The Perpetual Fight

Racial covenants along with violence, hostility and coercion played an outsized role in keeping non-white families out of sought after suburbs. Lee learns how these practices became national policy after endorsement by the state’s wealthy business owners and powerful politicians.

Transcript

Part 2 – Discrimination and the Perpetual Fight

Cold Open:

PENNY PETERSEN: He doesn't want to have his name associated with this. I mean, it is a violation of the 14th Amendment. Let's be clear about that. So he does a few here and there throughout Minneapolis, but he doesn't record them. Now, deeds don't become public records until they're recorded and simultaneously, Samuel Thorpe, as in, Thorpe brothers, is president of the National Board of Real Estate

FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “Housing for Blacks was extremely limited after the freeway went through and took so many homes. We wanted to sell to Blacks only because they had so few opportunities.”

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 could trace our property back to Mr. Hughes at the transaction that Mr. Hughes did.

CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community.

You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 2.

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 move to the suburbs shaped us.

We now understand how the challenges Black families faced in buying homes between 1930 and 1960 were more than isolated acts of attempted exclusion.

My reporting for this series has uncovered evidence of deliberate, systemic obstacles, deeply rooted in a national framework of racial discrimination.

It all started with me shining a light on the neighborhood I grew up in – Maplewood.

Mrs. Rogers, who still lives there, looks back, and marvels at what she has lived and thrived through.

ANN-MARIE ROGERS: My kids went to Catholic school, and every year they would have a festival. I only had the one child at the time. They would have raffle books, and I would say, don’t you dare go from door to door. I family, grandma, auntie, we'll buy all the tickets, so you don't have to and of course, what did he do? And door to door, and I get a call from the principal, Sister Gwendolyn, and or was it sister Geraldine at that time? I think it was sister Gwendolyn. And she said, Mrs. Rogers, your son went to a door, and the gentleman called the school to find out if we indeed had black children going to this school, and she said, don’t worry. I assured him that your son was a member of our school, but that blew me away.

In all my years in Maplewood, I had plenty of similar incidents, but digging deeper showed me that the pioneers endured so much more, as Carolyn Hughes-Smith explains.

CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: The one thing that I really, really remember, and it stays in my head, is cross burning. It was a cross burning. And I don't remember exactly what's it on my grandfather's property? Well, all of that was his property, but if it was on his actual home site.

Mrs. Rogers remembers firsthand –

ANN-MARIE ROGERS: I knew the individual who burned the cross.

Mark Haynes also remembers –

MARK HAYNES: phone calls at night, harassment, crosses burned

In the archives, I uncovered a May 4, 1962, article from the St. Paul Recorder, a Black newspap