Black families in this Minnesota suburb found homes, despite racism in real estate
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Black families in this Minnesota suburb found homes, despite racism in real estate
Maplewood, Minnesota, is a suburb of St. Paul with a population of roughly 40,000 people. But when journalist Lee Hawkins and his family moved there from the city 50 years ago, there were only 25,000 people living in Maplewood, and 90% of the population was white.
Hawkins and his family moved into what he called an enclave — about 20 square acres of land with a heavier concentration of Black families. “Black Maplewood,” he said, was not particularly welcoming; he recalls being called the N-word at school and hearing it shouted out of cars as he rode his bike. But still, it was a place where he, his family and members of his community could carve out a life.
Mark Haynes, a friend of Hawkins’ growing up, remembers it like this:
“It was like family, you know. All of them are like aunts and uncles to me, cousins,” Haynes said. “It just felt like they were having a lot of fun. I think there was an investment club, too.”
That wasn’t always the case. The first Black families to move to Maplewood only arrived about 30 years prior. Those who lived in the neighborhood earlier experienced cross burnings and found dead cats on doorsteps. For those first families, nearly every step forward was met with resistance. Yet they stayed and often thrived, Hawkins said. And that opened the door to opportunity for generations to come.
Listen to Part 1 of Unlocking the Gates here
So how did Maplewood become a place where Black families could build lives? It was not without overcoming serious structural racism. In fact, some of the most devastating housing discrimination — including the use of racial covenants to lock anyone who wasn’t white out of entire neighborhoods, in violation of the U.S. Constitution — took hold in Minnesota in the early 20th century. And the fight for restorative justice continues today.
Building Black Maplewood
James and Frances Hughes were essentially the founders of Black Maplewood. It traces back to a transaction that unlocked the gates of the Minnesota suburb for dozens of Black families who were seeking better housing and schools and safer neighborhoods.
“My grandpa was able to find someone that actually sold the land to him out there, and that’s where it all started, really,” Carolyn Hughes-Smith said.
But that first step proved difficult. As Frances Hughes explained in a 1970s interview that Marketplace got archival access to with help from the Alicia Patterson Foundation:
“It was just after the war. There was a tremendous shortage of housing, and a great deal of new development was going on to try to fix that,” she said. “But, my dear, Negroes couldn’t even buy a lot in these developments. They didn’t need deed restrictions to turn us away. They just refused to sell.”
But there was at least one person willing to break with that trend. A white farmer named Frank Taurek and his wife, Marie, owned the land that the Hughes had set their sights on. They sold the Hughes 10 acres of land for $8,000, even though a St. Paul real estate company tried to hijack the deal by offering $1,000 more, just to keep a Black family from buying the property.
“The farmer could have very easily accepted the $1,000 and told us ‘no,’ and there would have been nothing we could have done,” Frances Hughes said.
From there, the Hughes started expanding housing access to Black families. Ann-Marie Rogers, another of Hawkins’ neighbors, said this coincided with the construction of Interstate 94, which cut through Rondo, a predominantly Black neighborhood of St. Paul, and displaced the families living there. This is what happened to Hawkins’ family.
“So at that time, I imagine Mr. Hughes had the surveyors come out and divided up into, you know, individual living blocks,” Rogers said in an interview with Hawkins.
“Housing for Blacks was extremely limited after the freeway went through and took so many homes,” Frances Hughes said in that 1970s interview. “We wanted to sell to Blacks only because they had so few opportunities.”
The Taureks selling to the Hughes, and then the Hughes selling to these Black families — it created a domino effect by which, ultimately, families like the Hawkins’ could begin building wealth.
Mapping Black Maplewood
This legacy, however, was relatively unknown to descendants of the Taureks until recently. Hawkins reached out to Davida Taurek, Frank’s great-grandaughter.
“When I received your email, it was quite shocking … like that somehow I could be, in this weird way, part of this amazing story of making a difference,” she said. “You know, like you said, that there’s generational wealth that’s now passed down that just didn’t really exist.”
“What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community,” Hughes-Smith said.
These individual acts, however, were not responses to isolated instances of exclusion. The obstacles that Black families face in real estate were part of a national framework of racial discrimination.
Racial covenants take root
Listen to Part 2 of Unlocking the Gates here
One component of this structural discrimination is the rise of what are known as “racial covenants.” Property deeds in the U.S. dating back to the mid-1800s contained these legal clauses, which barred owners from selling to Black people, along with other races, ethnicities and religions. But they really became widespread in the early 20th century. And Minnesota developers played a role in this, according to historian Penny Petersen with Mapping Prejudice.
The earliest known racial covenant in Minnesota comes in 1910, according to Mapping Prejudice’s database.
This is about 10 years before covenants really take hold, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. But by the end of the decade, they could be found in both property deeds across Minnesota, and those across the country.
The largest developer in Minneapolis at the time, Samuel Thorpe of Thorpe Brothers, was responsible for many of the covenants in city property then. Thorpe was also behind what Petersen called the “first fully covenanted addition,” or subdivision, in Minneapolis, in 1912.
He was also active in the national real estate industry, just as it was becoming a standardized, professional business. Thorpe was president of the group that today is the National Association of Realtors. This is the same group that, in 1924, would write racial covenants into its code of ethics, and then draft a template covenant that could be reproduced in property deeds around the country.
Racial covenants also came from the highest ranks of Minnesota government. For example, just before becoming lieutenant governor, state legislator Thomas Frankson developed a subdivision in the Como Park neighborhood of St. Paul, which he advertised in newspapers.
Thirty-five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that covenants were not enforceable. Five years after that, the state of Minnesota outlawed them, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 did the same thing at the national level.
Covenants, along with other forms of housing discrimination, left their mark. There’s research that shows increased present-day home values correlate with whether property deeds contained enforceable covenants.
A new analysis by the APM Research Lab shows 77% of white families in Minnesota own homes, while about 32% of Black families own homes.
This is the legacy of those obstacles that families moving to Maplewood in the middle of the 20th century had to overcome to build homes and lives.
The fight for equity continues
Listen to Part 3 of Unlocking the Gates here
Margaret Thorpe Richards is a Minnesota real estate agent. She’s also the granddaughter of Samuel Thorpe.
“I really didn’t know about these covenants until it was 2019, when I was actually on the board of the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors,” Thorpe Richards said in an interview with Hawkins. “I was horrified. It felt shameful. I’m not going to fix anything, but I would like to show up in a way that says I think this was wrong and I’d like to help make it right.”
In 2020, the National Association of Realtors apologized for past discriminatory practices. Then, Minneapolis Area Realtors issued its own apology.
“That’s an incredible spread in the housing disparity gap that we have,” Jackie Berry, who’s on the board of directors at Minneapolis Area Realtors, said in an interview. “If we’re talking about Minnesota, in comparison to other states, we are one of the worst with that housing disparity gap.”
Peggy Flanagan is Minnesota’s current lieutenant governor — that’s the same office that Frankson held more than a century ago. Flanagan, the highest-ranking Native American female politician, is calling for an apology from the state of Minnesota for its role in housing discrimination — and for action.
“I think that an apology is powerful,” she said. “But in the same way that I think things like land acknowledgements are powerful, if you don’t have policies and investments to back them up, then they’re simply words.”
When it comes to these solutions, Flanagan points to several recent investment initiatives in Minnesota that provide millions of dollars in down payment and loan assistance to first-time homebuyers. They’re meant to help close the racial home ownership gap, she said.
“I think when we increase home ownership rates within our communities, it’s a benefit to the state as a whole,” Flangan said.
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