The lone Black student among 84 graduates from St. Paul Central High School's Class of 1891, Nellie Griswold rose to deliver a commencement speech titled "The Race Problem."
Never mind that this was 130 years ago and the speaker was only 16, addressing the crowded, spacious People's Church auditorium. Nellie spoke "with a clear, silvery musical voice, soft, yet perfectly distinct and supplemented with faultless enunciation," the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. The St. Paul Globe called it "a remarkable oration" delivered "with great spirit and feeling in a clear, low-pitched voice."
Sharing her first name with a grandmother born into slavery, Nellie Griswold told the largely white audience that her ancestors were "less favored … than the domestic animals" on their masters' plantations. When Black citizens "are given equal rights and chances," she insisted, "the race problem will solve itself. Let color be forgotten, and merit be the standard, and the race problem will disappear as mist before the rising sun."
Thunderous applause followed her words, and Nellie was on her way. In years to come she would achieve victories as a suffragist and social justice champion, but she would also endure galling displays of racism. Thirty years after her speech, she successfully lobbied Minnesota lawmakers to enact the state's first anti-lynching legislation, amid the fallout from three Black circus workers hanged from a Duluth lamppost by a mob in 1920.
Nellie watched crosses burned on her front lawn when in 1924 she and her husband, railroad lawyer William Francis, moved from the Rondo neighborhood to 2092 Sargent Av. near Groveland Park, a whiter section of St. Paul. They left Minnesota for good in 1927 when President Calvin Coolidge named Billy (as she called him) consul general to Liberia, where he would die of yellow fever two years later.
Nellie Griswold Francis' amazing 95-year life long has been eclipsed by Billy Francis' equally remarkable story. Now Augsburg University history Prof. William D. Green has written a book that puts Nellie front and center. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, "Nellie Francis: Fighting for Racial Justice and Women's Equality in Minnesota," comes out this week (tinyurl.com/Nelliebook).
"Often when she is mentioned in histories, her story is woven within, and more often subsumed, within her notable marriage" and her husband's legacy, Green writes. "While I feel that their marriage was and remains an extraordinary subject of exceptional people … it is a singular treatment of Nellie Francis that I feel is long overdue."
Born in 1874 in Nashville, Nellie Griswold was the second daughter of Maggie and Thomas Griswold. Her maternal grandmother, Nellie Seay, was enslaved in the home of Col. Robert Allen, a Tennessee congressman who was also her father. After the Civil War, Thomas became a successful merchant, Nashville City Council member and secretary of the city's first Black cemetery.
