Longtime south Minneapolis resident brings deep experience to historic panel
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It was a Friday night in 1964, recalls Greg McMoore. A line of men stretched out the Young Brothers barbershop on Fourth Avenue in south Minneapolis. McMoore was just a kid then, but he could tell they were there for more than just haircuts.
He remembers seeing a group head to the backroom and begging his father to let him sneak a glimpse.
“It was all in fun,” he reminisced with a laugh. “They were back there cooking soul food, playing cards and having a good time in the backroom.”
Now 71, McMoore carries vibrant memories of the southside with him each day — scenes from when it was a bustling and tight-knit middle class African American community. His brain is such a warehouse of southside knowledge he was recruited to help preserve the city’s African American history.
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“I’m viewed as an elder now,” McMoore said. “And there aren’t very many of us left to be able to talk about what was here.”
Through May 2025, he’ll be part of the African American Heritage Work Group — a 15-person advisory board guiding the city in efforts to research and document sites of significance, ultimately narrowing in on three to nominate to the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s a group with artists, educators and historians from the northside to the southside, including familiar names like documentarian Daniel Bergin and health advocate Beverly Propes.
Each member brings their own passion to the table, and for McMoore that’s serving as a voice for the southside, where his family has called home for over a century.
A child of the 50s, McMoore is among the eldest in the group. His family escaped slavery in Virginia, making their new home in Hastings between 1865 and 1870 — one of the first Black families to settle in the area. In 1912, his grandmother moved to south Minneapolis after graduating high school, and his family has been here ever since.
For McMoore, honoring history is more than just marking spots with remembrance.
“I’m always thinking about where we came from as developing an understanding of where we’re going to go,” he said. “You have to know where you came from if you want to talk about who you are and how you can move forward with it.”
The hub of the southside community
On a crisp fall day, McMoore pointed out some of those roots, starting with the former hub that had it all: the intersection at 38th Street and Fourth Avenue. Though he calls that intersection a flyover street now, he can quickly recall how it used to buzz.
“When you came into this community, especially when you went across 38th Street, you know, there was something in the air,” he said. “You felt that you belonged to something, and it was a sense of strength and vitality.”
Between the 1930s and 1970s, more than 20 Black-owned businesses stood tall along the corridor. One of the earlier gems was Dreamland Café. That was the social club opened in 1937 by Anthony B. Cassius, a civil rights activist and the first Black man to obtain a liquor license in Minneapolis.
Cassius’s bars were some of the first integrated spaces in the city and few places where African Americans could safely gather and socialize.
Another Cassius-stamped staple — the Nacirema Club (that’s American spelled backwards) — was a couple streets over. It’s a church now, but McMoore amusedly remembers his father ushering him in when he came of age. Both Dreamland and the Nacirema, as well as Cassius’s house, are on the heritage group’s research list.
Most of the iconic landmarks at the intersection of 38th and 4th are now gone, but still standing is the Minnesota Spokesman Recorder, the Black-owned newspaper which recently celebrated its 90th year. A bright blue mural covers the brick, decorated with notable names and portraits, from Cecil Newman to Norma Jean Williams.
“You can go along [the mural] and all of us, all the families, we all knew each other, too,” McMoore said. “In many ways, it’s the families that drove this community and protected it.”
‘It feels like I’m driving through my living room’
As McMoore got in his white “retro Chevy,” driving beyond the intersection, the power of southside names was apparent. He pointed out their old homes. Willie Mays, baseball legend. Lena O. Smith, Minnesota’s first African American woman lawyer.
The Bowman house, where Earl Bowman, the first Black president at a Minnesota community college, resided; and the Hughes home, where the trailblazing golfer Solomon Hughes Sr. and legal scholars lived.
Then, McMoore approached a bridge over I-35W. He looked down at the trail of cars, rushing 60 miles per hour over concrete — once green lawns in the old predominantly African American community.
“Whenever I head to downtown Minneapolis on the freeway, I know exactly where the house was, and it feels like I’m driving through my living room,” he said. “Many folks talk about 94 going through St Paul and destroying Rondo, but over here it was 35 going through South Minneapolis, and it dismantled our community.”
Freeway construction in the 60s wiped out homes where over 80 percent of the Twin Cities Black population lived, destroying the opportunity to build wealth. To this day, the racial homeownership gap in Minneapolis remains one of the highest in the nation.
“Things like that aren’t just coincidental,” McMoore said, a hard glint to his eye.
In his neighborhood, the freeway trench marked the start of a shift, as families were displaced and residents east and west were literally divided. The community’s vitality dulled as pressures from crime rose, then took another turn when Central High School — the neighborhood’s castle-like “pride and joy” on the hill — was demolished in the 80s.
With the local high school gone — a place that produced the likes of Prince, the city’s first Black mayor Sharon Sayles Belton and the state’s first Black woman judge Pamela Alexander — more families left.
Marking history as a guide
But McMoore, who spent some years working in D.C. and South America, has always come back. He said the community in which he grew up — the foundation for his values, his home —doesn’t have to remain a still life from the past.
He says it’s a guide to what makes communities livable, of how strength can be found in getting to know your neighbors and looking out for one another.
“We have to learn from the past and how all of us can come together to revitalize the neighborhood,” he said. “And it starts with things like the cultural corridor, understanding the history of it, and honoring the history with markers.”
There’s more for people to learn from one another, he said, in order to collaborate and create together. There’s more work to be done there, too, he said.
On the steps of the Sabathani Community Center, McMoore punctuates his southside tour: “So let’s do something about that.”