The Perpetual Fight
<p>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.</p><br/><h2 id="h2_transcript">Transcript</h2><br/><p>Part 2 – Discrimination and the Perpetual Fight</p><br/><p>Cold Open:</p><br/><p><em>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</em></p><br/><p><em>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.”</em></p><br/><p><em>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.</em></p><br/><p><em>CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community.</em></p><br/><p>You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 2.</p><br/><p>My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book <em>I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free</em>.</p><br/><p>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.</p><br/><p>We now understand how the challenges Black families faced in buying homes between 1930 and 1960 were more than isolated acts of attempted exclusion.</p><br/><p>My reporting for this series has uncovered evidence of deliberate, systemic obstacles, deeply rooted in a national framework of racial discrimination.</p><br/><p>It all started with me shining a light on the neighborhood I grew up in – Maplewood.</p><br/><p>Mrs. Rogers, who still lives there, looks back, and marvels at what she has lived and thrived through.</p><br/><p><em>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.</em></p><br/><p>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.</p><br/><p><em>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.</em></p><br/><p>Mrs. Rogers remembers firsthand –</p><br/><p><em>ANN-MARIE ROGERS: I knew the individual who burned the cross.</em></p><br/><p>Mark Haynes also remembers –</p><br/><p><em>MARK HAYNES: phone calls at night, harassment, crosses burned</em></p><br/><p>In the archives, I uncovered a May 4, 1962, article from the <em>St. Paul Recorder,</em> a Black newspaper, that recounted the cross-burning incident in Maplewood. A white woman, Mrs. Eugene Donavan, saw a white teen running away from a fire set on the lawn of Ira Rawls, a Black neighbor who lived next door to Mrs. Rogers. After the woman’s husband stamped out the fire, she described the Rawls family as “couldn’t be nicer people.” Despite the clear evidence of a targeted act, Maplewood Police Chief Richard Schaller dismissed the incident as nothing more than a "teenager’s prank."</p><br/><p>Instead of retreating, these families, my own included, turned their foothold in Maplewood into a foundation—one that not only survived the bigotry but became a catalyst for generational progress and wealth-building.</p><br/><p><em>JESON JOHNSON: when you see somebody has a beautiful home, they keep their yard nice, they keep their house really clean. You know that just kind of rubs off on you. And there's just something that, as you see that more often, you know it just, it's something that imprints in your mind, and that's what you want to have, you know, for you and for your for your children and for their children.</em></p><br/><p>But stability isn’t guaranteed. For many families, losing the pillar of the household—the one who held everything together—meant watching the foundation begin to crack.</p><br/><p><em>JESON JOHNSON: if the head of a household leaves, if the grandmother that leaves, that was that kept everybody kind of at bay. When that person leaves, I seen whole families just, just really go downhill. No, nobody's able to kind of get back on your feet, because that was kind of the starting ground, you know, where, if you, if you was a if you couldn't pay your rent, you went back to mama's house and you said to get back on your feet.</em></p><br/><p>For Carolyn Hughes-Smith, inheriting property was a bittersweet lesson. Her family’s land had been a source of pride and stability— holding onto it proved difficult.</p><br/><p><em>CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: We ended up having to sell it in the long run, because, you know, nobody else in the family was able to purchase it and keep going with it. And that that that was sad to me, but it also gave me an experience of how important it is to be able to inherit something and to cherish it and be able to share it with others while it's there.</em></p><br/><p>Her family’s experience illustrates a paradox—how land, even when sold, can still transform lives.</p><br/><p><em>CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: Us kids, we all inherited from it to do whatever, like my brother sent his daughter to college, I bought some property, you know?</em></p><br/><p>But not all families found the same success in holding onto their homes. For Mark Haynes, the challenges of maintaining his father’s property became overwhelming, and the sense of loss lingered.</p><br/><p><em>MARK HAYNES: it was really needed a lot of repair. We couldn't sell it. It was too much.</em></p><br/><p><em>It wasn't up to code. We couldn't sell it the way it was. Yes, okay, I didn't really want to sell it. She tried to fix it, brought up code, completely renovated it. I had to flip I had to go get a job at Kuhlman company as a CFO, mm hmm, to make enough money. And I did the best I could with that, and lost a lot of money. And</em></p><br/><p><em>LEE HAWKINS: Oh, gosh, okay. So when you think about that situation, I know that you, you said that you wish you could buy it back.</em></p><br/><p><em>MARK HAYNES: Just, out of principle, it was, I was my father's house. He, he went through a lot to get that and I just said, we should have it back in the family.</em></p><br/><p>For Marcel Duke, he saw the value of home ownership and made it a priority for his own life.</p><br/><p><em>MARCEL DUKE: I bought my first house when I was 19. I had over 10 homes by time I was 25 or 30, by time I was 30</em></p><br/><p>This story isn’t just about opportunity—it’s about the barriers families had to overcome to claim it. Before Maplewood could become a community where Black families could thrive, it was a place where they weren’t even welcome.</p><br/><p>The racial covenants and real estate discrimination that shaped Minnesota’s suburban landscape are stark reminders of how hard-fought this progress truly was.</p><br/><p><em>LEE HAWKINS: I read an article about an organization called Mapping Prejudice which identifies clauses that say this house should never be sold to a person of color.</em></p><br/><p><em>So we had this talk. Do you remember?</em></p><br/><p><em>PENNY PETERSEN: I certainly do, it was 2018.</em></p><br/><p>Here’s co-founder Penny Petersen.</p><br/><p><em>PENNY PETERSEN: So I started doing some work, and when you you gave me the name of Mr. Hughes. And I said, Does Mr. Hughes have a first name? It make my job a lot easier, and I don't think you had it at that point. So I thought, okay, I can do this.</em></p><br/><p><em>LEE HAWKINS: I just knew it was the woman Liz who used to babysit me. I just knew it was her grandfather.</em></p><br/><p><em>PENNY PETERSEN: Oh, okay, so, he's got a fascinating life story.</em></p><br/><p>He was born in Illinois in. He somehow comes to Minnesota from Illinois at some point. And he's pretty interesting from the beginning.</p><br/><p>He, apparently, pretty early on, gets into the printing business, and eventually he becomes what's called an ink maker. This is like being a, you know, a chemist, or something like, very serious, very highly educated.</p><br/><p>In 1946 he and his wife, Francis Brown Hughes and all. There's a little more about that. Bought 10 acres in the Smith and Taylor edition. He tried to buy some land, and the money was returned to</p><br/><p>him when they found it. He was black, so Frank and Marie Taurek, who maybe they didn't like their neighbors, maybe, I don't know. It wasn't really clear to me,</p><br/><p><em>PENNY PETERSEN: Yeah, yeah. And so maybe they were ready to leave, because they had owned it since 1916 so I think they were ready to retire. So at any rate, they buy the land. They he said we had to do some night dealing, so the neighbors didn't see. And so all of a sudden, James T Hughes and Francis move to Maplewood. It was called, I think in those days, Little Canada, but it's present day Maplewood. So they're sitting with 10 acres of undeveloped land. So they decide we're going to pay it off, and then we'll develop it.</em></p><br/><p><em>Hearing Penny describe Frank Taurek takes me back to the conversation I had with his great granddaughter Davida who never met him and only heard stories that didn’t paint him in the most flattering light.</em></p><br/><p><em>DAVIDA TAUREK: It feels like such a heroic act in a way at that time and yet that's not, it seems like that's not who his character was in on some levels, you know.</em></p><br/><p><em>HAWKINS: But people are complicated</em></p><br/><p>The choices made by Frank and Marie Taurek—choices that set the stage for families like mine—are reflected in how their descendants think about fairness and equity even today. That legacy stands alongside the extraordinary steps taken by James and Frances Hughes. Penny Petersen explains how they brought their vision to life.</p><br/><p><em>PENNY PETERSEN: They paid it off in a timely fashion. I think was 5% interest for three years or something like that. He plaits it into 20 lots, and in 1957 he starts selling them off. And he said there were one or two white families who looked at it, but then decided not to. But he he was had very specific ideas that you have to build a house of a certain, you know, quality. There were nice big lots, and the first family started moving in. So that's how you got to live there.</em></p><br/><p><em>But interestingly, after the Hughes bought it in 1946 some a guy called Richard Nelson, who was living in Maplewood, started putting covenants around it.</em></p><br/><p><em>LEE HAWKINS: There were people who were making statements that were basically explicitly excluding Negroes from life liberty and happiness.</em></p><br/><p><em>And these are big brands names in Minnesota. One was a former lieutenant governor, let's just put the name out there.</em></p><br/><p>Penny explains how we got here:</p><br/><p><em>PENNY PETERSEN: The first covenant in Hennepin County and probably the state of Minnesota, seems to be by Edmund G Walton. He lived in Minneapolis in 1910 he enters a covenant. He doesn't do it. This is great because his diaries are at the Minnesota Historical Society.</em></p><br/><p><em>He was, by the way, born in England. He'd never he may or may not have become an American citizen. He was certainly voting in American presidential elections. He was the son of a silk merchant wholesaler, so he was born into money. He wasn't landed gentry, which kind of chapped him a lot. And he he came to America to kind of live out that life. So he he's casting about for what's my next, you know, gig. And he goes through a couple things, but he finally hits on real estate.</em></p><br/><p><em>And he He's pretty good at it. He's, he's a Wheeler Dealer. And you can see this in his letters to his mom back in England, in the diaries, these little, not so maybe quite legal deals he's pulling off.</em></p><br/><p><em>But by, by the early aughts of the 20th century, he's doing pretty well, but he needs outside capital, and so he starts courting this guy called Henry or HB Scott, who is land agent for the Burlington railroad in Iowa, and he's immensely wealthy. And. No one knows about Henry B Scott in Minneapolis. You know, he's some guy you know.</em></p><br/><p><em>So he gets Scott to basically underwrite this thing called what will be eventually known as Seven Oaks Corporation. But no one knows who he is really what Edmund Walton does so he gets, he gets this in place in 1910 Walton, via Henry Scott, puts the first covenant in.</em></p><br/><p><em>And there's a laundry list of ethnicities that are not allowed. And of course, it's always aimed at black people. I mean that that's that's universal. And then what's happening in the real estate realm is real estate is becoming professionalized.</em></p><br/><p><em>Instead of this, these guys just selling here and there. And there's also happening about this time, you know, race riots and the NAACP is formed in 1909 the Urban League in 1910 and I think Walton is he sees something. I can make these things more valuable by making them White's only space.</em></p><br/><p><em>But 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, you know, and he's listening to JC Nichols from Kansas City, who said, you know, a few years ago, I couldn't sell a lot with covenants on them, but now I can't sell it without covenants.</em></p><br/><p><em>After that, that real estate convention, there's one in 1910 and Walton is clearly passing this around, that he's he's put covenants in, but no one really talks about it, but they you know, as you look back when the deeds were signed, it's like 1910 1911 1912 the 1912 one when HB, when JC, Nichols said, I can't sell a lot without him.</em></p><br/><p><em>Sam Thorpe immediately picks up on this. He's the outgoing president of the National Board of Real Estate. By June, by August, he has acquired the land that will become Thorpe Brothers Nokomis Terrace. This is the first fully covenanted edition. He doesn't record for a while, but within a few years, they're not only these things are not only recorded, but Walton is advertising in the newspaper about covenants, so it's totally respectable. And then this is where Thomas Frankson comes in. In Ramsey County, he's still in the legislature when he puts his first covenant property together, Frankson Como Park, and in 1913 he's advertising in the newspapers. In fact, he not only advertises in English, he advertises in Swedish to let those Swedish immigrants know maybe they don't read English. So well, you can buy here. This will be safe.</em></p><br/><p>Penny says the National Board of Real Estate but she means the National Association of Realtors. Samuel Thorpe was not only the President of this powerful organization, he even coined the term ‘realtor’ according to records.</p><br/><p>I want to take a moment to emphasize that Thomas Frankson is a former lieutenant governor.</p><br/><p>They were architects of exclusion. By embedding racial covenants into the fabric of land deals, they set a legal precedent that shaped housing markets and defined neighborhoods for decades. As Penny Petersen noted, these practices were professionalized and legitimized within the real estate industry.</p><br/><p>Michael Corey, Associate Director of Mapping Prejudice explains how these covenants were enforced.</p><br/><p><em>MICHAEL COREY: And so in the newspaper, as not only do they put the text of the Covenant, then two lines later, it says, you have my assurance that the above restrictions will be enforced to the fullest extent of the law. And this is a legislator saying this, and so like when he says that people are going to assume he means it.</em></p><br/><p><em>And the way this worked with racial covenants is, theoretically, you could take someone to court if they violated the covenant, and they would lose the house, the house would revert back to the original person who put the covenant in. So the potential penalty was quite high for</em></p><br/><p><em>LEE HAWKINS: Oh, gosh.</em></p><br/><p><em>MICHAEL COREY: And I think, like, in practice, it's not like this is happening all the time. The way covenants work is that, like, no one's gonna mess with that because the consequence is so high.</em></p><br/><p><em>LEE HAWKINS: Is there any record of anybody ever breaking a covenant.</em></p><br/><p><em>MICHAEL COREY: Yeah, there are, like, there are legal cases where people either tried like, and people try a number of different strategies, like as Penny mentioned some of the early ones, they have this, like, laundry list of 19th century racial terms. And so it'll say, like, no Mongolian people, for example, like using this, like, racial science term. And so someone who is Filipino might come in and say, like, I'm not Mongolian, I'm Filipino.</em></p><br/><p><em>So, this professionalizing real estate industry keeps refining the covenants to be more, to stand up in court better. But I think for so many people, it's it's not worth the risk to break the covenant both white and like. For the white person, the stakes are low, right? Your neighbors might not like you. For people of color who are trying to break this color line, the stakes are the highest possible like like, because the flip side of a covenant is always violence.</em></p><br/><p>So I’m now clear on how these wealthy and powerful figures in my home state came up with a system to keep anybody who was not white locked out of the housing market.</p><br/><p>I’m still not clear on how these ideas spread around the country.</p><br/><p><em>MICHAEL COREY: these conferences that these real estate leaders, like the like the Thorpe brothers are going to like, this is the, this is the moment when these national Realty boards are being formed. And so all of these people are in these rooms saying, Hey, we've got this innovative technology. It's a racial covenant.</em></p><br/><p><em>And this private practice spreads rapidly after places that are in early. There's some places in the East Coast that are trying this this early too. This becomes the standard, and in fact, it gets written into the National Board of Realty ethics code for years because they're prominent people, they're also, like, going to be some of your elected officials there.</em></p><br/><p><em>And when you get to the era of the New Deal, like these are the people who are on the boards that are like, setting federal policy, and a lot of this stuff gets codified into federal legislation. So what starts as a private practice becomes the official policy of the US government when you get to the creation of the Federal Housing Administration that adopts essentially this, this concept that you should not give preferential treatment on loans to to integrate to neighborhoods that are going to be in harmonious and that same logic gets supercharged, because if we know something about this era, this is the FHA and then, and then the GI bill at the end of World War Two are a huge sea change in the way that housing gets financed and the way that homeownership sort of works.</em></p><br/><p>I learned so much from my conversations with Penny and Michael. We covered a lot of ground and at times I found myself overwhelmed by the weight of what I was hearing. </p><br/><p>What exactly does this mean today? What about the families who didn’t secure real estate through night dealings? The families who didn’t slip through the cracks of codified racial discrimination? How can we address these disparities now?</p><br/><p>In the final part of our series, we’ll hear from some of the people who benefitted, including relatives of Samuel Thorpe who have become new leaders in an old fight to make home ownership a reality for millions of Americans.</p><br/><p><em>MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: This could be the conversation. I feel like it's time to say something from my perspective. I have a platform, I have a voice, and I think it needs to be said and discussed and talked about,</em></p><br/><p>OUTRO MUSIC THEME/CREDITS</p><br/><p>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.</p><br/><p>Hosted and created by me, Lee Hawkins. Produced by Marcel Malekebu and Senior Producer, Meredith Garretson-Morbey. Our Sound Engineer is Gary O’Keefe.</p><br/><p>Kelly Silvera is Executive Producer.</p>