Saint Paul Bicycling Recollections from the Rondo Oral History Project

[House at Selby and Dale, 1900.]

For a project I am working on, I am going through the oral histories collected by the Hand in Hand group and housed in the Minnesota Historical Society archive. These interviewed were conducted from 1997 - 2004, and were the recollections of African-Americans who grew up or lived in Saint Paul's Rondo community that was the site of government-led destruction and displacement for the construction of Interstate 94 in the late 50s and early 60s.

For young people in Rondo, bicycles were a key part of many people's experiences.

Here are six mentions of bicycling from the archive, five men and one woman:

One of the big things was, up until a certain age, you could not ride your bicycle in the street. And naturally, when you get around the corner from your house, you thought you were safe so you would go off the sidewalk and you would get on the street. We lived on Saint Anthony and we would ride our bikes around the block. 

When we got on Victoria or on Milton, we pull right off the sidewalk and get in the street and go down Rondo in the middle of the street and look up and see somebody's mother staring at you, and you knew, "Oh, oh. When I get home I'm in trouble because they saw. They know."  

Everybody had the same rules. So they knew I was under a certain age and shouldn't be in the street. So when I got home, my mother knew all about it. 

[Interviewer]: So they literally told you where you could sit, or if you tried to sit together ...  

We walked in there. We went to sit in the middle of the snack bar, and they explained to us that it was okay for these two to sit there but the rest of us had to go down to the other end. And we kind of looked around, and we realized that White folks were kind of in the middle to the left and Blacks and everything else were from the far middle to the right.  

[Interviewer]: What year again?  

I think that was like the-that was the early Sixties. That was around 1960, '61, something like that. Because we were getting to the point where our parents were letting us ride our bicycles downtown for our little excursions. So we were riding outside of the community more and more and more and expanding our vision, so to speak.  

[Interviewer]: What was your reaction when they wouldn't let you sit together?  

Reaction was anger, but not external anger. You know, I didn't shout, I didn't cuss, I didn't stomp, I didn't beat on anything. It was frustrating that people were trying to drive a wedge between friends and that's how I looked at it. 

It wasn't so much that I gave a damn what they thought. It was that they were trying to separate friends that came in the store together. So they're trying to force us to realize there's some difference there, where we felt that there wasn't

-William Collins.

So the values, the character, the integrity, the close-knit connection, the extended family, I mean, we never locked our doors until I got into high school and I was like seventeen or eighteen before I had to carry a key.  

And ninety five percent of people on our block put the key under the doormat, because you were always playing football, or baseball, or bike riding or climbing trees or wrestling, or doing something like that. Or the door was locked and the windows were open. So you just reached over and lifted up the window and climbed in, and did your thing.  

I miss that. It's romantic, it's nonchalant, it's in part naIve, to even wish that, you know, we could go back to "the day" as the kids now call it which means anything happened two weeks ago. But it was part of our culture. Culture is anything that is learned and shared among a given group of people and passed down from one generation to another.  

I was proud of it. I was real proud to pass as much of it along to our kids, as painful as they thought it was. 

-Yusuf Mgeni

[Interviewer]: Did you have any personal experiences with the KKK?  

To tell you the truth about it, I wouldn't know whether I had any personal relationships or anything with them I cause a lot of them around where I was raised up at. I don't know whether they was Klansmen or not. But I know I've had to run many a day to keep from getting beat up for something. 'Cause I always said, if a White man ever hit me, I was gonna kill him. I knowed my life was over with, but I was not gonna let him live and I would run to keep from getting beat up.  

I worked at a little country grocery store there in the little town I was raised up in. I used to ride a bicycle around there delivering groceries.  

So one day, there was a restaurant on this side and here was an alley and a creamery where the people hauled milk. So I come around the comer on a bicycle and this guy was there delivering his milk and I scared his horse. By me turning the corner that fast, the horse made a noise and he started backing up. So I stopped, so the horse stopped. He come out and he was trying to get to me so he could beat me up.  

I turned around, I got on my bicycle and I really made it.  

I went back to the store and I told my boss. I said, "A guy wanted to beat me up. I couldn't deliver the goods to the restaurant."  

He said, "Don't pay him no attention."  

I said, "You'll have to go take it over there 'cause I can't go back"  

So he didn't force me to go back to take it 'til after the man had gone.  

And another time this same dude-not the same dude, they had a big truck And he always backed in that alley to load his milk, a big truck He hauled the milk in that to some other town. I'm coming up on my bicycle, he's coming this way, but he got to swing in the alley over here in order to back in. So I'm going like this, so he got to slow down 'til I pass so he can pull over there.  

Boy, he cussed me out. He said, "You Black So-and-so you. I'm not gonna put on my brakes no more. If you is in my way, I'm just gonna run over you."  

He called me all kinds of names, so I made it on my bicycle.  

But I don't know whether any of them was really Klansmen or what they are. But I've seen them throw Black men-they walk down the street you better get off the street 'cause they will throw you over. They were just terrible. 

-Willie Lee Frelix

[Interviewer]: Who were your friends when you were a youngster? 

I had one friend pretty much that we played together a lot of times as young kids and, I mean, we would be all over Saint Paul, just about, on our bicycles.  

I remember one time, there's a street-well, Dale Street the way it is now is a little different than those days. But we used to go across Dale Street on our bicycles balancing on our handlebars doing flips, whatever, across this busy street. But we always knew where the cars were coming and so forth. And people always used to say, "These kids are going to kill themselves." You know.  

But our bicycles were our transportation all over the Saint Paul area. So that's kind of an early memory of growing up with him. 

-Melvin T. Henderson

[Interviewer]: Now when you moved to 880 Rondo, now is that Oatmeal Hilll or are you still in Cornmeal Valley?  

No, no. I never made Cornmeal Valley. We always lived on Oatmeal Hill. Not that it made any difference to me, because I was always in Cornmeal Valley. [Laughs] Or else I was on the West Side. 

[Interviewer]: What was on the West Side?  

All my friends that played basketball, and all my friends and everything. We'd ride over there and go on the playgrounds and play with the children over there. We had friends over there.  

[Interviewer]: So you would ride from Rondo through downtown?  

Yes.  

[Interviewer]: Would go across the High Bridge or through downtown?  

I still won't go across the High Bridge. No. I would either go across Wabasha [Bridge] or Robert Street [Bridge ], one of the two.  

[Interviewer]: What ages where you that you were riding all the way over there?  

I was a teenager.  

[Interviewer]: Okay.  

But I still had to be in before dark. [Laughs] We all had to be in before dark. Okay? 

-Gloria Ellen Gilbreath Wilson

[Interviewer]: As you grew up and learned about Cornmeal Valley, how would you describe Cornmeal Valley? 

Well, we actually moved from Rondo to Rice Street after my father-my father showed up about three months later and we moved down on Rice Street, which was kind of different. We lived around a lot of White people. We were the only Black family there. 

Our introduction to some of the Black kids and Black people was when they traveled, because you had to get on the Rondo-Stryker bus to go downtown and most of the people would come by and they'd see this Black family. Black kids playing out there.  

Out of curiosity they'd stop and talk and ask us questions. Did we live down there? And we'd tell them yes. And we got to know people in that kind of interaction, of them traveling, going to work. Some kids walking, on bicycles, going to the movies, coming back and forth, and so we got a chance to have a good interchange, and in that interchange we picked up some friends. We'd go visit up on Rondo with them, they'd come down to Rice Street and visit with us... 

It wasn't all as racist as people try to make it, you know. Racism always been here. It used to raise its ugly head from time to time. If you went over on the East Side, you're going to run into a lot of opposition. You go out in Highland Park, you run into a lot opposition. But generally going around where kids will hang out, with the kind of kids that would show up, they kind of knew what to expect. 

-Floyd George Smaller, Jr.

[Farrington and Aurora, 1940.]

[University and Mackubin, 1959.]