Integration Generation

Host Lee Hawkins investigates how a secret nighttime business deal unlocked the gates of a Minnesota suburb for dozens of Black families seeking better housing, schools, and safer neighborhoods. His own family included.

Transcript

Intro

LEE HAWKINS: This is the house that I grew up in and you know we're standing here on a sidewalk looking over the house but back when I lived here there was no sidewalk, and the house was white everything was white on white. And I mean white, you know, white in the greenest grass.

My parents moved my two sisters and me in 1975, when I was just four years old. Maplewood, a suburb of 25,000 people at the time, was more than 90% white.

As I rode my bike through the woods and trails. I had questions: How and why did these Black families manage to settle here, surrounded by restrictions designed to keep them out?

The answer, began with the couple who lived in the big house behind ours… James and Frances Hughes.

You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 1.

My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.

I investigated 400 years of my Black family’s history — how enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid in my father’s home state of Alabama, the Great Migration to St. Paul, and our later move to the suburbs shaped us.

My producer Kelly and I returned to my childhood neighborhood. When we pulled up to my old house—a colonial-style rambler—we met a middle-aged Black woman. She was visiting her mother who lived in the brick home once owned by our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Hutton.

LEE HAWKINS: How you doing? It hasn't changed that much. People keep it up pretty well, huh?

It feels good to be back because it’s been more than 30 years since my parents sold this house and moved. Living here wasn’t easy. We had to navigate both the opportunities this neighborhood offered and the ways it tried to make us feel we didn’t fully belong.

My family moved to Maplewood nearly 30 years after the first Black families arrived. And while we had the N-word and mild incidents for those first families, nearly every step forward was met with resistance. Yet they stayed and thrived. And because of them, so did we.

LEE HAWKINS: You know, all up and down this street, there were Black families. Most of them — Mr. Riser, Mr. Davis, Mr. White—all of us can trace our property back to Mr. Hughes at the transaction that Mr. Hughes did.

I was friends with all of their kids—or their grandkids. And, at the time, I didn’t realize that we, were leading and living, in real-time, one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the American economy and culture. We are the post-civil rights generation—what I call The Integration Generation.

Mark Haynes was like a big brother to me, a friend who was Five or six years older. When he was a teenager, he took some bass guitar lessons from my dad and even ended up later playing bass for Janet Jackson when she was produced by Minnesota’s own Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Since his family moved to Maplewood several years before mine, I called him to see what he remembered.

MARK HAYNES: "It's a pretty tight-knit group of people,"

Mark explained how the community came together and socialized, often –

MARK HAYNES: "they—every week, I think—they would meet, actually. I was young—maybe five or six.

LEE HAWKINS: And what do you remember about it? I asked. What kind of feeling did it give you?

MARK HAYNES: It was like family, you know, all of them are like, uh, aunts and uncles to me, cousins. It just felt like they were having a lot of fun. I think there was an investment club too."

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