The Godfather of Dreamland

When Minneapolis was at its most segregated, Anthony Brutus Cassius dared push back by creating and sustaining Black social space where none had existed before. This is his story.

by

A long, starched white barkeep’s apron falls past the knee. White button-down collared shirt, gold wedding band prominent on the left ring finger. Two barmen in action, each in white shirts and black neckties. The bar is hopping.

Three handsome Black men in overcoats, ties, fedoras, and patterned scarves surround Anthony Brutus Cassius. They’re looking fly, and they know it. They’re looking like they’re smelling good. The bottoms of the cocktail glasses they clutch are almost reflected in their Florsheims.

Cassius’s right brow, arched slightly, says, “I’ve got this.” Resolve. The half-smile shows confident arrival. But there’s something else, too. 

In this historic photo from the John F. Glanton Collection at the Hennepin County Library, Cassius looks poised for action. There’s a spring-loaded energy to his body. Though his very back seems to prop up the bar—and while you already know he’s the man who owns this place—there’s disquiet in his face, too. In his stance. It’s ready to go to any length to keep his feet firmly planted on that porcelain mosaic floor, along with the feet of those around him. 

Welcome to Cassius Bar and Playroom. Downtown Minneapolis. 1940s. 

It didn’t come easy.

••••• 

Minister Samuel Robert Cassius handed his two teenage sons, Anthony Brutus and Benjamin, less than $15. Maybe it was $7 each, maybe it was $7 between them. Accounts vary. He must have said something like, “This is all I can do for you.” Or, “This is the best I can do for you.” In any case, the once enslaved father—the product of an enslaved woman and the white man who owned them both—sent his two sons north, away from the 380-acre Meridian, Oklahoma, farm where they were raised. 

In addition to the few dollars, Anthony Brutus Cassius carried a sheepskin diploma—proof of his graduation from junior high. It was an extremely rare accomplishment for Black children in the South, who were discouraged and often barred from going to school then. Anthony Brutus and Benjamin’s father was also educated and was known not just as a preacher but as an educator, farmer, entrepreneur, postmaster, and politician. 

The year Benjamin and Anthony Brutus headed north was 1922. The year before, one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, Tulsa (home to the Greenwood neighborhood, AKA Black Wall Street), just 90 miles east of Meridian, was attacked by white mobs who killed as many as 300, injured hundreds more, and decimated the city. It’s estimated that 191 businesses and 1,256 houses—1,447 thriving Black spaces—were extinguished. 

Cassius began to organize, which was a difficult task in the Black community, whose members were rightly afraid, as pre-1950 Minneapolis was fervently anti-union. 

Anthony Brutus and Benjamin emerged from the train at Union Depot at the foot of the Kellogg Boulevard hill, abutting the Mississippi at downtown St. Paul’s riverbank—though they thought they had arrived in Minneapolis. They trudged up the hill, probably hungry, undoubtedly exhausted, likely afraid. 

At the top stood the Merchants Hotel, with a “Porter Wanted” sign hung up. Anthony Brutus walked in and asked for the job, with Benjamin waiting in the wings. Since Anthony Brutus had nowhere else to go, the hotel owner offered a mattress in the basement. Anthony Brutus Cassius took the gig and the mattress. 

By the time Cassius graduated high school—a football star at the top of his class—he’d lived and worked for three years at the Merchants. He should have been college-bound. 

“But the chance of a Black man getting a scholarship to a college was nil. There just wasn’t anything,” he said in his 1981 oral history interview conducted for “Twentieth Century Radicalism in Minnesota,” a project now in the Minnesota Historical Society oral history collections.

One of the few career tracks for Black men was the ministry, which would have had him following in the footsteps of his father. So, with the help of his football coach, Cassius enrolled at Macalester’s divinity school on a reduced tuition. But after a year, Cassius—now married with two kids—decided to leave school and seek work, eventually putting him on the path to becoming a minister of a different sort. 

“Here’s the places you worked at [if you were Black],” Cassius remembers in that oral history. “The Athletic Club, the Elks Club, The Curtis Hotel. Most of the people were either working there or on the railroad as Pullman porters. [...] Young-Quinlan’s Company and Dayton’s—they hired no Blacks. So, you either worked in the hotel and restaurant industry or you worked on the railroad.” 

Cassius chose the former, The Curtis Hotel, at the time considered an excellent job for Black men. While the all-Black team of waiters at The Curtis was welcome to work for $17 per month (compared to the group’s white counterparts’ $75 at comparable hotels), they certainly were not allowed to stay or dine at the hotel, which had the tagline “Where the Guest is King.” 

“I said, ‘This is no way of life.’ I discovered that the white waiters downtown at the Radisson, the Nicollet, the Minneapolis Club, and the Athletic Club were all paid $75 a month. I thought, ‘This can’t be right, we working here ’cause our faces are Black for $17 a month!’” 

Together, the unions were a formidable bargaining force. With the backing of the Teamsters, the city’s strongest and best-known labor union (famous for the Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934), Cassius’s organization won back wages to the tune of $500 for some of the members—enough to buy a house at the time. He remained active in the labor movement throughout the Depression and beyond, changing the balance of power in Minneapolis. 

But outside of home and work, there were still few—if any—places for Black people to socialize aside from picnics or socials at north Minneapolis’s storied community center, the Phyllis Wheatley House.

••••• 

Before that hard-earned photo of Cassius working his namesake bar, a pivotal moment: 

“I went to the Midland Bank,” Cassius recalls in the oral history. 

“We ain’t never loaned but one colored man no money since I’ve been here. . . .What do you want?” Cassius remembers the vice president saying. 

“Ten thousand dollars,” Cassius said.

As Cassius remembers it, the VP laughed in his face, to which Cassius responded by asking to speak with the president, which inspired even more laughter. But he persisted and eventually ended up in the president’s office. As Cassius tells it, 15 minutes later, he and the president, Mr. Ueland, emerged—Ueland with his arm around Cassius’s shoulder. 

“Take Mr. Cassius over there and draw him up a note,” Mr. Ueland told the fellows who’d just moments earlier mocked Cassius. “We’re going to go along with him for $10,000.”

“They liked to die!” Cassius laughs of the moment in the oral history.

Cassius left Midland Bank that day in the late 1940s with the loan that meant victory after a two-and-a-half-year battle—Cassius was officially the first Black man to secure a full liquor license from the City of Minneapolis.

Welcome to Cassius Bar. 

••••• 

“I think it’s really significant that Cassius came to Minnesota fleeing racial violence in Oklahoma,” says Kirsten Delegard, historian and co-founder of the Mapping Prejudice Project, a body of research showing the structural barriers that prohibited people who were not white from buying property and building wealth in America for most of the last century. “He came right at the beginning of the 1920s, right after Tulsa erupted. You know, one of the most notorious episodes of racial violence in American history.” 

“Cassius arrived in St. Paul at a moment where race relations in the Twin Cities were really not race relations, but white resistance to the presence of Black people really growing and getting more organized.”

-Historian Kirsten Delegard

As a porter at the Merchants Hotel, Cassius performed duties like polishing spittoons and toilets for his room and board. Between work and sleep, he eventually made his way to Pilgrim Baptist Church, one of the few obvious safe places to find community and a third space if you were Black in a pre–civil rights America. 

“This was a prejudiced town, St. Paul/Minneapolis. About the only things you could do was go to school,” said Cassius in the oral history. 

The year of Cassius’s arrival in 1922, Black people made up less than 1 percent of the Minnesota population (a figure that continued into the 1950s). Yet the state’s institutions were already restricting where Black people could live, work, and eat. By 1910, the first racial covenants had already been drawn in Minnesota—language within deeds that reserved land for the exclusive use of white people. 

“Cassius arrived in St. Paul at a moment where race relations in the Twin Cities were really not race relations, but white resistance to the presence of Black people really growing and getting more organized,” says Delegard. 

And yet, by 1937, Cassius had managed to buy the building at 38th Street and 4th Avenue South. He named it the Dreamland Café and turned it into a modest storefront selling simple food and 3.2 beer. At that time, if you were Black in Minneapolis, your life was restricted to the Old Southside, where the Dreamland stood; the Near North Side; an area around Hiawatha Avenue; and the area we now call Cedar Riverside. According to Delegard, those were the only places you were legally allowed to live. And, she says, the covenants, in conjunction with redlining, “did the work” of Jim Crow in the North. 

In segregated Minneapolis, no Black people were welcome in downtown restaurants or hotels, including touring musicians or other celebrities who came to entertain white audiences. So they went to the Dreamland, and then private homes in the area, to sleep, eat, drink, and play. Lena Horne and Frankie Lymon famously visited the café. 

The Dreamland truly was just that—a place where people could don a sleek fedora, clutch a beer glass, be safe, and relax long enough to dream. Maybe of a better place—a place where the insidious tentacles of “Jim Crow of the North” could not slither in to stifle and choke. 

“People always ask me as a historian, if I could go back in history, where would I go, what would I see? And I think I would go to the Dreamland Café in the 1930s,” says Delegard. 

In an increasingly racially constricted Minneapolis, the Dreamland Café was the rhythmic nucleus of the Old Southside. The building still stands, and even today is buttressed by barbershops and places of worship. The headquarters for the Minnesota Spokesman Recorder, the state’s oldest Black-owned newspaper, is right across the street. Delegard calls the area “incredibly central” to Black cultural, business, and political life—the “commercial backbone” of the Black community. 

Dreamland was a place with old heads posted up outside playing chess or chilling in a folding chair with an ass pocket of whiskey, chopping it up and watching the world go by. It was the place with just the right lineup of blues on the juke, where the ceiling fan cut through a brew of humidity, fryer grease, and the sweet anticipation of good times, mixing it all into the heady alchemy that makes a good spot the spot. And behind the bar, Cassius—the mayor of the Old Southside, the Godfather of Black social space in Minneapolis. 

“Did you ever see the movie The Godfather?” inquires Cassius’s grandson Suluki Fardan. “You remember how people would come to [Don Vito Corleone] and they asked him all kinds of questions and stuff like that? You have business leaders, community leaders coming to him and asking for advice? That reminded me of Grandpa!” 

Dreamland was humming at the height of World War II, which means that while Cassius was running his business, filling an imperative void for his community, the government had other ideas. The Dreamland was deemed nonessential to the war effort, even though comparable white-owned businesses were allowed to run as essential. Cassius had to simultaneously put in full-time work at a St. Paul defense plant, offering him just a few hours of sleep each night. 

And still, he was far from finished. As he had always done, Cassius looked power in the eye, brow arched, and kept on punching. When I first imagined him, he was Richard Roundtree in Shaft. I pictured him in a tight Afro and leather jacket, kicking down doors and taking no mess from white people—a badass. 

But Cassius was a different kind of badass—one that kicked down doors to accomplish a hell of a lot more than any Blaxploitation stereotype.

It was the place with just the right lineup of blues on the juke, where the ceiling fan cut through a brew of humidity, fryer grease, and the sweet anticipation of good times, mixing it all into the heady alchemy that makes a good spot the spot.

Remember how no Black person had ever been granted a full liquor license in Minneapolis? When he first applied, Cassius was told that Black people were only allowed to operate barbecues, shoeshine parlors, and barbershops. No Black person had ever legally owned and operated a bar in downtown Minneapolis. And, Delegard told me, when Black people applied for any license in Minneapolis, they had to prove that they were not going to use their business for “immoral purposes.” 

“Several times I had the FBI wanting to know if I was a communist, and when I’d joined,” Cassius noted in the oral history. “And when I applied for this liquor license in 1942 they brought up that I had been to Russia under the Five-Year Plan.”

He had not. 

“They brought out everything to keep me from getting a license.” 

Even gangster Kid Cann and his liquor syndicate told the City Council Licenses Committee—in Cassius’s presence—that the liquor business was a white man’s.

••••• 

When that photo was taken, Cassius Bar and Playroom, at 207 South 3rd Street, was at its apex—a center of community, known as a place where people of both races could mix and mingle safely and peacefully. In 1958, thanks to neighborhood redevelopment, the bar moved to 318 South 3rd Street, where it remained until 1980. 

Cassius, ever present, ever clear-eyed, ever vigilant, ensured that his bars were safe and good-vibing gathering spots for all. Black people, yes, but white people too, including, thanks to its proximity to the police station, cops; and thanks to its proximity to the courthouse, judges and lawyers; and thanks to Cassius’s many connections, politicians, journalists, and touring celebrities. There was no place like it in Minneapolis before or after. 

Just three years after Cassius Bar closed forever, so did Cassius the man. 

He kept his feet firmly planted on that porcelain mosaic floor for 40 years. As did so many countless others—feet shod in Florsheims and stilettos, Nikes and flats, well-heeled and not so much. 

With his barkeep’s apron endlessly ready for action, come what may, he ministered to thousands. His way. 

Originally published in the July 2021 issue. 

Mpls.St.Paul Daily Edit

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