It all started with The Summer Christmas Came to Minnesota. This 1989 article by Dr. William D. Green sent Jason Benjamin, a long-time South Minneapolis resident and teacher, down a Minnesota history rabbit hole.
The article tells the story of Eliza Winston, an enslaved woman brought to Minnesota in 1860 by the Christmas family, one of many Southern slaveholding families who summered in Minnesota. By the time Eliza Winston arrived, the new state had ratified a constitution that stated: “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in this state.” Yet many locals turned a blind eye to the presence of enslaved people in this “free state.”
Eliza Winston forced Minnesotans to reckon with this contradiction. She was the first and only enslaved person in the state of Minnesota to secure her freedom through the court system…