Fur trader and translator George Bonga was one of the first Black people born in what later became the state of Minnesota. His mother was Ojibwe, as were both of his wives. Through these relationships, Bonga was part of the mixed racial and cultural groups that connected trading companies and Native Americans. He frequently guided white travelers and traders through the region. Comfortable in many worlds, Bonga often worked as an advocate for the Ojibwe in their dealings with trading companies and the United States government.

Marvel Cooke was a pioneering journalist and political activist who spent her groundbreaking career in a world where she was often the only female African American. Talking about her work environment for the white-owned newspaper the Compass, she told biographer Kay Mills in 1988, ''there were no black workers there and no women."

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fredrick McGhee was known as one of Minnesota's most prominent trial lawyers. In 1905, he was one of a group of thirty-two men, led by W. E. B. DuBois, who founded the Niagara Movement, which called for full civil liberties and an end to racial discrimination.

The Western Appeal was one of the most successful African American newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the height of its popularity, it was published in six separate editions in cities across the United States, including St. Paul.