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- [00:09]
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 and 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 so 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 one. My name is Lee Hawkins. I'm a journalist and author of the book I Am Nobody's How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free 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 house, a colonial style rambler, we met a middle aged black woman. She was visiting her mother who who lived in the brick home once owned by our neighbors. Mr. And Mrs. Hutton. 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 and the ways it tried to make us feel we didn't belong. My family moved to Maplewood nearly 30 years after the first black families arrived. And while we had the inward 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. You know, all up and down this street, there were black families. Most of them, Mr. Reiser, Mr. Davis, Mr. White, all of us can trace our Property back to Mr. Hughes and 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. Marc Haines 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 end 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. It was a pretty tight knit group of people. Mark explained how the community came together and socialized. Often every week, I think they would meet. I was young, maybe five or six. And what do you remember about it? I asked. What kind of feeling did it give you? It was like family, you know, all of them are like aunts and uncles to me, cousins. It just felt like they seemed to be having a lot of fun. And I think there was an investment club too. Herman Lewis was another neighbor who was 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 would 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.
- [04:54]
Marc Haines
We had friends of ours and our cousins would come all the way from St. 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 on that, Trying to make sure kids stayed off the street. And on a Friday night, you get in there at 5, 6 o'clock, and you play till 9, 10 o'clock. Four hours of basketball on any kid. All you're gonna 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.
- [05:36]
Lee Hawkins
Right. But that was a community within a community.
- [05:39]
Marc Haines
Definitely a community within a community. Because 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.
- [05:54]
Lee Hawkins
Joe Richburg, another family friend, said he experienced our community within a community as well. You told me that when you were working for Pillsbury, you worked. You reported to Herman Cain. So you were already working there, Right. Herman Cain, who was once the Republican frontrunner for president of the United States, who was from the south but lived in Minnesota, because he had been recruited here. I know he was at Pillsbury and he was at Godfather's Pizza before. And he actually sang for a time with the sounds of blackness, which A lot of people don't 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 in that when he came to Minnesota, he asked you a question. Yeah. What was that question?
- [06:49]
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 geographies in the south. And I didn't have that. I didn't realize that was where he was coming from.
- [07:24]
Lee Hawkins
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 church James and Francis Hughes comes from newspaper reports and interviews with members of their family. Mr. Hughes, a chemist and printer at Brown and Bigelow, and Francis, 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 Francis Hughes, he told the.
- [08:50]
Frances Hughes
Group, you're living in the ghetto and you will stay there. She adds, 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.
- [09:04]
Lee Hawkins
The Hughes family began searching for land, but quickly realized 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 Francis kept pushing. They found a white farmer willing to sell them 10 acres of land for $8,000. And according to an interview with Francis, 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 never refused to sell to whites, but according to an interview with Frances, economic justice was their goal.
- [10:00]
Frances Hughes
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.
- [10:11]
Lee Hawkins
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.
- [10:43]
Frances Hughes
It was lovely. It was a show place. Even the people who resented our being there in the beginning came over to show up this beautiful area in Maplewood.
- [10:53]
Lee Hawkins
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 in the 50s.
- [11:02]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
Mr. Hughes decided he was gonna let go of the farming, and it coincided with 94 going through the Rondo community and displacing, you know, those people. So at that time, I imagine Mr. Hughes had the surveyors come out and, you know, divide it up into, you know, individual living blocks.
- [11:28]
Lee Hawkins
That is Mrs. Ann Marie Rogers, the mother of Uzelle 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.
- [11:44]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
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.
- [12:07]
Lee Hawkins
Throughout this project, we found similar stories of strength, including one from Jason Johnson, a childhood friend with another Minnesota musical connection. His aunt, Cynthia Johnson, was lead singer of Lips, Inc. Whose hit song funky town 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.
- [12:36]
Joe Richburg
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 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 ro, 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 that when she had got the house, they were so mad that. But they could. Nothing that they could do legally because she had it on paper, right? And then that kind of started our generation out there. It was the NAACP that kind of helped further that just because she was a chemist, they got her in the 3M and all their programs started there.
- [13:30]
Lee Hawkins
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. Did they tell you that Mr. Hughes was the guy that started it? It probably never was conveyed that way to us kids, right? I'm sure back then it was looked as an opportunity to get out of the city where people that looked like us lived. And obviously that's the backstory of Mr. Hughes. 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. I used to cut Mr. Hughes grass, so I was like the little hustler in the neighborhood. I wanted to cut because I wanted money to go 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 about his multi generational vision for black American wealth building. But before he became a historical figure, he was just grandpa.
- [15:01]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
The things that I really remember about him is he could whistle like. Not whistle, but he could sing like a bird, you know, always just chirping. That's how we know he was around. To me, he was more of a like a farmer.
- [15:15]
Lee Hawkins
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.
- [15:30]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
I 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.
- [15:57]
Lee Hawkins
That someone was a white man named Frank Torick. He and his wife Marie owned the farm that Mr. Hughes and Francis 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.
- [16:18]
Frances Hughes
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 even need deed restrictions to turn us away. They just refused to sell.
- [16:38]
Lee Hawkins
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 Torics $1,000 more to keep blacks out.
- [16:54]
Frances Hughes
But he was a man of his word, which gives you faith in human nature. The average white person has no idea 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.
- [17:21]
Lee Hawkins
What led Frank Torick to defy norms and his neighbors to sell the land to a black family?
- [17:28]
Davita Torick
I'm already moved to tears again just hearing about it and hearing you talk about the impact of my, you know, my lineage there. It seems so powerful.
- [17:40]
Lee Hawkins
This perspective comes from his great granddaughter, Davida Torick, 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.
- [18:05]
Davita Torick
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 could be up 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.
- [18:44]
Lee Hawkins
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 Torics facilitated. As Carolyn Smith Hughes sees it, the power of that ripple effect had a direct impact on her life, both as a youngster, but later on as well.
- [19:28]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
We were just fortunate that my grandfather gave us that land. Otherwise I don't know if we would have ever been able to move out there.
- [19:37]
Lee Hawkins
Her parents faced some tough times, making.
- [19:41]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
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.
- [19:59]
Lee Hawkins
But we were struggling, but they persevered and made it through.
- [20:04]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
After I grew, got older and a teen and that, I mean, I look back and say, wow, my grandfather did all of this out here on the.
- [20:11]
Lee Hawkins
Toric side of the transaction, the wow factor was even more, more striking. As I dug deeper into his story. It wasn't clear that Frank Torick was driven by any commitment to civil rights. Davita never met her great grandfather, but explains what she knows about him.
- [20:30]
Davita Torick
What I had heard about him was through my aunt, 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, 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.
- [21:24]
Lee Hawkins
Carolyn Hughes Smith still reflects on the courage of her family for the ripple effect it had on generational progress.
- [21:34]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
Would the struggle be the same? Probably not. What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community.
- [21:54]
Lee Hawkins
Next time on Unlocking the Gates.
- [21:57]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
The one thing that I really, really remember, and it stays in my head, it's cross burning. It was a cross burning and I don't remember exactly was it on my grandfather's property.
- [22:10]
Lee Hawkins
You've been listening to Unlocking the 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 Malachibu and senior producer Meredith Garretson Morby. Our sound engineer is Gary O'Keefe. Kelly Silvera is executive producer.
- [22:52]
Frances Hughes
Consumer confidence had its sharpest monthly decline since 2021, which means we're all in our feels about money. And while uncertainty is the only constant these days, it's also a great reason to get serious about understanding personal finance. I'm Janelia Espinal, host of Financially Inclined, a podcast from Marketplace that makes learning about money simple. Learn about practical skills like negotiating job offers, dealing with money and friendship and love, entrepreneurship and student loans. Get serious about your money and build a life you've always dreamed of. Listen to Financially Inclined wherever you get your podcasts.