Listening to the Voices

Eric Roper, Star Tribune columnist and creator of the podcast Ghost of a Chance, will be in conversation with Greg McMoore, South Minneapolis activist, elder, and community historian. When reporter Eric Roper bought his 113-year-old house in Minneapolis, he researched its history becoming obsessed with one couple, the Robinsons, who owned the house about 100 years ago. As he pieced together the remarkable story of their lives, we find out what the Robinsons reveal about a history of race in Minneapolis–“the city that became ground zero for an unprecedented global racial reckoning.” 

Greg McMoore is a community historian and a member of the Minneapolis African American Heritage Work Group. He is a lifelong South Minneapolis resident and current board member of Hennepin History Museum. He completed an Arthur C. McWatt Fellowship to further explore the story of his family’s “North Star Journey.” 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 from high school, and his family has been here ever since.