(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Funding for this program
is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts
and Cultural Heritage Fund
and the friends of Minnesota Experience.
(soft music)
- This mob
of over 100 people
marched on an African American's house
in October of 1909
to try to stop this family from moving in.
(soft music)
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.
(soft 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.
(soft music)
And this is where you first see this racial language.
- [Man] Caucasians only.
Aryans only.
No Negros,
or no members of the African American blood or decent.
(soft music)
- 100% of them were aimed at black people.
(soft music)
- In many ways, racial covenants,
this was kind of ground zero of residential segregation.
And 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.
(soft music)
- The law of the streets,
the law of the courts working in consort
to discourage blacks from moving into white neighborhoods.
- It starts out as a private property developers,
but eventually you have the federal government
encouraging these racial covenants,
demanding actually that any investment they make
is protected
with this kind of racial exclusivity.
(soft music)
- When you can covenant entire
areas of the city,
it makes it off limits.
That's pretty powerful.
This is the Jim Crow of the North.
(soft music)
(soft Music)
- By the end of the century,
it would seem
that Minnesota was
one of the most enlightened states
with regard to race.
(soft music)
You had a leadership of the state
that seemed much more
amenable to doing the right thing,
or at least supporting in word,
policies that respected the dignity
of the African American.
Frank Wheaton came from Maryland.
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 in street cars, railroads,
places like that.
It didn't really deal with other issues
like schools and
housing and things of that nature.
But for all intents and purposes,
a major step forward with regard to
civil rights.
(soft music)
- 1910,
Minneapolis isn't particularly segregated.
There is emerging African American neighborhoods
around Lake Harriet,
around West River Road,
certainly on the east side of Minneapolis.
Prospect Park is this beautiful neighborhood,
very close to down town,
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 pulman porter.
He moved his family to Prospect Park
and he built a house there.
This was the first black family there.
(soft music)
- [Marvel Jackson Cooke] My father had bought
a piece of land
in what is known as Prospect Park, Minneapolis.
And he
broke ground and built a house,
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 whole community
became quite aroused
that a black family should be moving in.
(soft music)
- Marvel Jackson,
she said when the neighbors across the street
saw who they were,
she said that lady started screaming
when she realized that
it was an African American family
that was moving in across the street from her.
- [Marvel Jackson] 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.
(soft music)
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 hadn't thought about the impact
on the children.
(soft music)
My father built us a playground.
There was no other like it in the whole area.
And we became the most popular children
in the place.
The neighbors couldn't keep their children away.
- [Woman] A little while after they moved in,
the father's friend and coworker
also wanted to build a house in the neighborhood.
- [Woman] William and Daisy Simpson,
they were gonna build a house as well.
And they were staying in the Jackson house
while their house was under construction.
And I think that was the tipping point.
- That's when the resistance from white homeowners
really ramped up.
- [Woman] And this is where the Tribune
reports a race war in Prospect Park.
(soft music)
- [Woman] This mob of over 100 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.
- [Man] It was decided that a large delegation
should call upon you
to make doubly impressive a fact,
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.
(soft music)
- [Woman] And as men of prudence, judgment
and determination,
we will do everything we can to prevent this.
(soft music)
And then there was another threat.
- [Man] 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.
(soft music)
These were not idle threats.
(soft music)
But the amazing thing to me is that
both of these families persisted.
(soft music)
They stayed in their houses,
and in a sense built a lovely home,
which is still there today.
Marvel blazed a trail
as she was the first African American child
to go through Pratt Elementary school.
I learned that her mother
had actually dated
W.E.B. Dubois
before marrying Madison Jackson.
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.
- [Marvel] 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 Wilkins
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 grownup,
you certainly can experience this more.
And she realized there was really no place for her here.
Well Minneapolis's loss
was the Harlem renaissance gain.
- She ended up moving to New York City.
She ended up working for W.E.B. Du Bois.
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 had this incredible career,
incredible talents, gifts,
passion.
And Minneapolis lost her.
(soft music)
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,
if 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.
(soft 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.
(somber music)
I'm pretty sure I know who wrote that covenant,
and that was one Edmond G. Walton.
He was a real estate developer.
(somber music)
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.
- [Kirsten] 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 plotted after 1910
are very likely to have these
racial restrictions embedded in the property deed.
- [Penny] Covenants can be building covenants.
The can be set back 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.
(soft music)
- Identifying racial covenants, however,
has proved remarkably challenging.
The only way to find racial covenants
are to read warranty deeds.
We're looking at about three million deeds
in Hennepin County between 1900 and 1960.
And each deed on average runs about three pages.
So we're in the ballpark of 10 million or so
pages of text.
- Robin's day on home garden.
- Penny found about 4,000, 5,000 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
racial restrictive covenants.
And that was enough to get us thinking,
okay, hey, maybe we can do more than just show
that racial covenants were just a practice
that was used in Minneapolis.
What if we can map all of them?
The first map that Penny made was shocking.
(soft music)
I was shocked when I saw this.
And she started reading me
some of the language of the use
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 sematic,
people of African blood or descent.
No Negros or Jews.
Only Caucasians,
except for their domestic servants
of a different race who might be domiciled
with the owner.
- [Kevin] Many of them were written
during the period where eugenics
was at front and center
of American
scientific thought.
And that language is often what you see
in these deeds.
- [Kirsten] Only people of the Aryan race
can inhabit this land.
- [Kevin] 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.
There's that.
That's black.
Okay, here's the legal description.
- What we're doing with Mapping Prejudice
is we're using digital tools
to do a lot of the heavy lifting,
to help us identify the deeds that do contain
racial restrictive covenants.
- [Penny] Covenants exist across the country.
People say well why aren't you doing this
for St. Paul too.
I know there are covenants in St. Paul.
Their deeds are not scanned.
- Which is incredibly unwieldy, right,
for traditional research methods
where you go down to the archive
and you just start going through the material.
You would need an army of undergrads
and the better part of a century.
And even then, I'm not convinced
you'd be able 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 so very large,
but manageable realm
of around 40,000 flagged images,
we ask volunteers to help us transcribe them.
- Then it says may not be sold, mortgaged,
or leased to or occupied by any person,
or persons other than members of the Caucasian race.
- Oh, yeah.
- Yeah.
So you can go ahead and click yes.
- [Kevin] And those answers, I then export.
And this actually gives me enough data to build the map.
(soft music)
- Planning has always been intentional.
Space has always been intentionally manufactured
to shape and represent values.
The question is whose values,
and for whose benefit.
And I argue historically,
low income folks of color, in particular,
and you know larger racial and 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, divide it 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
got injected into the property record.
- So people like Samuel Thorpe,
Thorpe Brothers,
could buy this up and just
plat it,
and lay it out as they saw fit
and put in covenants.
It was a very efficient way of doing this.
There's this real estate convention.
It's there that J.C. Nickels,
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 August of 1912,
buys up the land that will become Thorpe Brothers
Nokomis Terrace.
And that is the first fully covenanted addition
that I know of.
It talks about no colored people,
or other objectionable types.
(soft music)
Mary Greer was a woman who inherited
many of the Dorman addition properties
near West River Road
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 Negros
or married to Negros.
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 Edmond 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'd 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 was an ad,
and he printed the covenant,
which shows you how quickly
they were accepted.
(soft music)
- The Supreme Court even held
that restrictive covenants
were constitutional.
This was in a case of Corgan 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 14th amendment.
Forget about that.
The key thing is that
the Supreme Court validated segregation,
validated discrimination.
- [Penny] You have the full force of the law,
the court system determining who could go where.
- And what'll 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.
(soft music)
The white neighbors,
knowing that the Francis couple was moving in,
offered them money
to not move into the house.
William Francis and his wife Nelly,
who was one of my heroes,
rejected that and moved in,
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 consul to Liberia,
in fact, 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 influence,
could still be exposed to racial animus.
So it shows the intensity of property values,
the perception of property values and race.
(soft music)
- [Dr. Brittany Lewis] So what racial covenants did
is they hardened boundaries.
They hardened those invisible boundaries.
- It's interesting because even in neighborhood
where there maybe aren't any covenants,
just being in proximity to covenants
is really powerful for keeping that neighborhood
white still.
(somber music)
- Homes are often taken for granted for some of us.
Instances like
the Lee family faced
makes us realize that a home
is a kind of fragile thing.
It's a one and a half story,
quite modest bungalow.
You wouldn't particularly notice it.
But when you know anything about it's history
and the story of the Lee family,
it becomes quite powerful.
(somber music)
- Arthur Lee was a World War I vet.
He worked for the post office.
- [Woman] He had a good steady paycheck at a time
when 30% of the city is out of work.
So he finds this house
that someone is wiling to sell him
on 46th and Columbus.
It was not covenanted.
They had the temerity
to violate what is at that point the boundary
in the urban landscape.
So Arthur Lee,
he moves into the house.
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 newspaper reports,
five or six thousand
white people at any given time
are milling around his house,
trying to drive him out.
(somber music)
- [Woman] Black paint was thrown on their house.
- [Woman] Their dog is poisoned.
- [Woman] Vandalism, intimidation.
- [Woman] 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.
(somber music)
- This is just another tool, so to speak,
this citizen terrorism.
- [Dr. Brittany Lewis] And in this particular case,
Arthur, who was a World War I vet,
comes home to believe
that his service to our country
gave him the same access as his white counterparts,
but learned very quickly that that was not the case.
(somber music)
- It was really important for families like the Lee family
to have advocates to help them fight.
(dramatic music)
Being able to have lawyers
like Queen Olive Smith,
and being able to have the NAACP on their side
was really powerful
in making sure that
their voices were heard.
(somber music)
The NAACP
was definitely fighting against
these racial covenants
and these instances of racial housing discrimination.
There's also smaller clubs and organizations
that were really focused on fighting this.
Unfortunately,
even with all these legal protections
and organizations fighting for them,
a lot of people don't end up getting
the end result that they want.
Edith and Arthur Lee,
and their daughter Mary,
they stayed for two years.
They didn't make it longer than two years.
I think the pressure was just too great for them.
(somber music)
- I can only imagine,
as a parent,
as someone who
wants to ensure that I'm living my values,
like 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.
- [Denise] You have this escalation of this sense of threat
thanks to racial covenants.
So it's that intensification,
that normalization of these racist ideas
that leads to the Lee house.
(dramatic music)
- [Greg] The marker at the corner of the property
has a depiction, and image
of Arthur Lee.
For those who just walked by,
I think it gets them,
it gets them thinking about it
(soft music)
- [Man On Radio] Basis of the happy, contented family life.
And now through the use of a national housing act,
ensured mortgage
is brought within the reach of all citizens
on a monthly payment plan.
- In the midst of the New Deal
when the FDR administration
is looking for ways to try to stabilize the housing market,
the Fair Housing Act is passed in 1934.
And as part of that,
the Home Owners Loan Corporation is also established.
But the hope that
if you could establish long term mortgages,
with fixed interest rates,
you could create pathways to home ownership
for most Americans.
- [Man On Radio] This time, they can buy this house
with monthly payments that are less
than they now spend 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 onto the federal government.
And now working class, middle class families,
they're able to purchase a home.
- Unfortunately,
as part of that,
what the HOLC does
is it establishes
designations for neighborhoods
based on the occupants of those neighborhoods.
- [Kevin] And this is where the term redlining
comes into place.
(dramatic music)
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 in people.
- [Kevin] The fact of the matter is
that there was no evidence that those people
who lived in those communities,
predominantly black and brown people
and foreign born 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 the racialization of space idea.
So areas that were predominantly African American,
or majority minority
are 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 their ranking it did.
- [Denise] The area around Fourth Avenue South,
which is called the 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,
it was redlined specifically due to, and I'm quoting,
"a gradual infiltration of Negros and Asiatics."
(soft music)
The FHA refused to give an area a green line designation,
again this is the best designation
that they'll offer
unless, and I'm quoting again,
"restrictive covenants are already in place."
That line is 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 gets lost
in this narrative.
And I think it does speak to
the ways that white supremacy
have been embedded,
and have really built structures
and built environments.
(soft music)
I mean if you're
grandparents bought a home
on Minnehaha creek,
that home's worth what, half a million.
If 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 de-integrating Minneapolis,
which I many ways is what racial covenants are doing,
this set the stage
and enabled all these subsequent systems
of inequality to really take hold.
(soft music)
- [Kirsten] 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 the north,
all over the north.
- Many, many whites simply were not aware
that there was a,
a segregation.
(soft music)
So many people in Minneapolis
would 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's what kind of a mixed kind of a situation
that we had in Minneapolis.
If you could imagine all these people,
their parents sent me
cookies and you know,
cakes all during the war.
And I was welcome in their house.
There was no question about it.
And then there's other people
who were just absolutely Klansmen.
That was what Minneapolis was all about.
But that was my generation in Minneapolis.
We were hemmed in that,
that ghetto.
And that was our,
that was our world.
(soft music)
- The 1935 Land Use planning map
used to define which place would get mortgages
versus others,
circled these areas.
Called them slums.
Places where them quote unquote Negros lived.
They were places to avoid, right.
So they were gonna give you substandard housing,
and they're gonna contain you.
Access to affordable housing was a challenge.
When you think about
the reasons behind the creation
behind public housing,
we had a lot of folks forced
to the low wage sector.
And you're thinking about what jobs
or opportunities that low income folks of color
even had access to at this time.
I would argue that with the creation
of public housing in 1938,
the Sumner Field 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 and saying not in my neighborhood.
And the city council crumbled under the pressure
and then took what was 400 units of public housing
to over 1,000 units
in less than a decade.
They have strategically manufactured
urban poverty.
(soft music)
- This history is very personal for me.
I'm a third generation Minneopolitan.
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,
my parents grew up in neighborhoods
that were entirely white.
And in many ways,
they described them 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.
(soft music)
- [Man] The Justice Department
contended that restrictive covenants
among private citizens barred 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.
- [Kevin] Covenants were one of the big issues
that the NAACP was tackling
in the first half to the 20th century.
- Thurgood Marshall was leader
of the litigation part of the NAACP.
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.
- [Kevin] Shelley V Kraemer,
in the late 1940s
was one of the more seminal civil rights cases
that ever made it to the Supreme Court.
It didn't explicitly end racial covenants as a practice,
but it was a pretty big blow.
- There could be no enforcement of covenants.
So you could still write a restrictive covenant,
but a person who signed it
could breech the contract
and sell it to a black person.
And they would not be held liable.
- [Kevin] It wasn't as effective
as a lot of folks hoped.
What people started doing
is instead of suing for breech of contract,
they would sue for damages.
So if somebody sells a covenanted 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're 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 us.
- If I have a covenanted 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,
it would revert to the heirs or assigns
of the initial covenanting party.
So the risk of going against these things
is just like astronomical.
(soft music)
- The restrictive covenants already laid the foundation
for continued denial of equality of African Americans
by virtue of these private contracts,
which the Supreme Court will determine in 1948
were judicially unenforceable,
but still legal.
In fact, it plays out in a very powerful way
in Lorraine Hansberry's play,
a Raisin in the Sun.
- You know, that money we got in the mail this morning?
- [Child] Yes.
- [Grandmother] Well what do you think your grandmamma
went and done?
- [Child] I don't know, grandma.
- Well, she went and she bought you a house.
(soft music)
- As that play was being produced,
you have situations across the country,
including one in Delaware
where a family in 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
in that wonderful passage,
where Walter Younger is kind of laying out
what the foundations for freedom of 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 in the Sun
because it's playing out about
this family seeking home ownership
as a pathway
to true freedom and true equality.
(soft music)
- [male narrator] And there is no one factor
more representative of
or more conducive to
the economic wellbeing of American citizens
than the home in which he lives.
(soft music)
- [Kevin] The spread of covenants
in the first half of the 20th century
is pretty much the same story
as the spread of the Twin Cities
over the first half of the 20th century.
The first string suburb,
Edina, St. Louis Park,
Richfield, Bloomington
are all blanketed in racial covenants.
They probably have a higher density
of restrictions than Minneapolis does,
simply because there's 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 the center of
Minneapolis.
(soft music)
- 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,
it denies them the same pathway
to the acquisition of wealth,
home ownership,
and of course the sale of those properties,
and bequeathing those properties to their children.
(soft music)
- My dad, they had a Tilsen with open houses
on I think was on 41st and Fourth
was the model home.
It was something to behold
because as a kid,
you don't really understand
what this desegregation meant,
or what segregation really meant,
or redlining.
You didn't really know,
but you saw people come in
who knew what that meant.
- And in fact,
I think the spokesman billed
the Tilsenbilt Homes
as possibly the first open housing event in the nation,
so it was one of the first times
African Americans could buy new homes
on the quote unquote open market.
It was a huge,
it's a huge piece of housing history
for the construction,
and for the Tilsenbilt Homes
that your dad demanded that there be
African American men working on those jobs.
- He knew
what that economic power
could be,
what the job power could be.
And he did insist on his contractors
bring people of color to the job.
And it was extremely, extremely important to him.
And I think the fact that it started here,
again, it's something unique about Minnesota.
- At the same time,
the disparities that we have now
don't support that it was continued.
- No, it didn't.
It didn't carry out throughout the whole community,
that's for sure, the city, yeah.
It wasn't citywide.
And so there is some significant divide
that still lasts.
(soft music)
- We moved to Minnesota.
So that was 1956.
I felt we were very fortunate
to meet the people we met.
The wonderful community
of black activists
and others.
So I became involved in being women voters,
and ACP.
We were very much involved in issues
dealing with
employment opportunities,
education for our children,
housing discrimination.
- Are wondering what the Fair Housing march
is all about.
We are attempting to get a fair housing deal
passed in the state of Minnesota now.
I was wondering if you would contribute something
to the fair housing march?
- I sure will.
- 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 fair 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,
Zeta Fader,
and my friend, Katie McWatt.
- We would feel that
to deny some parts of the housing market,
the effect of the law
is fraudulent in effect.
- Those who own property
have a right to sell and a right to rent
to whom we please.
And the white people,
the white race had better wake up
and see the hand writing on the wall
before it is too late.
- To steal that
America,
that part of America, St. Paul,
become more truly
what we call the American dream.
It's gonna be hard.
It's gonna cost money.
You made this mistake,
your forefathers have made this mistake.
And it cannot be remedied
without a pain and suffering,
and expenditure of hard, cold cash.
(soft music)
- 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 gonna 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 judgment,
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.
- Whereas Minnesota's Fair Housing Act
becomes operative,
and implementation of the law
must come from the willingness
of all of our citizens to cooperate
for their common perfection
as well as the beliefs that discrimination
practiced against any individual
is a threat to all.
Now, therefore, I, Elmer L. Anderson,
governor of the state of Minnesota,
do hereby proclaim Saturday December 29,
and Sunday December 30,
as Fair Housing Sabbath in Minnesota.
- So between 62
and 67,
I've been very troubled because
there was still so much
discrimination in housing.
(soft music)
- [Man] This weeks 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.
(soft music)
- [Man] This is not an anti-riot bill.
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 sense of rage that exist
in our American ghettos.
There are compelling problems
of injustice and unfairness
in employment, and housing,
and education, and many other areas
that we should have taken care of
a long time ago.
(soft music)
- The Fair Housing Act
makes it illegal to discriminate
based on race.
Later, they add sex, and disability,
and et cetera
to insure that everyone has equal access
to housing where they so choose.
And I think that's opened up doors
for a lot of families.
What happened to the black middle class,
for instance.
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.
(soft music)
- [Kevin] 35W, I94,
expand Hiawatha,
expand Olson Memorial.
These were all explicitly
and very intentionally run through these black communities
and emerged as a result of this kind of cordon
of covenants that had taken place around the city.
(soft music)
- 35W going south,
it was a dividing line
between the folks on the other side of the freeway
and the folks on our side of the freeway.
It's interesting,
it brought people together in one sense.
And we were able to create
our own community
around 38th street and Fourth Avenue.
(soft music)
- My dad and their family
were originally from the central neighborhood.
And he went to Central High School.
And they tell me these stories
just about what they called
kind of the black mecca
in the Central neighborhoods.
(soft music)
When you talk about the problem,
we're talking about from a deficits based language.
I also want to make sure
we're talking about an asset based langrage.
We need to be aware of this kind of
assault on the character of these places
and take back that narrative
in intentional ways.
- We're not gonna be able to get everybody
out of these discriminated areas
because 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 home ownership.
And the only way we can do it
is by a partnership between
private industry and
the lending business,
and our government.
- Our community was
redlined, simple as that.
Now, as a community,
we made the best of it
and we produced 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 Fourth 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 the covenants are now illegal,
kind of this yawning chasm of wealth inequality
that emerged as a result of covenants
is still very much with us today.
(soft music)
Well 75% of white families in Minneapolis
owned the homes that they actually occupied.
About 25% of black families in Minneapolis
owned the homes that they occupied.
It's actually the largest,
in terms of percentage,
gap in the country.
And this has huge implications
for the racial wealth gap.
- We look at where our high income communities live,
where now there's been investment home ownership
for certain communities versus others.
Where if black folks participated in that,
during this rise in proliferation of racial covenants,
you might see a different notion
of black wealth.
We have to first acknowledge that history,
and understand how we're implicated in it
to get to reparative solutions.
(soft music)
(upbeat music)
- You do have a covenant,
but it's.
- Mapping Prejudice Project
is doing something unlike anything
that's seen across the country,
which I think is 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,
get people to read these racial restrictive deeds.
So from the beginning,
I wanted to invite as many people as possible
into that process.
(group chatter)
- I think it's
fascinating to see.
There's a genuine curiosity about
something that lay hidden for so long,
and buried.
- And I think doing it
is kind of a way to 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 a part of our history,
and is very much part of our present reality.
(soft music)
- With the exhibit owning up racism
in housing in Minneapolis,
we're hoping to illustrate
the history of housing discrimination
and racism,
and the impact that had on real families.
We really want to confront visitors
with these histories
so they 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.
You got another one.
Once you see that in a deed,
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 an 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 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.
(group chatter) this one is one Lake Minnetonka
This one is on Lake Nokomis
- Their work
is a graphic example of
this otherwise invisible
practice of discrimination.
(soft music)
- Ideally, what we're looking at
is changing the grand narrative
away from the personal
pathology,
cultures of poverty, as the saying goes,
to saying 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 us--
- We're showing how incredibly
central racial covenants were
in terms of laying the groundwork
and the foundation for those
later manifestations of racism.
(soft music)
We are inviting people not to just know about this,
but also to take action.
And what we are attempting to do
is to build the first comprehensive
spatial database or map if you will
of racial covenants of any city in the country
so there as been . . .
- I mean this just give 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.
(soft 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.
(soft music)
- [Dr. Brittany Lewis] Talk about space in urban planning,
we're talking more than like bricks and mortars
and windows.
We are talking about people's lives,
their values, and their humanity.
(dramatic music)
(soft music)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Funding for this program
is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts
and Cultural Heritage Fund
and the friends of Minnesota Experience.