Julius F. Taylor

clay county histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director  HCSCC

One of the best parts of my job is meeting fascinating people, though as a historian these people have often been dead for decades and they don’t meet me back. While researching our upcoming exhibit Stories of Local Black History (opening March 22 at the Hjemkomst Center), I made the acquaintance of Julius and Anna Taylor, prominent members of Fargo-Moorhead’s original African American community. 

As mentioned in a previous article, Fargo-Moorhead’s African American community began with families of pioneer barbers. Being a barber was one of the only occupations in the 1800s that allowed an African American man to make a good living, be his own boss, and be respected as a professional among white residents. Barber Julius F. Taylor and wife Anna were among the first African American residents of the frontier town of Fargo, and we know about them because, after leaving Fargo, Mr. Taylor became an important newspaper publisher.

Julius and wife Anna Emogene Taylor arrived in Fargo shortly after they were married in 1879. Anna was born in Minneapolis in 1857, daughter of a Minnesota-born African American father and German immigrant mother. Anna is credited with being the first Black student to graduate from High School in that city. Within a few years, Taylor’s Tonsorial Palace on the corner of Main Avenue and Broadway was the largest of Fargo-Moorhead’s “First Class Barbershops,” employing several other barbers whose families were part of our local Back middle class. The barbershop was in the basement of the First National Bank building, which was on the site of the former Wimmer’s Diamonds next to Babb’s Coffee House. The couple lived down the road on the corner of 1st Ave S and 10th Street.

In 1885, Fargo Argus editor A. W. Edwards asked Julius to write an article for his paper. “From that time on,” wrote Julius Taylor later in his own newspaper, “he urged and encouraged us to continue to practice the art of writing for the press, to adopt a vigorous style of writing – that in time we might become an editor.” 

In 1889, the Taylors moved to Chicago to start that city’s first African American newspaper, The Broad Ax, which they published until their deaths in 1932. Anna studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and became a professional painter and printmaker. As editor of The Broad Ax, Julius Taylor was central to both regional politics and national African American political issues, in spite of having often unpopular ideas. His articles were sometimes critical of religion and he was one of the early voices saying the future of African American politics lay within the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. But it wasn’t all politics. In 1916, for his mother’s 91st birthday, he wrote a long article about her life as an enslaved American woman. The article includes incidents of injustice and sorrow, defiance and dignity, written by a son who admires his mother’s strength.

The Taylors counted among their friends several presidents, senators, governors, business leaders, and influential thinkers. Reminiscences in the The Broad Ax show Anna and Julius also had fond memories and kept good friends from their younger years in Fargo.