Minnesota’s pardons board on Friday granted a posthumous pardon to a black man imprisoned a century ago in the alleged rape of a white woman, part of a case that included the infamous lynchings of three other black men in Duluth.
The board voted 3-0 to pardon Max Mason, one of several traveling circus workers accused in the 1920 case. Democratic Gov. Tim 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,” Walz said, referring to the May 25 death of Floyd that has become a flashpoint in a national movement against police brutality and racism.
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Attorney General Keith Ellison and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Lori Skjerven Gildea also voted to grant the pardon.
“Racial terror is not limited to one section of our country,” Ellison said before the vote. “It may have taken place more frequently in some places, but there’s not an inch of our country that doesn’t need to address this critical issue.”
A case summary prepared for the board said 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 the summary, the young man made no mention of any attack when dropping off Tusken at her parents’ house but related the story to his father early the next morning.
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.
Meanwhile, 13 other men had been jailed in the case, and three — Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie — were dragged from their cells and lynched by a mob the night of June 15.
Mason was convicted that November, and unsuccessfully pursued appeals and pardons in subsequent years. During one of the pardons, St. Louis County Attorney Mason Forbes called Mason “rather unfortunate” to be convicted, said he “never was of the impression that the evidence was any too strong” and that he regarded it as unlikely Mason would have been convicted if white. Mason was eventually paroled in 1925. He died in 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee.
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Among those speaking in support of the pardon was Duluth police Chief Mike Tusken, a grandnephew of Irene Tusken’s.
“In recent weeks we have seen an injustice at the hands of those who are sworn to serve and protect in the murder of George Floyd,” Tusken said. “Never has there been a time that we must work relentlessly in our fervent pursuit to seek and find justice than today.”
The pardon application, written by attorney Jerry Blackwell, was approved in December to be reheard by the pardon board during its spring meeting. The board members quickly established their legal authority to grant the pardon before taking the vote.
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Mohamed Ibrahim is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.