- Let's give it up for George one time!

- [Acoma Gaither] Minneapolis is the epicenter of a global racial reckoning.

But, why?

Why here, in the so-called Free North?

(statue thuds) (crowd cheers) It's not a coincidence.

It's a direct consequence of our history.

- [Protestor] The whole damn system is guilty as hell!

- [Acoma] Jim Crow laws in the South made brutal racism legal and segregation an everyday reality for a century after the abolition of chattel slavery.

But up here in the North, achieving legal racial segregation required a little more creativity.

I'm Acoma Gaither, a public historian digging into our modern racial inequity through the past.

Which leads us to this place, Theodore Wirth Parkway, part of a unique bicycle byway that circles Minneapolis, called the Grand Rounds.

It's also a picturesque border between North Minneapolis to the east and the suburb of Golden Valley to the west.

But there are borders, and then there are barriers.

(map unrolls) And this is the story of the latter.

This is a story of Jim Crow of the North.

(film projector whirs) In the first half of the 20th century, white land developers made extensive use of something called racially restrictive covenants as formidable and legal weapons of housing discrimination.

- Restrictive covenants are contract clauses, sometimes in private contracts, sometimes in development documents, sometimes in plat maps, that restricted who could own, lease, or occupy land in a particular place.

In Minnesota, in Hennepin County, where we've seen the research, they're primarily in deeds, and a lot of them were placed kind of at the neighborhood level, so they would apply to an entire neighborhood at once and they would be put in place when the neighborhood was being developed.

(projector clicks) (quiet piano music) - One of the most significant dividing lines, in terms of racial covenants, was between Golden Valley and North Minneapolis.

I mean, on our map, that's got to be one of the most interesting stretches, the clear border.

You have this incredible divide of economics, and you can see physically how developers built this divide of racial covenants to separate out the part of the city that was the most welcoming, the most diverse for all kinds of people, to this, you know, rapidly developing, affluent suburb that was just a little parkway away.

- When I saw the Mapping Prejudice map, I was not at all surprised.

When I look at the map of restrictive covenants for this area, I see the patterns that already existed in my mind, as somebody who grew up here.

(film projector whirs) - [Acoma] The federal government then used those covenants, and the white space they outlined, as a map for supporting home loans, and for redlining, the geography-based practice of rendering entire communities of color ineligible for home loans.

But the story of racial covenants in Golden Valley reveals that local governments were also aware and encouraging of this segregationist system.

- [Maria Cisneros] I'm pretty sure it's in the very first Golden Valley Planning Commission meeting that one of the Tyrol neighborhoods, the development was approved, and there's a list of requirements that apply to the development of the neighborhood.

And one of the requirements is that all of the deeds contain a racially restrictive covenant.

And so that was approved by the planning commission.

And then at the next city council meeting, the city council also approved it.

- [Acoma] This barrier of bias solidified into the mid-century.

By the 1960s, this severing of multicultural city and nearly all-white suburb was showing itself in other, more dangerous ways.

- These racial covenants had structured every aspect of life in this first-ring suburb.

It shaped policing.

It shaped the way people felt welcome or unwelcome.

People who have experienced this kind of police violence know that patrolling the boundaries is where the danger is.

(jazz music) - [Acoma] In 1969, jazz musician Oliver Lyle, brother of famed pianist, Bobby Lyle, had a cool gig at a club in Golden Valley.

- The place had a good reputation for fine dining and good music.

Everything was good about it except one thing, and that was getting to and from the job, where I started getting stopped almost every night by the police.

That border between Minneapolis and Golden Valley, they basically set up a border patrol to watch for people of color coming in.

And sure enough, I got caught up in that.

(car whooshes past) It was getting uglier with each stop.

It could be me winding up on the side of the road as another statistic, you know.

(police scanner chatters) When that cop asked for my license the 20th time or whatever, I didn't know, "Hey, why are you stopping me?

Why are you stopping me?"

"Oh, we don't need to give you a reason to stop you."

I said, "Well, if you're not going to give me a reason for stopping me, I'm not gonna show you my license."

And that was the civil disobedience right there.

He said, "Well, get out of the car."

And I got out of the car, (car door slams) did the whole frisking thing, and down to jail I went.

- [Acoma] Lyle used the incident as a catalyst for action, filing a federal lawsuit against the Golden Valley Police in 1970.

- I had a theory that the law of the land cases beats law of the city cases.

So we got this in federal court under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

And the jury deliberated for 3 1/2 days, and they came out for civil rights of a person and against violation of civil rights by the cops.

So, for me and against the cops.

I felt proud that I was able to put one brick into that building block of cases towards justice and civil rights for people.

- The voice of justice speaks again.

- [Acoma] Racially restrictive covenants were finally made illegal with the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

- Fair housing for all is now a part of the American way of life.

(audience applauds) - [Acoma] But the hate-based contracts remained buried in the deeds, visible only to those who go looking for them.

Golden Valley.

- Anti-Semitic, too.

- Wow.

- I purchased a home in Golden Valley with my husband, who is mixed-race, is Afro-Latino.

And being the the legal nerd that I am, (chuckles) I read every document in our chain of title.

And I found a racially restrictive covenant in our title work.

And so I brought it to my husband to talk about.

Not being a lawyer, and also not being from this country, his first question was, "Well, is that enforceable?

Can we buy this house?"

Which was kind of eye-opening to me, because I kind of took it for granted like, this is a horrible stain on this title, but obviously it's illegal.

But that wasn't his reaction.

We also talked about, what does that say about this neighborhood?

Do we want to live in this space?

We ultimately decided, "Well, this is maybe a vestige of the past.

We're gonna move to this community and buy this house."

So we did.

But that kind of started me on the journey of looking into, well, what is the history of racially restrictive covenants in Golden Valley, and why don't I know about this already?

- Like the documents themselves, the story of racial covenants has been a buried secret for most Minnesotans.

But, some folks knew.

And thanks to the efforts of researchers, community groups, and lawmakers, something historic was about to happen.

(upbeat music) - We're here for the ceremonial signing of a bill that makes history.

Many people who have found these racial restrictions in their deeds feel complicit.

- We are a deeply segregated state, and House File 51 attempts to put a spotlight on one practice that served to segregate this state to this day: Racially restrictive covenants.

- Words matter, and we come together to clean up some things that are stains on the state of Minnesota.

It's the law.

There we go.

- All right!

(observers applaud) - In 2019, the legislature passed a law that allowed property owners to discharge racially restrictive covenants.

And so my husband and I decided, "Let's go through that process.

Let's discharge the covenant on our home."

So we did that.

And then a friend of mine, who also wanted to discharge their home, so I helped her through that process.

- The state of Minnesota has done an amazing job in terms of making it much easier for people to do this, but it's still complicated.

You still have to understand how the paperwork works, and you have to understand how to file things.

- [Acoma] So, Maria and a group of attorneys, real estate experts, and others decided to use their knowledge, skills, and resources to help homeowners interested in discharging the racist language in their deeds, in Golden Valley and beyond.

- And at the same time, we connected with Mapping Prejudice.

Kirsten Delegard kind of brought us all into the same room and pretty quickly we realized we can all work together on this issue of discharging racially restrictive covenants and try to bring other cities into the work.

We came up with the name Just Deeds.

- The thing that I appreciate about the Just Deeds group is that they understand the inner workings of all these institutions.

They also understand what needs to happen.

- When municipalities join Just Deeds, we tell them, "We have resources to help you do these things.

And we will recruit attorney volunteers to help your residents discharge their covenants."

But then the rest of this needs to be kind of a path of self-discovery about your community.

(pensive music) (film projector whirs) - [Acoma] Dealing with difficult history is well, difficult.

But Maria says Golden Valley has found ways to address historical inequity without triggering political turmoil.

- There are a lot of tension points in this work.

There is pressure at times to not talk about those things, because it feels political in the climate that we live in right now.

But what we're talking about here is not really a political thing.

This is a historical fact that this happened, and there's a lot of really good research on what the impact of it has been.

Our city council is very supportive, even though doing this work requires us to examine some things about our own system that are not flattering, or not things that are fun to talk about.

But our leadership has been super supportive, and our community has been very interested in learning about this and in taking these steps together.

- [Acoma] Golden Valley offers a useful story of how cities can engage in racial reckoning, acknowledging their role in creating barriers between Black and white communities, and making amends for the apartheid-like policing of those borders.

- I think it was last year.

Well, all of a sudden there's this knock on the door.

(door knocks) There's this fellow with a suit and tie on, standing there, and he introduced himself as the mayor of Golden Valley.

And he said that he had come to apologize for the events of 50 years ago.

And I said, "Really?"

(laughs) I couldn't believe it.

And so I invited him in, and we sat down and talked for a while.

And he thought, "How could we be preaching civil rights to people, when we've got these things hanging like this?"

And one of the things being apologizing to me.

So it was very much of a surprise for that to happen, you know.

- Just Deeds built their program on the groundbreaking restrictive covenant research of the Mapping Prejudice project at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Their continuing research has found a new focus and profound new meaning during these historic couple of years.

- We fully expected the process of transcribing the deeds in Ramsey County to take basically the same amount of time as it took in Hennepin County, three years.

But then George Floyd was murdered.

(somber music) Mapping Prejudice really became an epicenter, or a focal point, for people trying to understand structural racism, trying to understand how the Twin Cities became the epicenter of a global uprising, a global reckoning around race.

- It's really interesting doing this work to watch how hyper-local the discussion can be, and how valuable it is and meaningful, for especially property owners, to be able to, like, get involved in a conversation that involves their specific property.

- The Just Deeds folks, they're very careful to say that that's the start.

The endpoint is not, like, how many deeds have we discharged?

It's important for people, for all kinds of reasons, but it's largely symbolic.

What matters is what you do with that information, what you do with that personal connection.

(birds chirp) (camera shutter clicks) - Money from slave labor helped to build the state.

Slavery's history is Minnesota's history.

- There's a lot of resistance around this word "reparations" from white people.

- Your forefathers have made this mistake, and it cannot be remedied without hard, cold cash.

(energetic piano music)