Minnesota Gov. Pardon Black Man In 100 Old Lynching Case

100% Real With Lisa Cabrera

Minnesota's pardons board voted 3-0 to pardon Max Mason, one of several traveling circus workers accused in the 1920 case. Walz, a member of the board, called it “100 years overdue” and said Minnesota for too long believed that lynchings “happened (only) in the Southern states.”

“There is a direct line between what happened with Max Mason ... to what happened to George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis,” the Democratic governor said, referring to the May 25 death that has become a flashpoint in a national movement against police brutality and racism.

Attorney General Keith Ellison and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Lori Skjerven Gildea also voted to grant the pardon.

“(Mason's) criminal justice process, from his first encounter with the police all the way through to his parole, was tainted and fairly characterized as racist and racially biased,” Jerry Blackwell, the attorney who wrote the pardon application, told the board. “With nothing but the accusation and claim of innocence by a white woman and her boyfriend.”

The allegation came from a young man who attended the circus with 19-year-old Irene Tusken in June 1920 and who said six workers forced the couple at gunpoint into a ravine and raped Tusken, according to a case summary prepared for the board.

The man did not mention any attack when dropping off Tusken at her parents’ house but related the story to his father the next morning, the summary said.

Several workers, including Mason, were arrested, but neither Tusken nor the young man could identify any of them as alleged attackers, and a family doctor found no evidence of sexual assault of Tusken, the summary said. Mason was allowed to travel to the circus’ next city but was re-arrested the next day and eventually identified as an attacker by Tusken and the young man.

Thirteen other men had been jailed, and three — Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie — were dragged from their cells and lynched by a white mob the night of June 15.

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