Matthew Carter was an astonishing person, a man of moral principle and remarkable fortitude. Drawing on these qualities, he contributed to racial justice in Duluth in a significantly measurable way.
Given Matt’s modesty, however, until a few years ago, a full account of this was known only to immediate family, close friends, a number of journalists, and a few stray historians. I am one of those historians, and in October of 2017, I was able to do an interview with Matt, a reeling conversation which lasted more than two hours. From that and other records, I began to reconstruct his life’s journey.
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Born in Laurel, Mississippi, in 1926, Matt was among four children raised by a single mother who also worked as a farm laborer. When white people violently drove them away, she moved the family to Flora, Mississippi, and took up sharecropping. As a boy in Flora, Matt intermittently attended a segregated school, three miles from home, acquiring only a fifth-grade education. By the time he was a young teenager, he had a job at a commercial laundry in nearby Cleo. There, Matt worked alongside white people but for less pay, so, when a cousin suggested he come to Chicago to work on a lake freighter, he took the chance.
The lake boat crews were segregated by occupation, and Matt joined other African Americans in the galley as a “second cook.” In the winter, when boats were put up, he lived with his aunt on Chicago’s west side, where housing was also segregated. He found temporary work at a steel mill. One winter, Matt went back to Mississippi to attend a wedding, where he met his future wife, Helen. She was a teacher and had already been involved with a local NAACP chapter challenging white opposition to Black voting. After they married in 1953, Helen moved with Matt to Chicago.
The new couple had the good fortune to find an apartment at a Lake Meadows building, on the south side, the first intentionally racially integrated housing in the city. Matt and Helen attended NAACP meetings there and became involved with Democratic precinct politics.
In the summer of 1960, they decided to move to Duluth, where it would be easier for Matt to work on the lakes and more often be with his family.
Like Chicago, most housing, employment, and public spaces in Duluth were segregated, and the Carters first rented an apartment on North Fourth Avenue West, in a building where other Black families lived. Moreover, because the Lake Carriers Association refused to allow African Americans to join crews in Duluth, Matt shipped out of Two Harbors. When Helen went to apply for a teaching position, she was told the school system had no “colored” teachers. Sitting in the office, dejected, she befriended Richard Weatherman, and he found her a job at the Jefferson School, making her a “first” in the city.
As the Carter family grew, Matt decided they needed more space, but when he attempted to rent a larger apartment, he was turned away. White landlords refused to answer the door, told him a place was already rented, or simply told him they would not rent to him.
When he tried to buy a house, real estate agents steered Matt to Gary and other areas where the housing quality was inferior. Additionally, when he tried to purchase an empty lot on London Road, the white owner, Ed Hebert, refused to sell to him.
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So, in the spring of 1962, Matt had Thomas L. Smith, a white minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church, buy Hebert’s lot and then transfer it to the Carters. Once other residents found out, they confronted Smith, telling him they “didn’t want the neighborhood ruined.” Several dozen also rallied to interfere with the building permit. This eventually failed, though soon after construction started, someone stole all the sheetrock. Finally, after the construction was finished and the family had moved in, the home was twice vandalized. The first time, in 1963, a year after Minnesota enacted its first fair-housing law, the vandals spray-painted “Koons Get Out” and “Get Out Nigger.” The second time, in 1967, they spray-painted “Kill Niggers” and covered a car with varnish.
Despite the racist reception, Matt and Helen stayed and, testament to their graciousness, in the years following, they befriended Ed Hebert and his wife Adeline. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the couple did various things to help, and when Ed got sick, they found a nursing home for him as well. In fact, the Carters survived both of the Heberts and continued to live on London Road, even as the area (and much of the rest of Duluth) remained otherwise all white.
Sadly, Helen died in 2007, and Matt died on Nov. 13 . He was 98 years old, nearly a centenarian, and lively to the end. “I was always interested in civil rights,” he said in his interview so many years ago, “because it was the situation I grew up in.”
Chad Montrie is a professor in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the author of both the book , “Whiteness in Plain View: A History of Racial Exclusion in Minnesota,” and the article , “In That Very Northern City: Recovering a Forgotten Struggle for Racial Integration in Duluth.” He wrote this exclusively for the News Tribune.
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