Understanding our Duluth Lynchings:Racial Violence in America & the Road to Justice & Reconciliation 

Monday, June 14, 2021 | 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

All are welcome at no cost. Registration fee for attorneys seeking CLE credit: $15 for public sector / $30 for private sector.

This virtual event commemorates one of the most horrific moments of racial violence in Minnesota history—the June 15, 1920 lynching of three young Black men, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie in Duluth—and examines the history of racially motivated violence and our efforts toward racial reconciliation.

The event will feature Bryan Stevenson, renowned civil rights lawyer, and Founder and Executive Director of Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). He will be interviewed by Jerry Blackwell, CEO of Blackwell Burke and one of the lead prosecuting attorneys in the trial of Derek Chauvin. The program will provide a broad perspective on racial violence in Minnesota and elsewhere, and the need for truth, accountability, justice, and reconciliation. As such, it will build on and complement the Duluth-based program and events that will be presented on June 13, 2021 by the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial (CJMM) to commemorate the lynchings.

Professors John Bessler, University of Baltimore School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, and Duchess Harris, Macalester College, will provide historical context about the legacy of lynching and racial violence in America. We will also hear from U.S. District Court Judge Richard Gergel, whose book “Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodward and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring,” reveals the heroic origins of the legal crusade to destroy Jim Crow and the entrenchment of racism through the tradition of states’ rights.

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