Olli Kinkkonen: Victim of Warmongers

[riverwalker]

(I've lived in Minnesota my whole life, and never heard about this before)



Kinkkonen was buried in an unmarked grave in a poor people's section of Park Hill Cemetery, just a few rows away from the graves of the three victims of the 1920 Duluth lynching. The Tyomies Society, a Finnish cultural group, placed a marker on Kinkkonen's grave in 1993. It reads, "Olli Kinkkonen, 1881 to 1918, Victim of Warmongers."


http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2001/06/lynching/olli.shtml

The other lynching in Duluth

In September 1918, the end of World War I was only two months away, but fighting was still fierce in Europe. The Duluth News Tribune and the Duluth Herald were filled with dispatches from the front lines, and full-page ads for war bonds, and long lists of servicemen who'd been killed. The papers were also full of tough talk about "slackers," a term for men who refused to join the military.
Toward the end of September, the tough talk turned to action. A headline in the Duluth Herald read, "Knights Of Liberty Tar And Feather Slacker." The story told of a Finnish immigrant, Olli Kinkkonen, who'd been dragged from a Duluth boarding house the night before, and not seen again. A phone call, and a letter delivered to the paper, took credit for the abduction in the name of a group calling itself the "Knights of Liberty." The letter said Kinkkonen had been tarred and feathered to serve as a warning to all slackers. Kinkkonen never showed up again at his boarding house, and his body was discovered almost two weeks later, dangling from a tree just outside of town, near Lester Park - covered with tar and feathers.
Duluth authorities declared the death a suicide. They said Kinkkonen was humiliated by the tarring, and hanged himself. Donald Wirtanen disagrees. "He was lynched," says Wirtanen, a retired businessman from Duluth, and the former honorary Finnish consul here.
Wirtanen grew up in a small Iron Range town called Markham, and moved to Duluth as a young man. He says most Finnish people in northern Minnesota in 1918 believed Olli Kinkkonen was murdered. Wirtanen was only five years old at the time, but he remembers his parents talking about it.
<more at link>

[Brickbat]

1. A lynching, straight up.

I have not lived in Minnesota my whole life, but have heard of it several times.

[dflprincess]

2. I've lived here most my life

(born here, my dad got transferred out of state, then back here when I was 12) and I've never heard this before.

Thanks for posting it.

[Jenoch]

3. I've lived in Minnesota

most of my life, includng living in Duluth for a while and I've never heard this story before.