It was during the hectic aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, when the nation fell into racial violence, that H. Peter Meyerhoff — a Jewish immigrant from Germany who had barely escaped the Nazi regime — decided to take action.
"When he saw what was going on with black people, he could identify with that," said his wife, Rose, last week. "In Germany they had no Jews allowed in restaurants, parks and schools. He didn't want that kind of thing to go on here, 'the land of the free.' "
Peter Meyerhoff, one of Minnesota's early civil rights activists, died Tuesday in Montevideo, Minn., of aspiration pneumonia, a complication of ataxia. He was 92.
He was an engineer at Honeywell, designing laser guidance systems for jet planes, when he decided to work for better race relations in Minneapolis. In 1968, soon after King was killed, Meyerhoff compiled a mimeographed directory of black-owned businesses. He and his wife delivered the list to churches and homes in white neighborhoods, encouraging people to cross the racial divide.
"This was a problem he thought had to be solved," Rose Meyerhoff said.
That modest directory eventually grew into a 375-page book listing more than 5,200 minority-owned businesses in the United States, including 78 in Minnesota that did their business nationally. Formally known as the National Black Business Campaign, newspapers shortened it to "Buy Black" as word spread, Rose Meyerhoff said.
"The thing that made it work was that others [in the white community] felt the way we did," Peter Meyerhoff told a Star Tribune reporter in 1987. "The people who joined in didn't have to join organizations or do things differently except buy goods and services from a black-owned business, and that appealed to a sizable segment of the society."
When Buy Black became a nationwide undertaking, Meyerhoff took a leave of absence from Honeywell with full support of top managers. When he returned to work in the 1970s, Rose took over the campaign.
