“Dayton’s didn’t hire no Blacks”

Yes, Target owes us DEI

Image from the book Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement by Traci Parker

In 2021, I co-produced the feature-length audio documentary “The Godfather of Black Space in Minneapolis” with my friend and colleague Nancy Rosenbaum.

I had recently begun my journey of trying to better understand Minneapolis’ Black food landscape-- and lack thereof-- and the search took me all the way back to the 1940’s when a man named Anthony Brutus Cassius opened the first Black-owned bar in downtown Minneapolis. He was also our city’s first Black liquor license holder, and he had to fight mightily to get both.

As part of my research for the story, I listened to some oral histories with Cassius produced by the Minnesota Historical Society where he spoke about his life and times, which began in Minneapolis when he fled the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1922. He was 13 years old, and began his life here as a porter at the Merchant Hotel in downtown St. Paul, sleeping on a mattress in the basement until he graduated from high school. Throughout that timeframe, he did work like scrubbing toilets and polishing spittoons, while balancing his high school career where he graduated top of his class and an all-star at football.

If you want to know more, and you should, give the doc a listen. It will be worth your time, I promise.

But what I want to tell you today is this:

In the oral history, Cassius is laying out the circumstances that led him to form the first all-Black waiters union in Minneapolis, and fight as a civil rights leader to gain his liquor license, which were previously considered the domain of white people only. While he should have been college bound, the dream to pay for college-- or get the scholarship he should have been granted-- was an impossibility for a Black man at the time.

He says:

“Here’s the places you worked at [if you were Black],” Cassius remembers in that oral history. “The Athletic Club, the Elks Club, The Curtis Hotel. Most of the people were either working there or on the railroad as Pullman porters. [...] Young-Quinlan’s Company (a department store) and Dayton’s didn’t hire no Blacks. So, you either worked in the hotel and restaurant industry or you worked on the railroad.”

Cassius chose The Curtis Hotel, where he and his fellow Black waiters faced egregious wage discrimination, which Cassius ultimately rectified, with back pay, via the union.

But this excerpt always resonated deeply with me, because like most Minnesotans of a certain age, I always thought of Dayton’s (now Target Corporation) department store fondly. I shopped there as a kid with my family-- in my great-grandmother’s era, a trip to Dayton’s was an all-day affair, warranting getting dressed up to shop, go to the salon, and get a meal at the St. Paul store’s fabled River Room with their signature popovers. I even worked at Dayton’s in college, in the early 1990’s, as a perfume sample girl.

But had it been a few decades earlier, I would not have been hired, because of the I would have possessed the wrong physical traits.

Of course, Dayton’s wasn’t singular in this-- American department stores were notorious for both employment and shopper discrimination until well after the Civil Rights movement.

But today, I’m talking about Dayton’s, and I’m talking about Target, everyone's favorite toilet paper, stocking stuffer, votive candle, and novelty T-shirt emporium. My hometown everything-you-need store.

When John Deere, Walmart, and Coors rolled back their DEI programs, no one was surprised. When Target did, we were.

For the record, Target’s specific DEI program was, according to its 2022 corporate statement, intended to “increase hiring and promotions of employees of color and women, and to increase its spending on diverse suppliers.”

But now, “ in an effort to stay in step with the evolving external landscape,” they will pull back on racial hiring targets, end their Racial Equity Action and Change Program and cease participation in external diversity surveys. In other words, they will cease attempting to reverse the harm that they have done historically, and instead get in lockstep with Donald Trump and his cronies’ soul-crushing racism.

I know that these reports are not new, and are becoming even not-newer, as companies such as Disney, Paramount, Coke, Pepsi, and even PBS, are cutting DEI programming. Keep an eye on the continuing to cave roster here.

But Target hits particularly close to home for me, because I’m a Minnesotan. Target is my hometown store, George Floyd was murdered a few miles from my house, and the uprising in response to his brutal, racist murder also began here, in my hometown.

Anthony Brutus Cassius, second from left, at the Dreamland, his downtown Minneapolis bar

Cassius began his career here, after fleeing soul-crushing racism in Tulsa, and became a Civil Rights hero, winning the right to work for fair wages (not just for himself, but for others) fair consideration for licensing, and finally winning the right to open a thriving business that existed for more than 40 years, consistently serving the Black and white communities alike, with dignity and respect.

In other words, winning the right to exercise his full humanity— something that should not have to be fought for, but has to be, every day for people of color in this country.

Meanwhile, the Dayton family was born into plush, fully-formed privilege and wealth (the Daytons are one of the state’s wealthiest families, with a a net worth of $1.6 billion as of 2015) thanks to the advantages that the American project laid out for them, with Mark Dayton becoming governor of our state, and his sons, Erik and Andrew, enjoying their own success as restaurateurs and bar owners. It goes without saying none of them had to fight for their right for access to any of it.

We do not live in a meritocracy.

Dayton’s didn’t hire no Blacks, and the reverberations are still felt today. They will continue to be felt, until we work as a society to rectify our harms.

Don’t shop at Target.

Eating: If you’re local, I can’t recommend Hot Grainz enough. It’s a literal hole in the wall behind Little Asia Cafe on a quiet residential side street in St. Paul. It’s easily the best Thai food I’ve had in the Twin Cities, and in many large cities for that matter. It’s probably the most inconspicuous restaurant in the Twin Cities, with some of the finest food. The khao soi was is good as any I had in Thailand.

Watching: I took the kids to see Paddington in Peru (would recommend if you have littles) and saw a preview for the upcoming Karate Kid which looks entertaining. I got nostalgic about the original, with Ralph Macchio as the unlikely heartthrob. It kind of held up, except for the predictable racist tropes, with Pat Morita’s Mr. Myagi playing the mystical Asian, and resulting slurs that emerge in his presence. But a more poignant moment came when Danial San is getting an impromptu history lesson by his prof in the schoolyard. As they turn and walk away, barely perceptively (we were able to make it out thanks to subtitles) the professor says-- “So you see Daniel, the Plains Indians were a very primitive tribe. . .”

I sat next to Sean, Oglala Lakota, and cringed. Well, no, I shouted.

Sean just said: “American History.”

And that’s how we got to now.