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- [00:00]
Penny Peterson
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. Housing for blacks was extremely limited, as after the freeway went through and took so many homes.
- [00:30]
Lee Hawkins
We wanted to sell to blacks only.
- [00:33]
Penny Peterson
Because they had so few opportunities.
- [00:35]
Lee Hawkins
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.
- [00:52]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community.
- [01:08]
Lee Hawkins
You're listening to Unlocking The Gates Episode 2. My name is Lee Hawkins. I'm a journalist and 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. The barriers black families faced in real estate weren't just isolated acts of attempted exclusion, but they were deliberate, systemic obstacles deeply rooted in a national framework of racial discrimination. It all started with me shining a light on the neighborhood. I grew up in Maplewood. Mrs. Rogers, who still lives in Maplewood, looks back and marvels at what she has lived and thrived through.
- [02:07]
Mrs. 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, family. Grandma, Auntie, we'll buy all the tickets so you don't have to. And of course, what did he do? Went door to door. And I get a call from the principal, 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.
- [03:15]
Lee Hawkins
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 Smith Hughes explains, the one.
- [03:28]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
Thing that I really, really remember and it stays in my head is the Cross burning. It was a cross burning, and I don't remember exactly was it on my grandfather's property? Well, all of that was his property. But if it was on his actual.
- [03:43]
Lee Hawkins
Home site, Mrs. Rogers remembers firsthand, I.
- [03:48]
Mrs. Rogers
Knew the individual who burned the cross.
- [03:51]
Lee Hawkins
Mark Haynes also remembers phone calls at.
- [03:55]
Mark Haines
Night, harassment, crosses burned.
- [03:58]
Lee Hawkins
In the archives, I uncovered a May 4, 1962, article from the St. Paul Recorder, a black newspaper, that recounted the cross burning incident in Maplewood. A white woman, Mrs. Eugene Donovan, 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 Sneller dismissed the incident as nothing more than a teenager's prank. 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.
- [05:08]
Marcel Duke
When you see somebody that 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 it's just something that, as you see that more often, you know, it just is something that it prints in your mind that that's what you want to have, you know, for you and for your children.
- [05:25]
Lee Hawkins
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.
- [05:38]
Marcel Duke
If the head of a household leaves, if the grandmother that leaves, that kept everybody kind of at bay. When that person leaves, I seen whole families just really go downhill. No, nobody's able to kind of get back on their feet because that was kind of the starting ground. You know, if you couldn't pay your rent, you went back to mama's house and you was able to get back on your feet. Well, once that person leaves, I seen that happen, that now there's nobody that can get you back on your feet.
- [06:06]
Lee Hawkins
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.
- [06:19]
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 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.
- [06:41]
Lee Hawkins
Her family's experience illustrates a paradox. How land, even when sold, can transform lives.
- [06:49]
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?
- [06:58]
Lee Hawkins
But not all families found the same success in holding onto their homes. For Mark Haines, the challenges of maintaining his father's property became overwhelming, and the sense of loss lingered.
- [07:12]
Mark Haines
It was really needed a lot of repair. We couldn't sell. Was too much. It wasn't up to code. We couldn't sell it the way it was.
- [07:21]
Lee Hawkins
Okay.
- [07:23]
Mark Haines
I didn't really want to sell it. She tried to fix it. Part of code completely renovated it.
- [07:31]
Lee Hawkins
Okay.
- [07:31]
Mark Haines
And I had to. I had to go get a job at Klullman Co. As a CFO, and I did the best I could with that and lost a lot of money.
- [07:45]
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 just out of principle.
- [07:56]
Mark Haines
It was out. Was my father's house.
- [07:59]
Lee Hawkins
He.
- [08:00]
Mark Haines
He went through a lot to get that. And I just said, we should have it back in the family.
- [08:07]
Lee Hawkins
For Marcel Duke, he saw the value of home ownership and made it a priority for his own life. I bought my first house when I was 19. I had over 10 homes by the time I was 25. 30. By the time I was 30. 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. The racial covenants and real estate discrimination that shaped Minnesota's suburban landscape were stark reminders of how hard fought this progress truly was. 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. So we had this talk. Do you remember that talk?
- [09:10]
Penny Peterson
I certainly do. It was 2018.
- [09:12]
Lee Hawkins
Here's co founder Penny Peterson.
- [09:15]
Penny Peterson
So I started doing some work, and when you gave me the name of Mr. Hughes, and. And I said, does Mr. Hughes have a first name? It'd 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.
- [09:30]
Lee Hawkins
I just knew it was the woman, Liz, who used to babysit me. I just knew it was her grandfather.
- [09:35]
Penny Peterson
Oh, okay. Okay. So he's got a fascinating life story. He was born in Illinois in 1894. He apparently, pretty early on, gets into the printing business. And eventually he becomes what's called an ink maker. This is like being know a chemist or something, like very serious, very highly educated. In 1946, he and his wife, Francis Brown Hughes, bought 10 acres in the Smith and Taylor addition. He tried to buy some land and the money was returned to him when they found out he was black. So Frank and Marie Tarek, who maybe they didn't like their neighbors, they had owned it for since 1916, so I think they were ready to retire. So at any rate they buy the land. 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.
- [10:52]
Lee Hawkins
Hearing Penny describe Frank Torick takes me back to the conversation I had with his great granddaughter Davita, who never met him and only heard stories that didn't paint him in the most flattering light.
- [11:05]
Penny Peterson
It feels like such a heroic act in a way at that time. And yet it seems like that's not who his character was on some levels.
- [11:15]
Lee Hawkins
You know, people are complicated. The choices made by Frank and Marie Torick, 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 by James and Frances Hughes. Penny Peterson explains how they brought their vision to life.
- [11:40]
Penny Peterson
They paid it off in a timely fashion. You know, I think it was 5% interest for three years or something. Like he platts 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 always had very specific ideas that you have to build a house of a certain quality. There were nice big lots and the first family started moving in. That's how you got to live there. But interestingly, after the Hughes bought it in 1946, a guy called Richard Nelson who was living in Maplewood started putting covenants around it.
- [12:33]
Lee Hawkins
There were people who were making statements that were basically explicitly excluding Negroes from life, liberty and happiness. And these are big brand names in Minnesota. One was a former lieutenant governor. Let's just put the name out there. Penny explains how we got here.
- [12:55]
Penny Peterson
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. He was, by the way, born in England. 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's casting about for what's my next gig? And he goes through a couple things, but he finally hits on real estate. And he's pretty good at it. 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. But early aughts of the 20th century, he's doing pretty well, but he needs outside capital. And so he starts courting this guy called HB Scott, who is land agent for the Burlington Railroad in Iowa. And he's immensely wealthy. No one knows about Henry B. Scott in Minneapolis. He's some guy. 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, but Edmund Walton does. So he gets this in Place in 1910. Walton, via Henry Scott, puts the first covenant in. 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's universal. And then what's happening in the real estate realm is real estate is becoming professionalized. Instead of these guys just selling here and there. And there's also happening about this time, 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. 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 J.C. 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. After that real estate convention, there's one in 1910. And Walton is clearly passing this around that he's put covenants in, but no one really talks about it. But as you look back when the deeds were signed, it's like 1910, 1911, 1912, the 1912 one when J.C. nichols said, I can't sell a lot without him. 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, 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's 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.
- [17:26]
Lee Hawkins
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. I want to take a moment to emphasize that Thomas Frankson is a former lieutenant governor. 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 Peterson noted, these practices were professionalized and legitimized within the real estate industry. Michael Corey, associate director of Mapping Prejudice, explains how these covenants were enforced.
- [18:17]
Michael Corey
And so in the newspaper ads, 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. 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 this.
- [18:45]
Lee Hawkins
Oh, gosh.
- [18:46]
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.
- [18:55]
Lee Hawkins
Is there any Record of anybody ever breaking a covenant.
- [18:58]
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. So this professionalizing real estate industry keeps refining the covenants to be more. To stand up in court, better and better. But I think for so many people, 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, because the flip side of a covenant is always violence.
- [19:50]
Lee Hawkins
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. I'm still not clear on how these ideas spread around the country.
- [20:06]
Michael Corey
These conferences that these real estate leaders like the Thorpe brothers are going to. 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. And this private practice spreads rapidly after places that are in early. There's some places in the east coast that are trying this early, too. This becomes the standard. And in fact, it gets written into the National Board of Realty ethics code for. For years, because they're prominent people. They're also, like, going to be some of your elected officials there. 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 U.S. 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 neighborhoods that are gonna be inharmonious. And that same logic gets supercharged, because if we know something about this era, this is the FHA and then the GI Bill at the end of World War II are a huge sea change in the way that housing gets financed and the way that homeownership sort of works.
- [21:24]
Lee Hawkins
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. 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? In the final part of our series, we'll hear from some of the people who benefited, including relatives of Samuel Thorpe, who have become new leaders in an old fight to make homeownership a reality for millions of Americans.
- [22:11]
Carolyn Hughes Smith
This could be the Conversation okay.
- [22:16]
Penny Peterson
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.
- [22:33]
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 Malakibu and senior producer Meredith Garrettson Morby. Our sound engineer is Gary O'Keefe. Kelly Silvera is executive producer.
- [23:11]
Janeli Espinal
Consumer confidence had its sharpest monthly decline since 2020 21, 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 Janeli 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 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.