Jim Crow of the North - Full-Length Documentary

[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 [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 and there's this tool that they become aware of it's called a racial covenant and so just a few months after this confrontation you see the first racial covenant appear in a minneapolis property [Music] and this is where you first see this racial language caucasians only aryans only no negroes or no members of african blood or descent 100 of them were aimed at black people in many ways racial covenants this is 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 the law of the street the law of the courts working in consort 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 that 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] hello i'm tucson 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 at 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 [Music] 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 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 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 is a major step forward with regard to civil rights 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 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 [Music] my father had bought a piece of land in what is known as prospect park minneapolis and he broke ground he'd built a 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 whole community became quite aroused that a black family should be moving in 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 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 is 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 going to 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 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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [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 [Music] 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.b du bois 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 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 grown-up you certainly can experience this more and she realized there was really no place for her here well minneapolis 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 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 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 [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 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 editions 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 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 [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 3 million deeds in hennepin county between 1900 and 1960 and egd on average runs about three 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 recorder's office and started going through deeds and she found several thousand racially restrictive covenants and that was enough to get us thinking okay hey you know 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 [Music] 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 at front and center of american scientific thought and that language is often what you see in these 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 oh 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 racially restrictive covenants covenants exist across the country people say well why aren't you doing this for saint paul too i know there are covenants in saint 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 um 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 once we have this into the still very large but manageable realm of you know around forty thousand flanked images we asked volunteers to help us transcribe them and it says may not be sold mortgaged or at least two are occupied by any person or persons other than members of 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 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'd argue 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 brothers could buy this up and just plaid 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 and in august of 1912 buys up the land that will become thorp brothers nokomis terrace and that is the first fully covenanted 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 dorman edition 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 negroes or married to negroes she adopted that early on her first one shows up about 19 11 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 was an ad and he printed the covenant which shows you how quickly they were accepted [Music] the supreme court even held that restrictive covenants or 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 14th 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 um 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 [Music] neighborhoods [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 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 consul to liberia in effect an ambassador and so they 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 natalie herself had personal audiences with andrew carnegie and three u.s presidents that despite their successes and their their influence could still be exposed to racial animus so it shows the intensity of property values perception of property values and 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 to covenants is really powerful for keeping that neighborhood white still 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 its history and the story of the lee family it becomes quite powerful [Music] arthur lee was a world war one vet he worked for 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 in columbus it was not covenanted they had the temerity to violate what is at that point this boundary in the urban landscape so arthur leaves he moves into the house you know 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 black paint was thrown on their house their dog is poisoned vandalism intimidation the family has to sleep in the basement they had this sense that they had set these boundaries that no one was to violate them [Music] this is just another tool so to speak this citizen terrorism [Music] and in this particular case author who is 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 learned very quickly that was not the case [Music] it was really important for families like the lee family to have advocates to help them fight [Music] being able to have lawyers like lena olive smith and being able to have the naacp on their side was really powerful in in making sure that their voices were heard 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 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 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 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 [Applause] [Music] the marker at the corner of the property has a depiction an image of arthur lee for those who just walk by i think it gets them it gets them thinking about it home ownership is the basis of a happy contented 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 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 homeowner's 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 home ownership for most americans 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 on to the federal government and now working-class middle-class families they're able to purchase a home unfortunately as part of that what what the holc does is it establishes uh 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 in people 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 foreign 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 up front and very explicit in how they're linking spatial desirability with racial occupancy it's this racialization space idea so areas that were predominantly uh 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 4th 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 was redlined specifically due to and i'm quoting a gradual infiltration of negros and asiatics the fha refused to give an area a green-lined designation again this is the best designation that they'll 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 home's worth what half a million your grandparents rented an area that was redlined and then subsequently destroyed by a freeway project you know 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 in many 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 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 was what kind of a this mixed kind of a situation that we had in minneapolis i mean 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 there was no question about it and then there's other people who were just absolutely clansmen you know that was what minneapolis was all about but that was the young that was my generation in minneapolis we were hemmed in in that that ghetto and that was that was our life that was our that was our work the 1935 land use planning map used to define which place would get mortgages versus others circled these areas called them slums places where the quote-unquote negroes lived these are places to avoid right so they're going to give you substandard housing and they're going to contain you access to affordable housing was a challenge when 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 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 sumnerfield homes area and where did 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 400 units of public housing to over a thousand units in less than a decade they have strategically manufactured urban poverty [Music] this history is is very personal for me i'm a third generation minneapolitan 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 my parents grew up in neighborhoods that were entirely white and 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 [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 covenants were one of the big issues that the naacp was tackling in the first half of 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 kramer shelly v cramer in the late 1940s was one of the more you know 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 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 covenant at home to an african-american the neighbors can sue that person because their property values are now lower well is there anything to 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 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 or a signs of the initial covenanting 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 are judicially unenforceable but still legal in fact it plays out in a very powerful way and lorraine hansberry's play a raisin in the sun you know that money we got in the mail this morning awesome well what do you think your grandmama done went and done i don't know grandma she went and she bought you a house as that play was being produced you have situations across the country including one in delaware where a family then 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 its homeownership 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 homeownership as 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 citizen than the home in which he lives [Music] the spread of covenants in the first half of 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 ridgefield bloomington are all blanketed in racial covenants they probably have a higher density of restrictions than 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 tillson would have open houses on i think it was on 41st and 4th 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 in redlining you didn't really know but you saw people come in who knew what that meant and in fact i think the spokesman built the tilson build 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 i know it was a huge it's a huge piece of housing history for the construction of for the tilson 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 the job power could be and he did insist on his contractors bringing people color to the job and it was extremely extremely important to him and i think the fact that it 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 they didn't didn't carry out throughout the whole community that's for sure the city yeah it wasn't city-wide and so there is 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 women voters in aacp we were very much involved in issues dealing with employment opportunities education for our children housing discrimination if you are wondering what the fair housing march is all about we are attempting to get a fair housing bill passed in the state of minnesota now i was wondering if you would contribute something to the fair housing mark 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 zetta 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 hind writing on the 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 have made this mistake your forefathers have made this mistake and it cannot be remedied without a lot of pain and suffering and the expenditure of hard cold catch i felt we were losing the vote and so i went to governor elmar 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 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 60 62 that minnesota was one of the first states to pass a fair housing whereas minnesota's fair housing act becomes operative an implementation of the law must come from the willingness of all of our citizens to cooperate for their common protection as well as the belief that discrimination practiced against any individual is a threat to all now therefore i elmarelle anderson governor of the state of minnesota do hereby proclaim saturday december 29th and sunday december 30th as fair housing sabbath in minnesota 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 [Music] 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 uh sense of rage that exists in our american ghettos there are compelling problems that of injustice and unfairness and employment and housing and education and many other areas that that we should have taken care of a long time ago [Music] fair housing acts makes it illegal to discriminate based on race age later they had sex and you know disability and etc to ensure that everyone has equal access to housing where they so choose 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 [Music] 35w i-94 expand hiawatha span also memorial these were all explicitly and very intentionally run through these black communities that emerged 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 of the freeway [Music] it's interesting of yeah you know it brought people together in one sense and we were able to create our own community around 38th street and fourth avenue [Music] 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 of the black mecca in the central neighborhoods [Music] when you talk about the problem we're talking about 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 in intentional ways we're not going to be able to get everybody out of these 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 in 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 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 um 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 percent of white families in minneapolis own the homes that they occupy about 25 percent of black families in minneapolis own the homes that they occupy it's actually the largest um 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 has been an investment in homeownership for certain communities versus others where if black folks were able to participate in that during the rise and proliferation of racial covenants you might see a different notion of black woe we have to first acknowledge that history and understand how we're implicated in it to then get to reparative solutions [Music] you do have a covenant but it's mapping prejudice project is doing something unlike anything 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 penny 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 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 is very much part of our present reality with the exhibit owning up to racism and housing in 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 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 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 is 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 how structural we're showing how incredibly central racial covenants were in terms of laying the groundwork and the foundation for those later 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 some 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 playing we're talking more than like bricks and mortars and like windows we are talking about people's lives their values and their humanity [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] this program is made possible by the minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund

Channel: TPT Originals

Views: 1,365,125

Rating: 4.835062 out of 5

Keywords: African American History, Black History, Documentary film, Housing, Housing inequities, Housing segregation, Jim Crow, Racial covenants, Redlining, black documentaries, black documentary, black history documentary, documentaries, documentaries on race, documentary, jim crow documentary, jim crow in the north, jim crow laws, jim crow laws documentary, jim crow north, jim crow of the north, pbs documentary, racism documentary, segregation, segregation documentary, the new jim crow

Id: XWQfDbbQv9E

Length: 57min 37sec (3457 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 25 2019