“Unlocking the Gates” on housing and economic opportunity

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Reema Khrais: Hey y’all, it’s me Reema. So I know it’s been a while since I’ve been in your feeds. We’re working on a new batch of episodes that will drop in May, so keep an eye out for that! And you know, if you ever want to reach out to share your experiences or a story idea, you can always drop us a note at uncomfortable@marketplace.org. I should say we’re especially interested in hearing about your money fights, you know the disagreements that typically happen behind closed doors and how you all resolved them. Like maybe you had trouble splitting rent with a roommate… or you and your partner couldn’t agree on how to handle a big purchase, or maybe you lent money to a family member and regretted it. Whatever it is, we are always happy to hear your stories and potentially feature them on the show. So let us know.

In the meantime, I wanted to share the first episode of a new series called “Unlocking the Gates.” It’s from Marketplace with support from APM studios. Marketplace special correspondent Lee Hawkins, he tells the story of how the Minnesota suburb he grew up in went from a place where Black families had no access to the housing market to one where many Black families found economic opportunity…and how it all started with a secret business deal. 

Alright here’s the episode, I hope you all enjoy it and I’ll be back in a couple of months.

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.”

Herman Lewis was another neighbor, some years older than Mark—an older teenager when I was a kid. But I remember him and his brother, Richard. We all played basketball, and during the off-season, we’d play with my dad and his friends at John Glenn, where I’d eventually attend middle school. Herman talked to me about what it meant to him.

HERMAN LEWIS: We had friends of ours and our cousins would come all the way from Saint Paul just to play basketball on a Friday night. It was a way to keep kids off the street, and your dad was very instrumental trying to make sure kids stayed off the street. And on a Friday night, you get in there at five, six o’clock, and you play till 9, 10 o’clock, four hours of basketball. On any kid, all you’re going to do is go home, eat whatever was left to eat. And if there’s nothing left to eat, you pour yourself a bowl of cereal and you watch TV for about 15 to 25-30, minutes, and you’re sleeping there, right in front of the TV, right?

LEE HAWKINS: But that was a community within the community,

HERMAN LEWIS: Definitely a community within the community. It’s so surprising to go from one side of the city to the next, and then all of a sudden there’s this abundance of black folks in a predominantly white area.

Joe Richburg, another family friend, said he experienced our community within a community as well.

LEE HAWKINS: You told me that when you were working for Pillsbury, you worked, you reported to Herman Cain, right? We’re already working there, right? Herman Cain, who was once the Republican front runner for President of the United States. He was from who, who was from the south, but lived in Minnesota, right? Because he had been recruited here. I know he was at Pillsbury, and he was at godfathers pizza, mm hmm, before. And he actually sang for a time with the sounds of blackness, which a lot of people would realize, which is a famous group here, known all over the world. But what was interesting is you said that Herman Cain was your boss, yeah, when he came to Minnesota, he asked you a question, yeah. What was that question?

Joe Richburg: Well, he asked me again, from the south, he asked me, Joe, where can I live? And I didn’t really understand the significance of that question, but clearly he had a sense of belonging in that black people had to be in certain geographic, geographies in the south, and I didn’t have that. I didn’t realize that was where he was coming from.

7.23 – BREAK

Before Maplewood, my family lived in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood—a thriving Black community filled with Black-owned businesses and cultural icons like photojournalist Gordon Parks, playwright August Wilson, and journalist Carl T. Rowan.

Like so many other Black communities across the country, Rondo was destroyed to make way for a highway. it was a forced removal.

Out of that devastation came Black flight. Unlike white flight, which was driven by fear of integration, Black flight was about seeking better opportunities: better funded schools and neighborhoods, and a chance at higher property values.

Everything I’ve learned about James and Frances Hughes comes from newspaper reports and interviews with members of their family.

Mr. Hughes, a chemist and printer at Brown and Bigelow, and Frances, a librarian at Gillette Hospital, decided it was time to leave St. Paul. They doubled down on their intentions when they heard a prominent real estate broker associate Blacks with “the ghetto.” According to Frances Hughes, he told the group;

FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “You’re living in the ghetto, and you will stay there.”

She adds:

FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “I’ve been mad ever since. It was such a bigoted thing to say. We weren’t about to stand for that—and in the end, we didn’t.”

The Hughes began searching for land but quickly realized just how difficult it could be. Most white residents in the Gladstone area, just outside St. Paul, had informal agreements not to sell to Black families. Still, James and Frances kept pushing.

They found a white farmer, willing to sell them 10 acres of land for $8,000.

And according to an interview with Frances, that purchase wasn’t just a milestone for the Hughes family—it set the stage for something remarkable. In 1957, James Hughes began advertising the plots in the Twin Cities Black newspapers and gradually started selling lots from the land to other Black families. The Hughes’s never refused to sell to whites—but according to an interview with Frances, economic justice was their goal.

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.”

By the 1960s, the neighborhood had grown into a thriving Black suburban community. The residents here were deeply involved in civic life. They attended city council meetings, started Maplewood’s first human rights commission, and formed a neighborhood club to support one another.

And over time, the area became known for its beautiful homes and meticulously kept lawns, earning both admiration and ridicule—with some calling it “The Golden Ghetto.”

Frances said:

FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “It was lovely. It was a showplace. Even people who resented our being there in the beginning came over to show off this beautiful area in Maplewood.”

And as I pieced the story together, I realized it would be meaningful to connect with some of the elders who would remember those early days

ANN-MARIE ROGERS: In the 50s, Mr. Hughes decided he was going to let go of the farming. And it coincided with the with 94 going through the RONDO community and displacing, right, you know, those people. So, at that time, I imagine Mr. Hughes had the surveyors come out and, you know, divided up into, you know, individual living blocks.

That is Mrs. Ann-Marie Rogers, the mother of Uzziel and Thomas Rogers, who I spent a lot of time with as a kid. I shared what I’d uncovered in the archives, hoping she could help bring those early experiences to life.

ANN-MARIE ROGERS: So, everyone played in our yard, the front yard, the yard light that was where they played softball, baseball, because the yard light was the home plate, and the backyard across the back was where they played football.

Throughout this project, we found similar stories of strength, including one from Jeson Johnson, a childhood friend with another Minnesota musical connection. His aunt, Cynthia Johnson, was the lead singer of Lipps Inc., whose hit song “Funkytown” became a defining anthem of its time when many of us were just kids. We were proud of her, but I now know the bigger star was his grandmother.

JESON JOHNSON: She was actually one of the first black chemists at 3M. So what she told me is that they had told her that, well, you have to have so much money down by tomorrow for you to get this house. It was really, really fast that she had to have the money. But my grandmother was she was really smart, and her father was really smart, so he had her have savings bonds. So what she told him was, if you have it in writing, then I’ll do my best to come up with the money. I don’t know if I’ll be able to. She was able to show up that day with all her savings bonds and everything, and have the money to get it. And they were so mad, yes, that when she had got the house, they were so mad that, but they nothing that they could do legally because she had it on paper, right, right? And then that kind of started out in generation out there. It was the NAACP that kind of helped further that, just because she was chemist, they got her in the 3M, and all their programs started there.

13.29 – BREAK

Decades later, as my friends and I played, I had no concept of any of the struggles, sacrifices and steps forward made by the pioneers who came before us. I checked in with my friend, Marcel Duke.

LEE HAWKINS: did they tell you that mister Hughes was the guy that started, that started it?

MARCEL DUKE: It probably never was conveyed that way, right to us kids, right? I’m sure back then, it was looked as an opportunity, yes, to get out of the city. Mm, hmm, and and where people that look like us live. And obviously that’s the backstory of Mister Hughes, yeah, ultimately, we went out there because he made it known in the city, inner city, that we could move out there and be a community out there.

Marcel is about four years older, I figured he may have clearer memories of Mr. Hughes than I do.

MARCEL DUKE: I used to cut mister Hughes grass. I was like, like the little hustler in the neighborhood. I wanted to cut because I wanted money to go to spend on candy.

Mr. Hughes’ significance transcends the extra cash he put in the pockets of neighborhood kids. His granddaughter, Carolyn Hughes-Smith, told us more his multigenerational vision for Black American wealth building. But before he became a historical figure, he was just…grandpa.

CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: the things that I really remember about him. He could whistle like I not whistle, but he could sing like a bird, you know, always just chirping. That’s how we know he was around. He was more of a, like a farmer.

He didn’t talk much with his grandchildren about how he and Frances had unlocked the gates for Blacks. But she was aware of some of the difficulty he faced in completing that transaction that forever changed Maplewood.

HUGHES-SMITH: I just heard that they did not, you know, want to sell to the blacks. And they, you know, it was not a place for the blacks to be living. And so, what I heard later, of course, was that my grandpa was able to find someone that actually sold the land to him out there and it, you know, and that’s where it all started, really

That someone was a white man named Frank Taurek. He and his wife, Marie, owned the farm that Mr. Hughes and Frances had set their sights on. But the purchase was anything but straightforward. They had to make the deal through “night dealing.” Frances explains in a 1970s interview.

FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “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. 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.”

She describes the weekend visit she and her husband made to put in an offer on the land. By Monday morning, a St. Paul real estate company had stepped in, offering the Taurek’s $1,000 more to keep Blacks out.

FRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “But he was a man of his word, which gives you faith in human nature. The average white person has no idea of how precarious life in these United States is for anybody Black at any level. So often it was a matter of happenstance that we got any land here. The farmer could have very easily accepted the $1,000 and told us no, and there would have been nothing we could have done.”

What led Frank Taurek to defy norms and his neighbors, to sell the land to a Black family?

DAVIDA TAUREK: I’m already moved to tears again, just hearing about it, [but and] hearing you talk about the impact of my, you know, my lineage there. It seems so powerful.

This perspective comes from his great-granddaughter, Davida Taurek, a California-based psychotherapist. When I tracked her down, she was astonished to hear the long-buried story of how her white great grandparents sold their land to a Black family, unwittingly setting into motion a cascade of economic opportunities for generations to come.

DAVIDA TAUREK: When I received your email, it was quite shocking and kind of like my reality did a little kind of sense of, wait, what? Like that somehow I, I could be in this weird way part of this amazing story of making a difference. You know, like you said, that there’s generational wealth that’s now passed down that just didn’t really exist.

I’ve seen plenty of data about what happens to property values in predominantly white neighborhoods when a Black family moves in. The perception of a negative impact has fueled housing discrimination in this country for decades, you may have heard the phrase: “There goes the neighborhood.” It’s meant to be a sneer—a condemnation of how one Black family might “open the door” for others to follow. In this case, that’s exactly what the Taurek’s facilitated.

As Carolyn Hughes- Smith sees it, the power of that ripple effect had a direct impact on her life, both as a youngster, but later as well.

CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: We were just fortunate that my grandfather gave us that land. Otherwise, I don’t, I don’t know if we would have ever been able to move out there

Her parents faced some tough times –

CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: making house payments, keeping food in the house, and that type. We were low income then, and my dad struggled, and eventually went back to school, became an electrician. And we, you know, were a little better off, but that happened after we moved out to Maplewood, but we were struggling.

But they persevered and made it through –

CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: after I grow got older and teen and that, I mean, I look back and say, Wow, my grandfather did all of this out here

On the Taurek side of the transaction, the wow factor is even more striking. As I dug deeper into his story, it wasn’t clear that he Frank Taurek was driven by any commitment to civil rights.

Davida never met her great grandfather but explains what she knows about him.

DAVIDA TAUREK: What I had heard about him was through my aunt that, that they were, you know, pretty sweet, but didn’t speak English very well so there wasn’t much communication but when they were younger being farmers his son my grandfather Richard ran away I think when he was like 14 years old. his dad was not very a good dad you know on a number of levels. There’s a little bit of an interesting thing of like where Frank’s dedication to his own integrity or what that kind of path was for him to stay true to this deal and make it happen versus what it meant to be a dad and be present and kind to his boy.

Carolyn Hughes-Smith still reflects on the courage of her family—for the ripple effect it had on generational progress.

CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: Would the struggle be the same? Probably not. But what makes me like I said, What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community.

LEE HAWKINS: Next time on Unlocking The Gates

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 was it on my grandfather’s property?

OUTRO THEME MUSIC/CREDITS.

You’ve been listening to Unlocking the Gates: How the North led Housing Discrimination in America. A special series by APM Studios AND Marketplace APM with research support from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Mapping Prejudice.

Hosted and created by me, Lee Hawkins. Produced by Marcel Malekebu and Senior Producer, Meredith Garretson-Morbey. Our Sound Engineer is Gary O’Keefe. Kelly Silvera is Executive Producer.

Reema Khrais: You can hear Lee Hawkins tell the whole story….Unlocking the Gates, over at Marketplace.org