Jim Crow of the North | Full Documentary

[Music] this mob of over a hundred people marched on an African Americans house in October of 1909 try to stop this family

from moving in the leading men of Minneapolis as the newspaper called them these are not the kind of people who want to be involved in mob violence and they don't have to because they have other tools that they

can use [Music] and there's this tool that they become aware of its called a racial covenant and so just a few months after this

confrontation you see the first racial covenant appear in a Minneapolis property and this is where you first see

this racial language occasions only Aryans only no Negroes or no members of

African blood or descent 100% of that were named at black people in many ways racial covenants this is kind of ground

zero of residential segregation in the United States and racism have a very very long history but this particular deployment of racism is fairly new and

this idea was really made material through instruments like racial covenants the law of the streets the law of the courts working in concert to

discourage blacks from moving into white neighborhoods it starts out as private property developers but eventually you have the federal government encouraging these racial covenants demanding

actually about any investment they make is protected with this kind of racial exclusivity [Music]

when you can covenant entire areas of the city it makes it off-limits that's pretty powerful this is Jim Crow of the

north [Music]

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hello I'm Toussaint Morrison and this is Minnesota experience TPT is committed to telling the full range of our state's past including the difficult history the mapping prejudice project that the

University of Minnesota has documented the widespread use of race-based restrictions buried in the deeds of homes in Hennepin County the research offers some answers as to why Minnesota has some of the worst racial disparities

in the nation our new documentary explores this history which amounts to what some researchers describe as a hidden system of Jim Crow of the north

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by the end of the century it would seem that Minnesota was one of the most enlightened states with regard to race

[Music] you had a leadership of the state that seemed much more amenable to doing the

right thing or at least of supporting inward policies that respected the dignity of the african-american Frank

Whedon came from Maryland a Wheaton came to Minnesota he saw opportunity out here he already had a law degree when he entered the law school at the University

and when he got out he had aspirations for political advancement he understood how to establish a rapport with the

party apparatus and as a result of their support he was able to win an election in south Minneapolis with a constituency made up of white and immigrant voters he

authored two bits of legislation that dealt with civil rights public accommodations the civil rights bill the accommodations bill only dealt with

blacks not being discriminated against in terms of going to restaurants hotels riding and streetcars the railroads places like that it didn't really deal

with other issues like schools and and housing and things of that nature but for all intents and purposes was a major

step forward with regard to civil rights 1910 Minneapolis isn't particularly segregated there's emerging african-american neighborhoods around

Lake Harriet her own West River Road certainly on the east side of Minneapolis Prospect Park is this beautiful neighborhood very close to downtown very close to the University of

Minnesota right on the banks of the Mississippi River it was a very desirable neighborhood and I think neighbors weren't surprised when they saw a house that fit into this

neighborhood on what is now East Franklin Avenue Madison Jackson he was a guy who had a law degree but he was a Pullman Porter he moved his family to Prospect Park and

he built a house there this was the first black family there my father had bought a piece of land in what is known

as Prospect Park Minneapolis and he broke ground and built the house in which I grew up until the house was nearly completed the completely white

community did not realize that a black family was moving in and when we moved in the old community became quite

aroused that a black family should be moving in marble Jackson she said when the neighbors across the street saw who they were she said that ladies started screaming

when she realized that it was an african-american family that was moving in across the street from her I was seven so I remember them meetings on our

lawn as to why we could not live there when my father and mother wouldn't budge they had committees come to meet them

and I remember sitting on the steps listening to some of the things that were said for instance one of the things our children will not play with your

children and my father was hadn't thought about the impact on the children my father built us a playground like

there was no other like it in the in the whole area and we became the most popular children in the place the neighbors couldn't keep

their children away a little while after they moved in the father's friend and co-worker also wanted to build a house in the neighborhood William and Daisy Simpson they were gonna build a house as

well and they were staying in the Jackson house well their house was under construction and I think that was the tipping point and that's when the resistance from white homeowners really

ramped up and this is where the Tribune reports a race war in Prospect Park this

mob of over a hundred people the newspaper described it as some of the most powerful people in Minneapolis marched on the Jackson house in October

of 1909 they read prepared statements it was decided that a large delegation should call upon you to make doubly impressive effect namely that the white

residents of this district do not want members of your race domiciled in our midst we are not here to argue but to make a perfectly plain statement of our position in the matter to wit that we do

not want you [Music] and as men of prudence judgment and determination we will do everything we

can to prevent this and then there was another threat rumors have been brought to our attention that there are parties in this vicinity who are determined that you and those of your race shall not

reside in this district that they have firmly declared themselves ready to take any steps necessary to bring about your removal and you have to understand in

1909 this is a period where lynchings are commonplace these were not idle threats the amazing

thing to me is that both of these families persisted they stayed in their houses The Simpsons built a lovely home which is still there

today Marvel blazed a trail she was the first african-american child to go through Pratt elementary school I learned that her mother had actually

dated w e BD boys before marrying Madison Jackson and that gives me clues as to what that household must have been like as soon as they became teenagers

all those white friends she had basically abandoned her at that time I determined I was going to get out of

that kind of society and go where my people were she went to the University of Minnesota where she dated Roy Wilkens and was engaged to him briefly as soon

as she finished at the University of Minnesota she got out of Minneapolis her parents had protected her I think from a lot of the racism in her childhood but when you get to be a grown-up you certainly can experience

this more and she realized there was really no place for her here well Minneapolis is lost was the Harlem Renaissance gained she ended up moving

to New York City she ended up working for WB Dubois she ended up becoming one of the premier african-american journalists in the country and then she became one of the first black

journalists to work for an all-white publication so she's has this incredible career incredible talents gifts passion

and Minneapolis lost her Madison Jackson died in 1927 once he died and they sold the house both families left Minneapolis and I just wonder what it would have

been like you know if they had been welcomed you know Prospect Park had become an enclave for black intellectuals and black civil rights activists what would that have been like

how would the city be different and that's what I think about a lot when I think about this story [Music] the problem with the Madison Jackson and

William Simpson incident is people had to show up in their front yard and threaten them and this was in 1909 I

don't think it's any coincidence that in May of 1910 the first racial covenant shows up in South Minneapolis

[Music] I'm pretty sure I know who wrote that covenant and that was one Edmund G

Walton he was a real estate developer the legacy he left on Minneapolis I mean there's Edmond Boulevard there's all these additions with his last name

really probably the most important and the worst was this legacy of racial covenants so when people purchase a home

traditionally you get an abstract package and it shows every time your property the property that you've just purchased changed hands and in Minneapolis properties that were planted

after 1910 are very likely to have these racial restrictions embedded in the property deed covenants can be building covenants they can be setback requirements but the racial covenants

that we're concerned with tells you who can or cannot live lease even occupy certain spaces racially restrictive

covenants private contracts between individuals that allow them to dictate to whom they'll sell their property identifying racial covenants however it has proved remarkably challenging the

only way to find racial covenants are to read Oran td's were looking at about 3 million deeds in Hennepin County between 1900 and 1960 and each deed on average

runs about 3 pages so we're in the ballpark of 10 million or so pages of text penny found about four thousand five thousand racial covenants by herself the

old-fashioned way she just went down to the county recorders office and started going through deeds and she found several thousand racially restrictive covenants and that was enough to get us

thinking okay hey now maybe we can do more than just show that racial covenants were a practice that was used in Minneapolis what if we can map all of

them the first map that penny made was shocking I was shocked when I saw this and I was shocked when she started

reading me some of the language of these of these racial covenants the wording can be very different they're working on early 20th century ideas of race Chinese

Japanese Negro Moorish Turkish Mongolian Hebrew sometimes Semitic people of African blood or descent no Negroes or

Jews only Caucasians except for their domestic servants of a different race who might be domiciled with the owner many of them were written during the period where eugenics is that front and

center of American scientific thought and that language is often what you see in these eats only people of the Aryan race can inhabit this land or the Aryan

branch of the Caucasian race I think one of the surprising things that I found in this research is 100% of these covenants

are aimed at african-americans that's black okay here's the legal description what we're doing with math and Prejudice is

we're using digital tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting to help us identify the deeds that do contain racially restrictive covenants covenants exist across the country people say well why

aren't you doing this for st. Paul - I know there are covenants in st. Paul

their deeds are not scanned which is incredibly unwieldly right for traditional research methods where you go down to the archive and you just start going through the material um you need an army of undergrads and the

better part of a century and even then I'm not convinced people to be able to get through all of them so we use OCR to translate these digitized warranty deeds

into searchable text documents once we have these in text document form I can write a script that iterates through and looks for predefined racial terms and whenever it finds a match we flag this

corresponding deed image and once we have this into the still very large but manageable realm of you know around 40,000 flanked images we as volunteers

to help us transcribe them may not be sold mortgaged or leased to are occupied by any person or persons other than the Caucasian race so you can go ahead and

click yes and those answers I then export and this actually gives me enough

data to build the map

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planning has always been intentional space has always been intentionally manufactured to shape and represent values the question is whose values and

for homes benefit and are you historically low-income folks of color in particular and you know larger racial ethnic groups more broadly have not been

at the center of the benefits of urban planning the covenants were first put in in 1910 but at that point developers

could start buying up large sections of farmland that had joined the city when a developer buys what used to be a farm on the outskirts of town they buy it

divided into six city Lots and sell the individual Lots off at that point when they start selling off the individual Lots that's really when their racial covenants kind of injected into the

property record so people like Samuel Thorpe Thorpe Brothers could buy this up and just plant it and lay it out as they saw fit

and put in covenants it was very efficient way of doing this there's this real estate convention it's there that JC Nichols who runs the country-club

estates in Kansas City gets up and said a few years ago I was really hesitant but now I can't sell a property without

them and Sam Thorpe was certainly there he was a retiring president he comes back in an August of 1912 buys up the

land that will become Thorpe brothers Nokomis Terrace and that is the first fully covenant Edition that I know of it

talks about no colored people or other objectionable types Mary Greer was a

woman who inherited many of the dormant Edition properties near Western Railroad after 1910 she started putting in racial covenants it will never be sold or

transferred or leased or conveyed to anyone who's a negro and that goes for people who are living with Negroes or married to Negroes she adopted that

early on her first one shows up about 1911 or 12 and you see this all through the teens and 20s with her and Edmund Walton did the same thing

along West River Road at one point I think they said he had bought up 437 acres along the river he had gone in

1910 from sort of surreptitiously putting these covenants in not recording them less than a decade later he was bragging about them in the newspaper

there is an ad and he printed the covenant which shows you how quickly they were accepted [Music]

the Supreme Court even held that restrictive covenants were constitutional this was in a case of Corrigan V Buckley and it was in that decision where the court resolved that

restrictive covenants are contracts and as such they are lawful now forget about the fact that they discriminate and forget about the fact that once we say

these contracts exist we are we are bringing up a violation issue of the Fourteenth Amendment forget about that the key thing is that the Supreme Court

validated segregation validated discrimination you have the full force of the law the court system determining who could go where and what will happen

as a result of that is you'll see efforts to ensure that a denial to one of the most basic foundations of opportunity for African Americans will be codified in the United States as a

result you had not only the courts supporting it but also a kind of license of sorts of people going to the streets and harassing blacks who moved into

white neighborhoods

[Music] the white neighbors knowing that little

Francis couple was moving in offered them money to not move into the house William Francis and his wife Nellie who is one of my heroes

rejected that and moved in and as a result faced all kinds of harassment the Francis family did not live there for

very long because shortly after moving in William T Francis was appointed to be the consult to Liberia in effect an

ambassador and so they moved to Africa it's an example of how even the most prominent of African Americans in Minnesota at the time who had

established contacts with some of the most powerful people in American politics Nelly herself had personal audiences with Andrew Carnegie and three US

presidents that despite their successes and their their influence could still be exposed to racial animus so it shows the

intensity of a property values the perception of property values in a race [Music]

so what racial covenants did is they hardened boundaries they hardened these invisible racial boundaries it's interesting because even in neighborhoods where there maybe aren't

any covenants just being in proximity the covenants is really powerful for keeping that neighborhood white still [Music]

homes are often taken for granted for some of us instances like the Li family faced makes us realize that a home is a

kind of fragile thing it's one and a half story quite modest bungalow you wouldn't particularly notice it but when

you know anything about its history and the story of the Li family it

becomes quite powerful Arthur Lee was world war one that he worked the post office he had a good steady paycheck at

a time when thirty percent of the city is out of work so he finds this house that someone is willing to sell him on 46th on Columbus it was not coveted they

had the temerity to violate what is at that point this boundary in the urban landscape so Arthur Lee he moves into the house now first the Neighborhood Association gets together and they try

to buy him out they contact the bank they contact different lawyers they try legal means in July of 1931 by a newspaper reports five or six thousand white people at any

given time are milling around his house trying to drive him out [Music] black paint was thrown on their house their dog is poisoned

vandalism intimidation the family has to sleep in the basement they had the sense that they had set these boundaries that no one was to violate them

this is just another tool so to speak this citizen terrorism and in this particular case author who was a World

War one vet right comes home to believe that his service to our country gave him the same access as his white counterparts but learn very quickly that

that was not the case

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it was really important for families like the Lee family to have advocates to help them fight [Music] being able to have lawyers like Elena

Olive Smith and being able to have the n-double-a-cp on their side was really powerful in in making sure that their

voices were heard the n-double-a-cp was definitely fighting against these racial covenants in these instances of racial housing discrimination there's also

smaller clubs and organizations that were really focused on fighting this unfortunately even with all of these legal protections and organizations

fighting for them a lot of people don't end up getting the end result of they want Edith and Arthur Lee and their daughter Mary they stayed for two years

they didn't they didn't make it longer than two years I think I think the pressure was just too great for them I can only imagine as a parent as

someone who wants to ensure that I'm living my values but what it would mean to put my family at risk and what it would mean to always feel like I'm

looking over my shoulder just to protect my right you have this escalation of this sense of threat thanks to racial communism so it's that intensification

that normalization of these racist ideas that leads to the Lee House marker the

corner of the property has a depiction an image of Arthur Lee for those who just walk by I think it gets them gets

them thinking about it

[Music] homeownership is the basis of a half a contended family life and now through

the use of a National Housing Act insured mortgage is brought within the reach of all citizens on a monthly payment in the midst a new deal when the FDR administration is looking for ways to try to stabilize the housing market

the Fair Housing Act has passed in 1934 and as part of that the home owners Loan Corporation is also established with the hope that if you could establish long term mortgages with fixed interest rates

you could create pathways to homeownership for most Americans now spanning for rent when the FHA starts

underwriting mortgages in the 1930s this really is a game-changer in a lot of ways it takes a lot of risk off the banks it places it on to the federal government and now working-class middle-class families they're able to

purchase a home unfortunately as part of that which what the holc does is it establishes designations for neighborhoods based on the occupants of

those neighborhoods and this is where the term redlining comes into place the FHA they made color-coded maps of all the largest cities in the United States and they broke cities down into

four different areas red is considered hazardous that's the worst yellow is considered definitely declining blue is considered still desirable and green is considered the

best and what's so powerful about this kind of scale of measuring investment it was about values at people the fact that matter is that there was no evidence that those people who lived in those

communities predominantly black and brown people inform when people would have defaulted on loans there are no firm realities behind the close proximity to blackness in your property

values going down that's just not true the FHA is being very upfront and very explicit in how they're linking spacial

desirability with racial occupancy it's this racialization space idea so areas that were predominantly african-american or majority minority or really in a lot of cases even if there's a few non-white

people there that's often enough to be redlined so when they built these maps they also explained why each area got the ranking it did the area around 4,000 new south which is called Old South Side

this was a nice area it had nice homes it's the historic african-american neighborhood on the south side of Minneapolis this one part of South Minneapolis was red line specifically

due to I'm quoting a gradual infiltration of Negroes in Asiatics the FHA refused to give an area a green

lined designation again this is the best designation that they'll go offer unless and I'm quoting again restrictive covenants are already in place that lines from the FHA underwriting manual racial covenants aren't just about

discriminating against people of color it's about enriching white people and I think that's the part that often gets lost in this narrative and I think it does speak to the ways that white

supremacy have been embedded and really built structures and built environments I mean if your grandparents bought a

home on Minnehaha Creek you know that homes worth what half a million your grandparents rented an area that was redlined and then subsequently destroyed by a freeway project

you're not inheriting anything in a lot of ways the practice of redlining which didn't start until the 1930s institutionalized and spread racial covenants all over the country

because suddenly developers got sanctioned they got direction from the federal government saying this is best practices if you want to have a really high rating from us if you want to get

the most favorable terms for any loans by kind of D integrating Minneapolis which in any ways is what racial covenants are doing this set the stage and enabled all these subsequent systems

of inequality to really take and to really take hold this very persistent myth that northern cities never had

formal segregation the South had Jim Crow and look at those signs well racial covenants did the work of Jim Crow in in the north all over the north

many many whites simply were not aware that there was a segregation [Music]

so many people in Maine apples that be outraged what they thought that their friend was being discriminated against they knew something was happening but it

wasn't happening to your friend that was what kind of this mixed kind of a situation that we had in Minneapolis I didn't when if you could imagine these

people their parents sent me cookies and you know cakes all during the war and I was I was welcome in their house it was no question about it and then there's

other people who were just absolutely Klansmen you know that was what many of us was all about but that was the young that was my generation in Minneapolis we

were him did in that that ghetto and that was that was our life that was her that was her work the 1935 land-use

planning map used to define which place would get mortgages verse others circled these areas called them slums places rather than clinic of Negroes lived is there places to avoid right so they're

going to give you substandard housing and I gotta contain you access to affordable housing was a challenge do you think about the reasons behind the creation of public housing we had a lot

of folks forced to the low-wage sector right and you're thinking about what jobs or opportunities that low-income folks of color even had access to at this time you know I would argue that

with the creation of public housing in 1938 the Summoner filled homes became this really interesting iteration of the redesign of space you have 400 units of

public housing which were segregated at the time created in 1953 the City Council of Minneapolis refused to

scatter another thousand units of public housing outside of the Sumner field homes area and where do these pressures come from you had both internal

conservative politicians and outlying suburban communities coming in saying not in my neighborhood and the City Council crumbled under the pressure and then took what was four hundred units of public housing to over a thousand units

and less than a decade they have strategically manufactured urban poverty [Music]

this history is is very personal for me I'm a third generation mini a Politan my grandparents were immigrants from Sweden who came to this country with nothing

you know worked incredibly hard jobs but both sets of my grandparents in 1942 were able to buy houses in South Minneapolis these houses were in a part of the city that was blanketed by racial

covenants because of those racial covenants Mike my parents grew up in neighborhoods that were entirely white and and in many ways they described them as as a paradise for children they had

wonderful parks they had really solid schools that sent them to college but no one in their neighborhood ever talked about the fact that this neighborhood was only for white people and I want

everyone with this map to imagine themselves in this landscape of privilege and disenfranchisement [Music] the Justice Department contended that

restrictive covenants among private citizens bar Negros and other minority groups from residential areas and are not enforceable by the courts their joint brief described the covenants as

an artificial quarantine of minority groups [Music] covenants were one of the big issues that the n-double-a-cp was tackling in

the first half of the 20th century Thurgood Marshall was leader of the litigation part of the in double-a-c-p when Thurgood was asked upon his retirement what was the most important

case everyone assumed he would say Brown versus Board of Education he said no it was Shelley V Kraemer Shelley V Kraemer in the late 1940s was one of the more

you know seminal sephora's cases that ever managed the Supreme Court it didn't explicitly and racial covenants as a practice but it was a pretty big blow there could be no enforcement of restrictive covenants so you could still

write a restrictive covenant but a person who signed it could breach the contract and sell it to a black person and they would not be held liable it

wasn't as effective as a lot of folks hoped what people started doing is instead of suing for breach of contract they would sue for damages so if somebody sells a covenants at home to an

african-american the neighbors can sue that person because their property values are now lower well is there anything a matter there's never going to be any violence in this part of town we

are peaceful people you've got friends here I'm your friend we just want to know what it is you think you're doing to it if I have a covenant at home and I sell it to somebody who isn't white and

I get sued I lose the house any equity I've accumulated the property reverts to the initial granting party so whoever first put that covenant on the land if that person's dead I would revert to

that the heirs are a science of the initial covenant Dean party so the risk of going against these things is just like astronomical [Music]

the restrictive covenants have already laid the foundation for continued denial of equality for african-americans by virtue of these private contracts which the Supreme Court will determine in 1948

or judicially unenforceable but still legal in fact that plays out in a very powerful way in Lorraine Hansberry play a Raisin in the Sun you know that money we got in the mail this morning yes'm

well what do you think your grandmama done with him done I don't know she went and she bought you a house does that

play was being produced you have situations across the country including one in Delaware where a family the Collins Park are forced out of their home by a mob and then ultimately the home is bombed but what Lorraine

Hansberry captures in there and that wonderful passage where Walter younger is kind of laying out what the foundations for freedom and equality will be for his family and it's home ownership one day son we're gonna sit

down and we're gonna see all the great schools in America but the pathway to that is the ownership of a home and Lorraine Hansberry hit on something very powerful in a raisin and son because it's playing out about this family

seeking home ownership is a pathway to true freedom and true equality and there is no one factor more representative of

or more conducive to the economic well-being of the American citizens than the home in which he lives

[Music] the spread of covenants in the first half the 20th century is that pretty much the same story as the spread of the

Twin Cities over the first half of the 20th century the first ring suburbs Edina st. Louis Park Richfield

Edina st. Louis Park Richfield Bloomington are all blanketed in racial covenants they probably have a higher density of restrictions in Minneapolis does simply because there was more development happening in Bloomington

around 1950 than in Minneapolis and the effects of that are very surprising right like that ring is very white and

this pushes African Americans into kind of the center of Minneapolis it denies them access to those mortgages it denies

them the opportunity to sell their homes and in that sense it closes off an opportunity to escape those communities but more importantly denies them the same pathway to the acquisition of wealth home ownership and then of course

the sale of those properties and bequeathing those properties to their children [Music]

my dad later Tilson would have open houses on I think it was on 41st and force was the model home it was something to behold because as a kid you

don't really understand what this desegregation of man or what segregation really meant redlining you didn't really know but you saw people come in who knew what that meant and in fact I think the

spokesman build the Tilson built homes as possibly the first open housing event in the nation so it was it was one of the first times african-americans could buy new homes on the quote-unquote open

market no it was a huge it's a huge piece of housing history for the construction of her the Choson built homes that your dad demanded that there be african-american men working on those jobs he knew what that economic power

could be what does job power could be and he did insist on his contractors bringing people colored to the job and it was extremely extremely important to him and I think the fact that that

started here again is something unique about Minnesota at the same time the disparities that we have now don't support that it was continuing no didn't carry out throughout the whole community that's

for sure the city yeah wasn't citywide and so there is a some significant divide that still lasts

[Music] we moved to Minnesota

so that was 1956 I felt we were very fortunate to meet the people we met a

wonderful community of black activists and others so I became involved in the

League of Women Voters in ACP we were very much involved in issues dealing with employment opportunities education

for our children housing discrimination thank you very much there was the sense that what we needed to do was to really

create a lobbying effort at the legislature in the 61 session to get their housing introduced and passed in

that session so I was encouraged to be the chief lobbyist for that and I

invited my friend Matthew little zetas fader and my friend Katie mcwatt we

would feel that to deny some parts of the housing market the effect of the law is fabulous in effect those who own property have a right to sell in a right

to rent to whom we please in the white people the white rates had better wake up and see the handwriting on wall before it is too late to see that

America that part of America st. Paul

become more truly what we call the American dream it's going to be hard it's going to cost money you've made this mistake

fathers have made this mistake and it cannot be remedied without a lot of pain and suffering and the expenditure of

hard cold cash I felt we were losing the vote and so I went to Governor Elmer

Anderson he was a very open fair liberal Republican one I knew and had a lot of

respect for so I went to the governor and I said governor the housing bill is

going to be defeated in the Judiciary Committee and I'm very worried and he went to his desk and wrote a note to

each member of the Judiciary Committee urging them to allow the bill to get out of the committee that it was only fair and just in his judgement and allow it

then to be treated in the full Senate and the bill passed by one vote so it then got to the full Senate where

it passed but again narrowly so that's

back in 62 that Minnesota was one of the

first states to pass a fair housing so

between 62 and 67 you know I've been very troubled because there was still so much discrimination in housing

[Music] this week's program deals with the proposed fair housing bill to prohibit

discrimination in the sale or rental of housing senator Mondale is chief author of the bill in the Senate this is not an anti riot field but at the same time I think we have to be wise

enough and mature enough to realize that these riots tell us something about the deep and abiding frustrations and a sense of rage that exists in our

American ghettos there are compelling problems that of injustice and unfairness in employment housing and education and many other

areas that that we should have taken care of a long time ago

[Music] Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to discriminate based on race AIDS later if they had sex and you know disability and

etc to ensure that everyone has equal access to housing where they sew shoes and I think that has opened up doors for a lot of families what happened to the black middle-class for instance you know many folks were able to break into

neighborhoods that they weren't you know didn't have access to before and we should have those choices but when you don't have the economic

mobility to make those choices fair

housing doesn't look very fair 35w i-94 expand Hiawatha expand Olson memorial

these were all explicitly and very intentionally run through these black communities that emerge as a result of this kind of cordon of covenants that

had taken place around the city 35w going south it was it was a dividing line between the folks on the other side of the freeway and the folks on our side

at the freeway it's an arresting of you know it brought people together in one sense and we were

able to create our own community around

38th Street and 4th Avenue my dad and their family originally from the central neighborhood and then he went to Central High School and they tell me these

stories just about what they call kind the black Mecca and essential neighborhoods [Music] when you talk about the problem we're

talking about it from a deficit based language I also want to make sure we're talking about an asset based language I think we need to be aware of this kind

of assault on the character of these places and take back that narrative an intentional way we're not going to be able to get everybody out of the just

discriminated areas because there many of them are in the center of our cities and many of these people want to live there and they want this opportunity for homeownership and the only way we can do

it is by partnership between private industry and a lending business and our government our community was redlined simple as that

[Music] now as a community we made the best of it and we produce a great many influential people as well and a lot of

that came from having developed a pretty powerful community when Central High School was shut down it took the heart and the soul out of

this community and I remember them talking about 4th Avenue and how it was

now referred to as crack Avenue which talks about the decline in the economy in this neighborhood but up and down

fourth Avenue throughout the neighborhood there were tough times so even though covenants are now illegal kind of this you know yawning chasm of wealth inequality that emerged as a

result of covenants is still very much with us today

[Music] 75% of white families in Minneapolis on the homes that they occupy about 25% of black families in Minneapolis own the

homes that they occupy it's actually the largest in terms of percentage gap in the country and this has huge

implications for the racial wealth gap you look at where our high income communities live or now there has been an investment homeownership for certain

communities versus others where if black folks rivers have participated in that during the rise and proliferation of racial covenants you might see a different notion of black wealth we have

to first acknowledge the history and understand how we're implicated in it so then get to reparative solutions you do have a covenant but it's prejudiced park is doing something

unlike anything across the country which I think's amazing so they're mapping the history of housing discrimination they're naming something that has been

allowed to exist in the shadows of neighborhood planning and politics the whole point of this map is to get people to read these racial covenants to get

people to read these racially restrictive deeds so from the beginning I wanted to invite as many people as possible into that process I think it's

fascinating to see there's a genuine curiosity about something that lay hidden for so long and and buried and I think doing it is kind of a way to kind of get in touch with history and better

understand how things are the way they are now and see the direct connection in systemic racist language that is very much part of our history and it's very

much part of our present reality with the exhibit owning up to racism and housing and Minneapolis we're hoping to illustrate the history of housing

discrimination and racism and the impact that that had on real families we really want to confront visitors with

these histories to really take action take responsibility and to try to help create change in some way and you're done at that point with that particular

deed as it turns out a lot of university professors are incorporating this into their curriculum

and you've got another one once you see that and indeed you think okay this is one but there's thousands out there this has been an amazing experience I think

for everyone involved I mean it's been amazing to me to see the goodwill and the energy that people have given us which has been a huge gift but I've also talked to people and I've actually

collected some data on what people say their experience has been you know these are mostly white people and they have reported that the experience of reading these deeds has been transformative for them

their work is a graphic example of this otherwise invisible practice of discrimination ideally what we're

looking at is changing the grand narrative away from personal pathology cultures of poverty as the saying goes to saying you know the system was rigged

from the get-go this is how it happened so at the last moment city planners decided to reroute the freeway several blocks east right through a black neighborhood racial covenants show what

we're showing how incredibly central racial covenants were in terms of laying the groundwork in the foundation for those leader manifestations of racism we

are inviting people not just to know about this but also to take action and what we're attempting to do is to build the first comprehensive spatial database or map if you will of racial covenants

for any city in the country so there has been I mean this just gives you a level of precision and data that nobody's really had access to previously and when used in conjunction with redlining

I think it can make very powerful arguments about which areas the city need to be systematically reinvested in [Music] so it's real important to speak about

the history of the community and figure out what made it click yesterday and implementing some of those same

approaches tomorrow and I see pieces of that kind of development of the community starting to surface

talk about space and urban planning we're talking more than like bricks and mortars and like windows we are talking about people's lives their values in

their humanity

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this program is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund [Music]