis’ entertainment district, joined by their friends L. C. Valle, Oscar C. Press and the young attorney Rufus Augustine Skinner. The theater, built in 1916 and originally used for vaudeville, was the 26th of what would eventually be a 500-theater conglomerate in the U.S. founded by Greek immigrant Alexander Pantages. With tickets in hand for seats on the “parquet floor” of the theater, they were turned away because they were Black. Burton and Smith, along with the others, sued the Pantages Theater. Burton and Smith each asked for $500 in damages, and Smith also sued for assault, asking for $1,000 in damages.
R.A. Skinner, as he was known, and Brown S. Smith represented the group against the theater mogul, who was served with papers at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis. The Black-owned newspaper The Twin City Star reported that Black Americans were discriminated against in Pantages Theaters nationwide and opined, “The Star is proud that the plaintiffs have accepted no compromise, and are making a fight for their race. Every Negro, who is denied his rights should resort to legal methods to obtain them, whenever possible.”
The Burton-Smith group was intent on vindicating the Minnesota public accommodations law prohibiting refusal of service to individuals based on race and color. The Minnesota law, passed in 1885, was one of the first state public accommodations law in the country. It was intended to mimic the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883 as beyond the powers of Congress granted in the 13th and 14th Amendments. The 1875 federal Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in “accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement” on the basis of race, color or “previous condition of servitude.” Minnesota’s act specifically added restaurants and barber shops to the list of establishments covered.
Despite the law, both prominent and ordinary African Americans continued to experience racial discrimination in public accommodations in Minnesota. Perhaps most notoriously, in 1887, noted architect William Hazel was twice refused hotel lodgings because of his color, and when he called a policeman to vindicate his rights under the law, he was arrested for drunken disorderly conduct, even though he was sober.
Such blatant disregard of the public accommodations law prompted amendments to it, led by Representative John Francis (J. Frank) Wheaton, the first African American elected to the Minnesota legislature (1898), and the first Black graduate (1894) of the University of Minnesota Law School. Wheaton himself was no stranger to racial discrimination in Minneapolis, having been refused service at the Creamery in 1895, and falsely arrested for the theft of a wallet at the St. Paul Metropolitan Hotel in 1897.
The Star reported on October 6, 1917, that the Pantages plaintiffs lost their suit after trial, although the Pantages had by then changed its policy. However, the lawsuit was followed by other suits against the Lyceum Theater and the Nicollet Hotel in Minneapolis.
Early Legal Career
R.A. or R. Augustine Skinner graduated from Northwestern College of Law in 1915 and was admitted to the Minnesota bar on February 16, 1916. After practicing law in the Twin Cities for a while, he and his family moved to Chicago in September 1921, where he was admitted to the Cook County, Illinois bar. In 1937, they returned to Minnesota. The attorney who memorialized Skinner suggests that this return to begin a new practice in Minnesota at the age of 51 must have been difficult in the middle of the Depression.
A Civil Rights Advocate
The Pantages suit was not the only public accommodations suit Skinner was involved in. In 1938, Skinner also won a lawsuit against a “Hennepin Avenue proprietor” on behalf of Nell Dodson (Russell). Dodson, an African American Minnesotan who went on to be a sportswriter for the Baltimore Afro-American and entertainment reporter for The People’s Voice in New York, later returned to Minnesota to work on the Black newspaper, the Minneapolis Spokesman. Before her return, Dodson became nationally known for her candid coverage of racial discrimination in the sports and entertainment worlds, from the unequal pay and inferior training facilities Black professional athletes received to the meager salaries paid to Black Harlem nightclub performers.
In the Nicollet Hotel case in 1938, Skinner represented Standard Oil dealer Martin Brown, who was invited by colleagues at the company meeting he was attending to have a beer in the hotel bar. When he was told by the bartender that the hotel did not serve Negroes, Skinner filed suit for him, asking for $500 in damages (over $10,000 in today’s dollars.) Although his meeting companions verified his story, the bartenders claimed that they refused to serve him at first because they thought he was intoxicated but then offered him a beer when they learned that he was not.
Skinner also successfully represented Earl Shamwell in a public accommodations suit against a local drug store the same year, winning $15 in damages; and he sued a Duluth tavern for racial discrimination in 1944. In 1941, he also worked on a federal lawsuit claiming bias by the Home Guard, the unit that had been formed to protect the state after the National Guard was federalized during World War I. The Home Guard had also formed a segregated Black unit because Black citizens lobbied for a chance to protect their country.
NAACP Work
R.A. Skinner, a prominent member of the African American legal community, was among the most active members of the local chapter of the NAACP, which he served as treasurer, long-time secretary, and ultimately president starting in 1941. In these roles, Skinner played an important part in the civil rights activity of the NAACP and related groups.
One of Skinner’s duties as NAACP secretary was to handle an anti-lynching fund started by the NAACP to further its work. Just before Skinner moved to Chicago, on June 15, 1920, a white mob lynched three Black circus workers held in the Duluth city jail on suspicion of rape. The NAACP mobilized quickly to ensure counsel for seven other men indicted as participants in the rape, raising funds to enlist prominent national lawyers to defend them. Although one of the men was convicted, the NAACP’s efforts resulted in getting charges against five of the men dropped, and another was acquitted after trial.
The Minneapolis NAACP anti-lynching effort was also responsive to high-profile lynchings in Abbeville, South Carolina and Waco, Texas. Black farmer Anthony Crawford was lynched in South Carolina in 1916 for arguing with a white merchant over the price of cotton seed; and his family was driven out of town, their property seized by white residents. In Waco, 17-year-old farm hand Jesse Washington was dragged through the town streets, stabbed, beaten, castrated, and finally doused with oil and lynched over a fire in May 1916, after he was convicted of raping and murdering his white employer’s wife.
Skinner also organized an NAACP petition seeking clemency for dozens of Black servicemen accused in the so-called Houston Riot of 1917. The soldiers had been court-martialed and sentenced to death for marching, against orders, on the Houston police department to protest white police brutality. They were angry after being told that a revered Black officer had been killed by the police for protesting police brutality against another Black serviceman; fortunately, the rumor was false, though the officer had been brutally beaten and shot.
One of the most important Minnesota civil rights cases in which Skinner played an important part was the effort to overturn the University of Minnesota’s student segregation system. African American and Jewish students were labeled as “problems” for the University, and one 1927 report on future of admissions at the University did not even mention the Black children in Minnesota potentially eligible to attend the university. President Lotus D. Coffman attempted to preserve racial distinctions by segregating students in housing off and on campus during his administration from 1920-1938. Although he permitted Black fraternities and a sorority to exist, these minority institutions were barely recognized in the university’s publications and campus organizations, which were also segregated.
Starting in the 1930s, University of Minnesota students, joined by civil rights organizations and angry parents of the Black students, began to push back, mobilizing to create integrated student housing and end other racist practices. One of the most notorious of these incidents occurred in October 1931, when John Pinkette, Jr. moved into the newly built Pioneer Hall, but was asked to leave only a few hours later. President Coffman pushed back against efforts to integrate student housing, saying students of different races should not live or socialize together, because it was important to him to maintain a social hierarchy preferring white students.
In the early 1940’s, as the Minneapolis NAACP president, Skinner was Chairman of the Citizens’ Committee that reacted to the segregated housing crisis at the University. The U of M’s then-President Walter Coffey promised Skinner that the University would integrate the International House, which was a segregated housing unit for Black male students, in 1942; but behind closed doors, he continued to undermine integration efforts.
Skinner also became embroiled in a national controversy over homeland support of the war effort during World War II. Shortly after the start of the war, the Charleston Navy Yard advertised for seamstresses to make military clothing, but the Navy then began hiring only white women for the 600 positions. The local and national chapters of the NAACP saw this as an opportunity to make a point and push for more jobs for Black women.
Skinner, who had a prominent national position because of his NAACP work, was critical in turning the tide to hire Black women as Navy seamstresses. An acquaintance of Minnesota Congressmen Knute Nelson, Clarence Miller, and Harold Knutson, he sent letters to them asking that they intervene. Since southern Blacks did not have much political power in this era, his strategy was to stoke Republican fears that northern Black voters would vote out of anger for Democrats. He was successful in getting the Minnesota Congressmen to argue that the exclusion of Black women from these jobs harmed the war effort, thus overturning the exclusion of Black women from these and other defense jobs.
The Minneapolis NAACP also lent its voice to national protests against draft and industrial boards that were discriminating against returning soldiers in assisting them to find work. Skinner was also part of the NAACP effort to protest racial discrimination in the railroad industry to Treasury Secretary (and son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson) William Gibbs McAdoo, a former railroad industry executive. The chapter won a local victory when Minneapolis Mayor Thomas Van Lear prohibited the showing of “Birth of the Nation” in the Twin Cities in 1944.
Skinner also represented at least two clients on law enforcement excessive force issues. He made local news in 1940 by representing Paul DuWalt (or DeWalt) a 67-year-old Black man who had escaped to Minnesota from an Arkansas penal farm in 1921, after being brutally beaten on a daily basis by prison guards using a leather strap loaded with buckshot. Governor Harold Stassen refused the extradition request for DuWalt, who had lived in Minnesota for 19 years before the extradition demand was made. In 1918, Skinner won a lawsuit filed by a Black homeowner whose dog had been killed when police invaded his home, securing a $25 verdict for the client even though the police officer claimed he had killed the dog in self-defense.
A black mark on Skinner’s record involved a presentation he made at the Negro-Jewish Relations forum in April 1943. While it is not clear precisely what he said, according to a disparaging news report, “Mr. Skinner perhaps voiced some of the complaints of countless Negros who have a bad experience with one Jewish merchant, and then go out and say, ‘They’re all alike.’”
Community Leader
Skinner was one among several Black leaders in Minnesota who believed that Black Americans could best build on early 20th century gains by demonstrating their patriotism. As an example, he participated in a 1917 community effort to organize a Black military unit to fight in World War I. The newspaper report of the organizing meeting for this effort noted that “the Minnesota Indians” and “the Greeks” had offered similar military units to Governor J.A.A. Burnquist at the time and attendees urged Black Minnesotans to do the same. In response, the Governor organized a segregated Black unit of the National Guard.
Skinner also regularly and stridently urged his fellow Black citizens to support legal institutions even while challenging them to advocate for the rights of their race in solidarity with others in the NAACP. In 1918, while chastising the military for failing to provide privileges and opportunities for Black war conscripts, the NAACP passed a resolution saying that Black citizens who refused military service were “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.“
In that vein, Skinner also warned his fellow Black Minnesotans against being recruited by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the Wobblies), a radical labor organization with ties to socialist and anarchist movements. Skinner noted that since the dawn of the republic, Black citizens had given “proof of their unswerving loyalty to [American] institutions, and any organization that under whatever name has for its ultimate object the overturning of our government and laws will not find in the negro a ready response.”
Beyond his civil rights work, R.A. Skinner also contributed in other ways to political and social life in the Twin Cities. He ran for assistant county attorney in Hennepin County, apparently unsuccessfully. He also investigated and reported on the lack of transparency about management and conditions at the Crispus Attucks home, an orphanage for Black children in St. Paul. Skinner was a member of the Hennepin County and Minnesota State Bar Associations. He also was a long-time member of the Minneapolis Urban League board of directors.
Skinner was an associate editor and contributor to the Twin City Star. He also represented the Star in a libel suit brought against it, along with Thomas Schall (SPCL 1904), later to become a United States Senator.
Skinner’s newspaper columns and ads regularly excoriated Black Minnesotans for “allow[ing] ourselves to lapse into a state of inertia and lethargy that we are oblivious of the wrongs meted out to our people, and not even attempt to raise our voice in protest.” He consistently claimed that the duty of Black Minnesotans was to ally themselves with the NAACP to continue to put pressure on discriminatory institutions. In one 1917 ad, he gave “six good reasons” for joining the NAACP. In the ad, he noted that the NAACP teaches “that race prejudice is the most evil thing in the world today” and that “it combats, in the courts, state legislatures, the Halls of Congress, the government departments and everywhere, the spirit of persecution against the Colored People which grows out of race prejudice.”
Politically active, Skinner promoted the election of fellow alumnus Floyd B. Olson when he ran for Conciliation Court and District Court judge W.C. Leary when he was up for re-election, among others.
Skinner was also a community orator. In March 1917, he gave a long-delayed address (apparently because of inclement weather) on “Duty” at the Minneapolis Sunday Forum, an organization he had led, focusing on the responsibility of Black Minnesotans to get involved with the work of the NAACP. In September 1917, he gave an address to the Forum on “The Negro and the Church” at the Pro-Cathedral Parish School, a well-attended community event. Preceded by a pianist and a “humorous” reading, he was introduced and applauded by Father Cullen for his industry, perseverance, and determination.
An amateur actor, in 1916 Skinner played the role of Baron Von Strelitz in The Rose of Eden, a performance by the Minneapolis Dramatic Club. In 1917, he organized the play Pro Tem as a benefit for the NAACP and took on the role of Dr. Adolphus Blank. He was a charter member of the local Checker[s] Club and was admitted to the Ames Lodge of the Elks.
As a lawyer, Skinner also represented Minnesotans in a variety of other “bread-and-butter” disputes. For example, he represented Mary Withers, wife of Pastor M.W. Withers of Zion Baptist Church, in a divorce involving “sensational charges” against the pastor. An alleged coat thief also buttonholed him in court to ask Skinner to represent him in a larceny case being tried at the same time; Skinner obtained an acquittal for him. He also made the news for defending a mail carrier accused of mail theft.
In his Hennepin County bar memorial, his anonymous memorialist said of him:
Mr. Skinner had a personality at once courtly, friendly, and quietly courageous. He was innately a gentleman, with a sense of humor and a sparkling wit that was free from malice. Throughout adversity and the vicissitudes of life he was not given to complaint but bore heavy burdens with manliness and complete lack of ostentation. He was accomplished in the language of Racine and Corneille and spoke it with the scholarly ease of an advocate of the Court of Appeal.
He had a deep respect for the courts and for our system of law. He did his full part in achieving harmony in our community and without yielding principle, was so tactful and considerate, diplomatic and genuinely friendly, that he won the admiration and respect of those of other races, and in his quiet and orderly way, with his profound respect for law and with a deeply imbued sense of Christian charity, he quickened the consciences of many who might not have been impressed by other methods.
Personal History
Rufus Augustine Skinner was born in French Guiana in 1885 and his early education was in Guiana. While he went to Canada intending to study medicine, he changed direction and came to the United States to study law at Northwestern College of Law in Minneapolis. He married Margaret Fairley, a New York dressmaker who was also from Port-au-Spain, French Guiana, in 1918; and they had two daughters, Andrea and Rita. His wife died in 1939, and Skinner died on January 29, 1953, at the age of 68.
Skinner was a pious Catholic, serving as a religious instructor at the Margaret Barry House, a community organization first formed to serve Italian Catholic immigrants. He was one of the original members of the Society of Blessed Martin de Porres, an African American saint. Skinner was an incorporator and lay trustee of the Church of St. Leonard of Port Maurice and the Church of St. Martin for much of his life. He was active in the Holy Name Society, Third Order of St. Francis, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Skinner was also a member and appointed speaker of St. Mary’s Court, the Catholic Order of Foresters, a fraternal life insurance organization.
References
*The quotations in this biography are taken from the references below
DeNeen L. Brown, Vandals Damage Historical Marker Commemorating 1917 Uprising by Black Soldiers, Washington Post (Sept. 8, 2017), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/24/i-am-not-guilty-the-mass-hanging-of-13-black-soldiers-after-the-bloody-1917-houston-riots/
Linda A. Cameron, Wheaton, John Francis (1866-1922), Mnopedia, Minnesota Historical Society (Last modified: March 2, 2019), https://www.mnopedia.org/person/wheaton-john-francis-1866-1922
Hennepin County Bar Association, Memorial for Rufus Augustine Skinner (1885-1953), http://www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org/assets/Skinner,%20Rufus.pdf
Pantages Theater: Individual Landmark, City of Minneapolis, https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/resident-services/property-housing/property-info/landmarks/alphabetical/pantages-theater/
Pantages Bars Negros: Legal Action Taken, Twin City Star, Dec. 9, 1916, at 4 (repeated Dec. 16, 1916)
Suit Against Pantages, Twin City Star, Dec. 23, 1916, at 4 (repeated Dec. 30, 1916, at 4)
Anti-Lynching Fund Started, Twin City Star, Jan. 6, 1917, at 2 (repeated Jan. 13, 1917)
Minneapolis Sunday Forum, A Good Meeting, Twin City Star, Mar. 10, 1917, at 2
A Negro Military Unit Organized in the Twin Cities, Twin City Star, Apr. 14, 1917, at 2
The Sunday Forum, Twin City Star, May 12, 1917, at 2
Mrs. Withers Receives Alimony, Twin City Star, May 26, 1917, at 2
The Sunday Forum, Twin City Star, May 26, 1917, at 2
Pantages Theatre Owners Sued, Twin City Star, Sept. 29, 1917, at 4
N.A.A.C.P. Benefit Draws Great Crowd, Twin City Star, Nov. 17, 1917, at 5
Secy Skinner Appeals for Support for N.A.A.C.P., Twin City Star, Dec. 29, 1917, at 5
A Patriotic Meeting, Twin City Star, Mar. 23, 1918, at 4
Advertisement: Attention! First Annual Entertainment, The Appeal, May 25, 1918, at 4 (repeated June 1, 1918, at 4)
Political Advertisement: Floyd B. Olson for Conciliation Judge, Twin City Star, June 15, 1918, at 5
Marriage Announcement: Skinner-Fairley, Twin City Star, Sept. 7, 1918, at 5
Advertisement: W.C. Leary: Judge of District Court., Twin City Star, Nov. 2, 1918, at 4
Secures Verdict Against Policeman, Twin City Star, Dec. 7, 1918, at 3
A Meeting to Protest Against Injustices, Twin City Star, Dec. 7, 1918, at 3
Decision Rendered in Dodson Case, Twin-City Herald, Sept. 3, 1938, at 1
Judge Anderson Hears Brown vs. Nicollet Hotel, Minneapolis Spokesman, April 28, 1939, at 1
Fugitive Bares Scars in Fight on Extradition, Star Tribune, July 27, 1940, at 14
Strange Position by NAACP President, Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 30, 1943, at 2