Abstract
This article traces the history of Edina, Minnesota, a community just outside of Minneapolis, following its transformation from an interracial farming village in the late nineteenth century to a racially exclusive and prejudice-ridden “streetcar” suburb by the 1930s. It also looks at the ordeal experienced by the first black family to move to the area, in 1960, demonstrating the challenges faced by the “open housing” movement in what is known as a racially “progressive” state. As a history of demographic change, the article suggests the need for a slightly revised Great Migration narrative, particularly when African Americans moved north and when and why some of the first migrants moved to cities. Likewise, it contributes to a literature showing how northern suburban communities became and remained all white for nearly a century and, more generally, how pervasive and intransigent racism was even among well-mannered, middle-class white Americans in the Deep North.
“The lure of burnt cork entertainment,” The Five Star Minstrel Book observed in 1938, “never seems to fade.” Local chapters of social clubs and fraternal lodges regularly hosted minstrel shows to raise money, the authors noted, and their book was meant to be “a useful aid” to those performances, offering guidance for arranging every aspect, from costumes and makeup to jokes and songs. If the events were annual, for example, it was more economical to buy “minstrel wigs” rather than rent them, since they were (apparently) widely available at a reasonable price. Another section detailed the method for white performers to apply “black face,” recommending actual burnt cork rather than greasepaint, advising that actors leave a space around their eyelids to heighten the “comedy effect.” Likewise, the book sketched out dozens of prototypical shows, all of them about a fancified, preindustrial, agrarian American South. One suggested performance, “Cottonblossom Minstrels,” opened with a tune called “Down South” and cast two outrageously made-up field hands trading insults, a racist banter that mixed conventional notions about black laziness, stupidity, superstition, and dishonesty. Other likely titles included “Levee Loungers’ Minstrel,” “Dixie Strutters’ Minstrel,” and “Sunny Southland Minstrels,” each of which, stage directions assured, could work as a “traditional black-face minstrel.” 1
Published in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by the Northwestern Press, The Five Star Minstrel Book’s particular regional theme is also part of what made it a “useful aid,” even if actors and audiences did not fully grasp the significance of that feature. The fixation on an imagined, ‘traditional,’ rural South associated African Americans—or rather, blackness and black inferiority—with an era, place, and culture profoundly not the “modern” urban North. This racial alchemy allowed northern whites to simultaneously affirm and deny their bigotry, to both display and hide their own racist beliefs and practices from themselves. The various minstrel show roles and storylines established a particular caricature of African Americans and yet put responsibility for the supposed living reality behind it on southern whites. By casting prejudice and racial inequality as distantly remote in time and place, the performances enabled white Northerners to disclaim an obligation to confront and eradicate them as well. The attitudes and wrongs were oddly not their own, and they were too far away to measurably influence or alter in any case.
This sort of insidious racism certainly had wide appeal among many whites in cities, towns, and suburbs scattered about the Northeast and Upper Midwest throughout much of the twentieth century, but it is useful to look closely at one particular place over time to understand why. Edina, Minnesota, just beyond the Minneapolis city line, is telling in that respect. During the stretch of years between the end of World War I and the start of World War II, Edina underwent a dramatic change from a racially integrated village of small farms to a racially exclusive “streetcar suburb,” and residents’ attitudes varied accordingly. Several white and black families had settled the area in the mid-nineteenth century and over the course of two full generations African Americans played wide-ranging and varied roles in the community, working and living as social equals alongside whites. By the 1920s, however, developers were turning berry farms, tree nurseries, and pastures into housing tracts, transforming the village by what might be called “suburban renewal.” Subsequently, within a decade, most of the original white as well as black residents were gone, many of them to Minneapolis or St. Paul. The only African Americans living in new Country Club District homes (each protected by a restrictive housing covenant) were a handful employed by white families as domestics and gardeners (allowed by exceptions to the covenants).
While Edina’s racial demographic shift played out, and as the 1930s came to a close, the relatively new Guild of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church hosted its own first “All Black Face Minstrel Show” at the local school auditorium, including the “Yes Sah! All Sister Mammy Act.” When the resident amateurs “blacked their faces, donned bandanas, and padded their figures with pillows,” the Country Club District bulletin declared afterward, “they ran the laugh-temperature of their large and appreciative audience almost beyond the breaking point!” This performance, and the many other annual minstrel shows that continued there into the mid-1950s, helped complete the suburb’s racial transformation, wiping whites’ collective memory clean of the preceding interracial era and justifying racial exclusion without violating pretensions to gentility. 2 Edina had been somewhat unusual for its harmonious race relations up to and after the turn of the century, but even there unquestioned whiteness and ghastly public displays of racism eventually prevailed (see Figure 1).
Edina minstrel show (ca. 1950), Edina Historical Society.
To be sure, the Twin Cities metropolitan area was not immune to the gathering midcentury offensive against segregation in America, and the first integration effort in Edina happened in 1960. This was, of course, more exactly a reintegration effort, bringing so-called “Black Pioneers” to a place where other blacks had lived several decades before. Forced out of their home by an “urban renewal” highway project in Minneapolis, African Americans Marion and Mary Taylor bought a lot in the Morningside neighborhood that was, ironically, on land that once belonged to Jonathan Grimes and his wife, white Quakers and close social acquaintances of the various African American families who had lived nearby. The Taylors faced significant opposition from the new suburban white residents, however, and it was an ordeal for them to win the right to build, secure necessary loans, and finally settle among their new neighbors. Not surprisingly, even after they did, it was a decade and a half, into the mid-1970s, before another black family followed them. For all intents and purposes, then, the area was still predominantly all white, demonstrating the persistent legacy of rigid exclusion.
Recovering this complicated arc of Edina’s racial history reveals nuances about the history of race in America in general, observations that are applicable to other parts of the United States. For one thing, acknowledging the presence of more than a dozen black families in Edina before the end of the nineteenth century draws attention to the need for slightly altered periodization and characterization of the Great Migration. “It was during the First World War,” Isabel Wilkerson explains in her summative account, “that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country,” and she emphasizes the urban destination of those migrants. 3 But the history of Edina, as well as many other villages, towns, and cities throughout Minnesota and elsewhere, reveals a smaller yet significant prelude to that larger demographic shift and registers the rural (rather than urban) destination of some earlier migrants. Similarly, tracing the eventual, gradual dispersal of Edina’s African American residents by “suburban renewal” ruffles conventional notions about population movement in another way, specifically how we understand the formation of concentrated urban black populations in the North. It shows that black ghettoes in Minneapolis and St. Paul were filled not only by waves of southern migrants but also by established African Americans leaving or sometimes fleeing increasingly inhospitable rural villages and towns throughout the state as white racism surged. Historical sociologist Jim Loewen has traced this movement more broadly and calls it the “Great Retreat,” a phrase that is a bit exaggerated for what actually happened in Minnesota, where the initial black population was always relatively small, yet one that rightly implies the need for an amended interpretation. 4
Identifying the methods that Edina whites quite intentionally used to exclude blacks over time exposes the depth and tenacity of northern racism as well. “The emphasis that many academics and civil rights activists have placed on southern racism,” historian Stephen Meyer contends, “has distorted the reality of race relations in the United States.” And paying closer attention to housing discrimination, he insists, is a particularly fruitful way to move beyond the notion that racism was a regional phenomenon while still capturing critical regional differences. Segregation laws and customs in the South generally prevented blacks from achieving equality with whites, Meyer notes, preserving whites’ privileged status but allowing considerable, daily association and intermingling. The elaborate rules for separation and the semblance of white supremacy they maintained also made wholesale, residential racial exclusion there less necessary, at least until after World War II, when segregation began to crumble. Whites in the North never adopted the full array of de jure segregation, however, and, as Edina clearly demonstrates, instead they chose to defend their privilege by keeping blacks apart from them altogether. Exclusion in the suburbs as well as select city districts was effectively the North’s answer to Jim Crow. 5
This is not to say that white Northerners acted entirely outside the law or simply according to personal whim. The methods they used to make and preserve exclusion were an evolving combination of obstructive techniques that typically included aid from government, homebuilders, and realtors. Yet, the emphasis historians and social scientists give to the part played by the state and others in making and preserving the North’s racial exclusion has varied, sparking a lively, ongoing debate. Again, Stephen Meyers insists that the classic interpretation, Charles Abrams’s Forbidden Neighbors, is flawed, because it emphasizes institutional forces, notably state and federal legislation, court decisions, and home industry dogma. “[T]he weight of evidence,” Meyers argues, “demonstrates that [those forces] reflected a popular unwillingness on the part of whites to have African Americans living in their midst.” In fact, Edina’s history suggests the relationship was a tangled, dialectical one. White residents there certainly expected Village Council members, legislators, Congressional representatives, and judges, as well as developers and real estate agents, to either actively empower or at least not interfere with efforts to make and maintain an all-white community. But this was not a simple matter of law reinforcing custom, since whites’ behavior and thinking varied as housing pratice and policy also changed. 6
Lastly, and just as importantly, recovering the details of what happened in Edina and other northern suburbs contributes to an ever-growing and ever-richer literature on the process of suburbanization, particularly the way historians employ race as a category of analysis to understand that process. The first studies on the subject, such as Sam Bass Warner Jr.’s classic Streetcar Suburbs, say nothing about either the steps whites took to ensure racial (and ethnic) exclusion or, for that matter, about the number of African Americans who were eventually able to get access to neighborhoods on city outskirts despite that resistance. “Above all else the streetcar suburbs stand as a monument to a society which wished to keep the rewards of capitalist competition open to all its citizens,” Warner writes. “Despite ignorance and prejudice, during this period of mass immigration, the suburbs remained open to all who could meet the price.” 7 Even Kenneth T. Jackson’s comprehensive survey, Crabgrass Frontier, published a couple of decades later, is limited in its treatment of how race figured, noting that American suburbs were distinguished by their “economic and racial homogeneity” yet treating this characteristic as ahistorical and uncomplicated. 8
One recent book that attempts to fill the breach on race is Andrew Wiese’s Places of Their Own, which makes the contrarian argument that the suburbs were not always or necessarily middle-class “white territory” and traces a line of “geographical continuity” showing how late nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century African American settlement on urban edges was “cumulative” and continued to draw millions more black residents over time. Yet this runs up against the history of Edina (and perhaps the history of most places that became suburbs) where absolute racial exclusion was the rule. Black Edina Village residents were not anchors for others to follow, the Country Club District and Morningside were established and maintained as all white, and even after the Taylor family moved in there was no significant racial integration in the area after. 9 Midway through Places of Their Own, in fact, Wiese qualifies his claim, acknowledging that most of the areas outside of cities where African Americans moved were not far from existing black neighborhoods and that “suburbanization tended to reinforce patterns of spatial segregation.” 10
Other revisionist literature has said much the same. Arnold Hirsch recognized the point early on, in Making the Second Ghetto, published in 1983. “Resistance to segregation, from both the public and private sector,” he insists, “prevented any fundamental alteration in Chicago’s established residential patterns despite the city’s rapid increase in black population and the appearance of the civil rights movement after World War II.” Similarly, in his study of Detroit, which came out just a year following Wiese’s book, Thomas Sugrue couples the histories of the city’s impoverished black ghetto and privileged white suburbs, arguing that despite some African American middle-class expansion outward, “patterns of residential segregation remained intact,” maintained by whites’ resolute “defensive localism.” 11 Likewise, in his examination of Miami, seemingly a different place from either Chicago or Detroit, N. D. B. Connolly observes that even there “investment in racial segregation became so great and multi-faceted . . . that even when challenged by something as forceful and many-headed as the black freedom struggle, it could not be undone.” 12 And, with its own unique features and nuance, this is more or less the conclusion that follows from looking at Edina.
Edina Village: “Their Views Enlarg’d, Their Liberal Mind”
White settlers first moved to what became Edina during the mid-nineteenth century, as Minnesota acquired territorial status and statehood and federal troops forcibly removed Dakota Indians from the area (the first racial exclusion). The tribe had lost most of their land through dubious treaties in 1851 and 1858—thirty-five million acres in all—after which they suffered humiliating and harsh confinement on two small reservations along the Minnesota River. Once there, government agents and Christian missionaries used various methods to destroy Dakota culture and families went hungry for want of access to hunting grounds and delayed annuity payments. In August 1862, a group of warriors retaliated, sweeping through nearby villages over several days, wantonly killing nearly everyone they encountered. By the time they were done, according to Walt Bachman, “one-third to one-half of the occupied regions of Minnesota had temporarily been cleansed of white inhabitants.” Not surprisingly, punishment was swift and harsh. A U.S. military commission conducted trials throughout the fall and condemned more than three hundred Dakota to death. President Lincoln personally reviewed the trial transcripts and pared that number to thirty-nine, eventually reduced to thirty-eight, and their hanging in December 1862 was then and is still the largest mass execution in American history, an event suffused with racial hatred. Meanwhile, more than two thousand Indians were interned at Camp Lincoln (in Mankato) and Fort Snelling (just south of Minneapolis), followed by transportation to the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska. 13
Among the participants in the Dakota attacks was Joseph Godfrey, son of a French Canadian fur trader father and enslaved mother. After fleeing from his own brutal master, Godfrey married a Dakota woman and lived with her in an Indian village. During the military commission trials he gave evidence against Dakota (including his father-in-law) and just barely escaped being among the executed. Yet Godfrey was only one among dozens of African Americans enslaved in Minnesota before the Civil War, despite Northwest Ordinance and Missouri Compromise prohibitions. Army officers and government agents posted to Fort Snelling owned many of these slaves, the most famous, perhaps, Rachel (who later successfully sued for her emancipation in Missouri Courts, arguing that she had lived in a free state) as well as Dred and Harriet Scott (who tried and failed to do what Rachel had done, capped by the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case declaring that “Africans” were not citizens and the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional). Even as late as 1860, vacationing white Southerners regularly brought black slaves with them to nearby Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet (see Map 1).
Minneapolis, Fort Snelling, Lake Harriet, Lake Calhoun, and Edina Village.
Still, many of the whites living only four to five miles west of the lakes, clustered around a mill on Minnehaha Creek, were of a different sort. During the Civil War the mill was owned and operated by Jonathan Grimes, formerly of Virginia, who faithfully delivered a seemingly endless amount of flour to soldiers at Fort Snelling. This commitment to aiding the Union cause came from Grimes’s personal disgust with slavery and his belief in an egalitarian ideal, values shared by his wife Elizabeth. After the war, they sold the mill but stayed in the area and ran the Lake Calhoun nursery. 14 Similarly, there were James and Annie Bull, who ran a dairy farm, as well as George and Sarah Baird, who raised sheep and bred cattle, and Henry and Sarah Brown, who established the nearby Browndale Farm, all of them also relatively enlightened when it came to the nation’s great racial divide. 15 Undoubtedly, as the local population grew it attracted some white residents who were not so freethinking, but when voters separated from the Richfield Township in 1888, the name they chose for their village (tellingly) came from the Robert Burns poem “Address to Edinburgh.” Among the lines of that verse was one that venerated “Edina” for being “social, kind, with open arms the stranger hail, their views enlarg’d, their liberal mind, above the narrow, rural vale.” 16
The first African American family to move to Edina Village was the Yanceys. Beverly Yancey was born in 1828, in Ohio, to parents who had been born in Virginia, likely slaves. Once the Union Army started taking black soldiers during the Civil War, Beverly joined up with a Colored regiment and served for a few years. After his discharge, he made his way to St. Paul and married Ellen Maria Bruce, whose parents were also from Virginia, again likely slaves. At some point in the latter part of the 1870s, they purchased fifty acres of land within sight of Minnehaha Creek, not too far from the Edina grain mill, and white residents warmly welcomed them as full members of the community. 17 There were regular social visits with the Grimes, Bulls, Bairds, Browns, and other neighbors, as well as berry-picking parties on the Yancey land. And the Yanceys were founding members and officers of the local Grange chapter, while Ellen helped found the school district’s Parent Teacher Association and served as its first president. 18 When Beverly and Ellen died just after the turn of the century, the Grange Minutes recorded effusive, lengthy eulogies that only a few other members received. He was remembered as “a genial comrade and faithful friend,” and she was recognized for her “tolerance and love” as well as “wise counsel . . . gentle presence, and nobleness.” 19
When they were grown, the Yancey children also played prominent roles in Edina. The oldest son, Charles Yancey, married Helen Watkin, whom he met in Canada, where Helen’s grandparents had fled from slavery years before. He organized a local orchestra, served as school board treasurer, and made his living as the village clerk. Ellen Yancey married African American William Gillespie. Ellen had studied music at the University of Minnesota, where she directed the school’s choir, and when she returned to Edina she was the organist for St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. William had been born in Milwaukee, lived for a while in Ontario, eventually came to Edina, and after he married Ellen, he ran the Yancey berry farm. Maggie Yancey married the son of another local black family, Thomas Fite, and they had a child, but Thomas died, Maggie remarried Swedish immigrant Claus Johnson, and they had a son too. Together, they managed their own fruit farm nearby. 20
By the turn of the century, however, real estate developers were eyeing Edina Village and starting to turn some of the nurseries, dairies, and farms into housing tracts, intentionally or inadvertently beginning to alter the community’s interracial character as well. This happened first when much of the Yancey and Gillespie land became part of the Emma Abbott Park and Cleveland subdivisions. Then, the Grimes heirs sold the family land and the Browns heirs sold part of their family plot for what became the Morningside subdivision. These initial developments, in particular, were made possible by extension of a streetcar line from Minneapolis, enabling middle-class professionals to live outside the city where they worked. Descendants from the original farm families, black and white, lingered into the 1920s, though, including Claus and Maggie Johnson and their children as well as the Payne and Siggers families. At that point, the village was still an interracial community. 21 (see Map 2).
Edina Village (1898), Edina Historical Society.
Country Club District: “The New, Restricted Residential Addition”
It was not until the 1930s that the full shift from farms to suburb and subsequent remaking of Edina into an all-white community happened. The tipping point was when the Brown heirs sold the rest of Browndale to the Thorpe Brothers to build what they called the Country Club District. This was modeled on exclusive suburbs in Kansas City, Cleveland, and Baltimore, and like those, it featured restrictive housing covenants, deed language preventing blacks from owning any of the homes. “No lot shall ever be sold, conveyed, leased, or rented to any person other than that of the white or Caucasian race,” they usually read, “nor shall any lot ever be used or occupied by any person other than of the white or Caucasian race, except for such as may be serving as domestics for the owner or tenant of said lot.” The fact these were even necessary suggests that, contrary to what apologists say about income being the barrier to African Americans, the Thorpe Brothers and other whites knew some blacks did have the means to buy a home in places such as Edina and they might try to if not explicitly banned. 22
Actually, the Country Club District’s enforced whiteness was just one of many restrictions meant to make the neighborhood attractive to “the better class,” as a promotional booklet put it, and the developers seemed to think racial exclusion was no more objectionable (and no less appealing) than rules about landscaping. It was not their intention to make the neighborhood “a community of ‘snobs,’” they said, but the lot sizes, price of homes, bucolic layout, “sparkling” lake, and an eighteen-hole golf course were very much about pitching it as “select.” Fliers, brochures, and booklets never explicitly mentioned racial covenants, however, indicating that this feature was at least slightly different from the others, one that could only be mentioned by polite hints. Presumably, prospective buyers appreciated the need for concealing ill-mannered racism and understood the Thorpe Brothers’ various euphemisms. The district would be “a community where you can be proud to live, proud of your home, your grounds, and your neighbor’s home as well,” for example, “a place where you can rear your children with the freedom of mind that comes with knowing they are more protected than would be possible in any ‘hit or miss’ city neighborhood.” 23
Of course, Edina was not the only place in the Twin Cities area that witnessed white efforts to prevent a black incursion, and the rhetoric and methods to accomplish exclusion were not always so civil. In one 1909 case, “in the heart of an aristocratic district” near Lake Calhoun, whites harassed two black families who rented apartments from a local doctor, repeatedly ringing their door bells and running away, breaking windows with rocks, and circulating a petition to have one of the men fired from his job. Similarly, during the 1920s, in several different incidents, whites attempted to intimidate African American families who moved into other south Minneapolis neighborhoods by breaking windows, pouring gasoline on porches, and shooting into their homes. 24 And in what is probably the most extended display of local white harassment, starting in the summer of 1931, World War I veteran and postal worker Albert Lee and his family faced several demonstrations by taunting and stone-throwing whites outside their home near Lake Harriet. Crowds ranged from a few hundred to several thousand angry neighbors at a time, sometimes prompting Minneapolis police to respond and make arrests. A full year later, when a group of white youths persistently gathered outside “hurling epithets,” an exasperated Lee struck one of the boys. A sympathetic judge fined him a nominal sum and ordered police to take measures to end the aggravations, but the family had had enough and moved away. 25
Typically, however, white mobs were not successful at removing interloping African Americans, and there always seemed to be at least some among the outraged who counseled other approaches. When black restaurant owner Evan Bridges bought two lots not far from where the Lees had briefly lived, only a year after the dispute there, Thirteenth Ward alderman and “alleged charter member of the local Ku Klux Klan” Walter C. Robb rallied his neighbors in another protest. One evening, he led about 150 residents at the Linden Hills branch library in a discussion about what could be done. Robb “made a masterful subtle appeal to the racial prejudices of his hearers,” other speakers cited cases “where Negroes were frightened from a neighborhood by stone throwing,” but, according to the Twin City Herald, “many of the people were obviously unfavorable to any suggestion of violence or coercion.” A local attorney also “reminded the audience that there was no legal way to keep a citizen of any color from purchasing property.” And, at least some of the Lake Harriet area residents, “the most aristocratic district in Minneapolis,” did not even agree “with the feeling that Bridges would make an undesirable neighbor.” In the end, a few meeting participants formed a committee to call on him and see if he would sell, then report their findings at another meeting to follow. 26
Increasingly during the 1930s and 1940s, the federal government responded to whites’ threats and violence against their African American neighbors by formalizing and even codifying a wide range of other options to help them create and protect racially exclusive enclaves. Modeled on the approach of its New Deal-era predecessor, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) spelled out a protocol for racist mortgage lending in its regularly updated Underwriting Manual. The agency mapped metropolitan areas and rated lending risk in individual neighborhoods according to a color-coded gradient, from green and blue to yellow and red, largely determined by housing stock quality and racial composition. By this system, “red-lined” African Americans were typically prevented from securing loans to purchase homes in black areas (because they were supposedly risky borrowers) and they faced difficulty getting a mortgage for homes in white areas (because the FHA discouraged mixing of “inharmonious races and classes”). At the same time, whites could not get loans to buy in “risky” black or mixed neighborhoods, pushing them to white or all-white sections of town. Just as importantly, whites in racially exclusive communities had an incentive to block integration to maintain their FHA-defined mapped ratings and select home values, critical to attracting other white homebuyers who needed mortgages as well as for existing homeowners to get second mortgages. 27
Additionally, southern segregationists and northern allies in Congress crafted the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill, to work through decentralized administration and oversight. Veterans’ Administration (VA) district office staff were under state headquarters direction, and the various benefits were actually implemented by local governments, schools, and banks. As intended, this made the law’s generous home loans (as well as business loans and education benefits) vulnerable to common white prejudice. It also left black veterans with few places to turn if they wanted to question or appeal a decision. “The stipulation that approval lay in the hands of the bank or lending institution, simple enough on its face,” Kathleen Frydl explains, “disqualified large numbers of African Americans from receiving Title III benefits, so much so that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” That kept African Americans confined to a particular neighborhood, which in turn reinforced the assessment of those areas as poor financial risks as well as unattractive to most if not all white homebuyers. 28
Northern local and state governments also aided whites passively, by stalling on fair housing ordinances and laws or bypassing only weak half-measures and underfunding enforcement. 29 In Minneapolis, during the summer of 1957, a City Council standing committee decided against recommending an Open Occupancy ordinance, after City Attorney Charles A. Sawyer declared that it would violate the Fourteenth Amendment. “It very obviously interferes very substantially,” he explained, “with the right of individuals to acquire, use, and dispose of property as they see fit.” 30 The next year, the Minnesota legislature’s Interim Commission on Housing Discrimination held hearings and studied the question but ultimately voted not to recommend fair housing legislation for the state. 31 One of the commission members, Thirty-Fourth District Representative F. Gordon Wright, cited Sawyer’s earlier opinion, branded “open housing” a “communist doctrine,” and claimed (probably accurately) that his constituents were overwhelmingly against such a law. 32 Similarly, in considering a justification for use of the state’s regulatory “police” power, the full commission’s report declared “no vital necessity is apparent for depriving private property owners of their rights for the benefit of a few.” 33
When Minnesota legislators did finally pass an open housing bill, in 1962, there were various significant exceptions and a subsequent concerted effort to deny adequate funding to the State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD) for enforcement. Existing legislation, enacted in 1953, prohibited restrictive housing covenants based on race and banned racial discrimination in public housing accommodations. The new measure added to this by covering rentals and property sales more broadly, although it excluded apartment buildings where one of the units was owner-occupied, rooms in an owner-occupied house, and single-family dwellings without government financing (FHA or VA mortgages). The latter exclusion meant that most real estate, which used only “conventional” financing, fell outside the law. 34 And the next year, when SCAD officials requested a small increase in their operating budget, beyond the biennium $192,000, it unleashed a round of attacks on fair housing more generally. Twin Cities realtor groups and organized homeowners joined together to lobby legislators, arguing that the agency had dealt with only a small number of cases in its first year and those were no real trouble to settle. Besides, they claimed, the state House Un-American Activities Committee established to investigate subversion had received only $360,000 for its 1963 operating budget and SCAD’s was an “infinitesimal task by comparison.” 35
In fact, realtors across the country had always played critical roles in enabling white property owners to discriminate, and it was no surprise when they helped to thwart fair housing legislation or undermine its enforcement. Over the preceding decades, real estate brokers had been professionalizing their trade, setting themselves apart with a claim to particular knowledge, recognized standards, and exclusive organization, all of which enabled them to more effectively perpetuate segregated housing. The 1924 Realtors Code of Ethics even spelled out the ethical imperative to practice discrimination, warning against introducing “members of a race or nationality” whose presence “will clearly be detrimental to property values.” And as late as 1957, taking notice of increasing attempts to cross the color line, the National Association of Real Estate Boards teaching manual advised against introducing “undesirable influences” such as “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.” 36
Prejudiced sentiment was certainly evident among Minnesota realtors, although public expression could swing from bold calls for property owners to defend their constitutional rights to carefully worded reluctance against stirring up controversy. On the one hand, in 1962, the Minneapolis Realtor claimed that recent court cases declaring open occupancy laws in other parts of the country unconstitutional indicated “so-called ‘fair housing’ legislation” was doomed and soon it would become unnecessary to abide by Minnesota’s law. 37 On the other hand, when the Greater Minneapolis Interfaith Fair Housing Program asked the local Board of Realtors to contribute to a full page advertisement listing supporters of a fair housing pledge, in 1963, the Board’s Human Relations Committee shrewdly steered the organization away from it, suggesting an ad would be counterproductive. “Very frankly,” Executive Vice President Bernard G. Rice explained, “a number of members of the committee questioned the advisability of such advertising and the good it would do the cause of housing for minority groups.” 38
Operating together, Minnesota’s weak open housing laws and prevailing racist rental and real estate sales practices effectively empowered suburban whites to create and maintain racially exclusive communities with few checks or challenges. The corollary to that was a concentration of blacks in delimited urban areas. By the 1950s, most Twin Cities African Americans lived in only a handful of Census tracts, almost all of which housing and redevelopment agencies had designated as “blighted.” And even as the black populations in Minneapolis and St. Paul surged, while white populations noticeably declined, segregation substantially increased over the next decade. Growing families and migrating newcomers, some of whom were beneficiaries of greatly improved incomes, generally did not settle elsewhere, because they could not. Likewise, the ever-thickening population density did nothing to improve actual housing conditions or neighborhood quality of life. 39
Morningside: “No Better Than a Portion of the South”
As federal and state housing policy evolved throughout the postwar era, on the Twin Cities’ suburban outskirts hardly any communities had black residents, and those that did were noticeably closer to the city limits, with numbers proportionately insignificant. 40 By the time the Country Club District was built out in Edina, for example, only a few among the original group of African American residents remained among thousands of whites, and even they were soon gone. Maggie Yancey lived there with her (white) husband, Claus, who worked as a laborer at the golf club in the 1930s, but by the 1940s she was widowed and lived alone with her son from an earlier marriage, and after she died he left, in 1963. George and Ora Payne and their son, John, kept a hog farm until the end of the 1930s although by 1940, they had moved to Minneapolis. Likewise, John Leggette, a “slusher” at a seed mill, held out for a while with his wife, Viola, and their two children, but by 1940 they also were in Minneapolis. Next door, Noah Siggers, who worked as a carver at a furniture factory, stayed on after his wife, Addie, died, and their daughter, Ernestine, still lived in Edina following his death in the 1950s, but she disappeared from the city directory in the early 1960s. 41
To be sure, several households in Edina’s Country Club District also included black, live-in maids and yard hands, a new group of servile labor that vividly demonstrated how different the exclusive suburban neighborhood was from the inclusive agrarian village it replaced. There were George and Elizabeth Walters, who worked for the Southworth family; Gertrude Alexander, who worked for the Smiths; James Batsell, who worked for the Schalfers; Louise Hampton, who worked for the Perrys; and Rena Murphy, who worked for the Baringtons. All were from the South, recently migrated from Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas, yet by the 1950s, every one of them had moved on again, most to a Minneapolis or St. Paul address in the “black” section of town. Some African Americans probably continued to come by train or bus to clean houses, care for children, or tend yards for the day, without “living in,” although otherwise the resident population had become entirely all white. Subsequently, and perhaps consequently, few whites there seemed to question the bizarre sight of neighbors in blackface (adults and children) at the intermittent minstrel shows, performing scripts that cast blacks as nineteenth-century, southern sharecropping oddities. 42
The next decade, the 1960s, did witness an important challenge to Edina’s more general racial exclusion, but this actually happened in Morningside, which had seceded from Edina in 1920. The neighborhood was part of an earlier suburban development, platted after the Twin City Rapid Transit’s newly electrified Lake Harriet line pushed out to Lake Minnetonka, on land owned by the Grimes, Brown, Yancey, and Gillespie families, along with a few others. In fact, a good portion of the Yancey land went first, when young Charles Yancey sold most of his father’s many acres to Seth Abbott, who named his development “Emma Abbot Park” (after his opera star daughter). As lots began to sell there and throughout the northern section of Edina, however, a division formed on the village council, between the remaining farming interests resistant to paying assessments for “improvements” and those hoping to draw homebuyers to the area. Oddly, the final push for separation came when Charles (the village clerk and assumed to be aligned with the “farmers”) was arrested for embezzling more than $5,000 from the roadwork payroll. Testament to the trust and respect he had among some in the community, Village Attorney George Grimes (son of Jonathan and Eliza) posted his bond and served as his lawyer, while the Council Minutes only discretely mentioned that he resigned. Charles quickly repaid the money and left for Minneapolis with his family and, soon after, local residents voted to make their own village. 43
Unlike its ostentatious Country Club District neighbor, Morningside was a modest community of bungalows, without restrictive housing covenants attached to their titles, yet realtor schemes and social pressure insured that every one of the families who moved in there was white. Then, in 1959, African Americans Marion and Mary Taylor, along with their young son Greg, bought one of the few remaining open lots, at the end of Scott Terrace, land formerly part of the Grimes estate. Doing this demonstrated remarkable individual daring as well as the fact of powerful social forces. Like other African Americans in metropolitan areas across the country affected by urban redevelopment and highway expansion, the state was pushing the couple out of their home in a mostly black neighborhood on the other side of Lake Calhoun, in Minneapolis, with construction for 35W. Also, like many African Americans, however, Marion had served in the Army during World War II, giving him access to GI Bill home benefits, and his well-paying job as a VA biochemist, along with Mary’s job as a schoolteacher, easily qualified them for a construction loan and home mortgage in Morningside. Moreover, they both already had some personal experience with outspoken resistance to housing segregation and workplace discrimination, encouraged by the growing black civil rights movement, and there were organized efforts happening in the Twin Cities. In particular, after Minneapolis failed to pass a local open occupancy law at the end of the 1950s, activists had established the Greater Minneapolis Interfaith Fair Housing Program, and Director James Tillman lent considerable attention to helping the Taylors, one among several “pioneer families” he was aiding to move to “new neighborhoods.” 44
When Morningsiders heard about the likely integration of their neighborhood a good number of them organized house meetings and developed a strategy to prevent it. Led by former Mayor Otto Wolin, a sales agent who lived on Scott Terrace, as well as Attorney Keith Bradley, who lived one block over, the bigoted whites narrowed their opposition to a claim that the Taylor lot had to be left for drainage and demanded that the Village take possession of it for the public good. 45 But the council refused to vote for this and opponents became more vocal about the impact the Taylor move would have on property values as well as the possibility of “race mixing” and “intermarriage.” 46 At the same time, bank officers actively blocked a construction loan and the Village Tax Assessor Office delayed getting tax information to the bank. Once the loan went through, and Marion hired a black contractor, the Village Engineer delayed permitting at various stages and the Council refused to extend the public water line. Meanwhile, because the move was taking so long, the State Highway Department began to insist that the Taylors pay a monthly lease to stay in their old house, in Minneapolis, the one in the way of the 35W highway project. This, Marion explained in a letter to State Attorney General Walter Mondale (who later cosponsored the 1968 Fair Housing Act in the Senate), would unfairly make his family responsible for whites’ “Racial Prejudice.” 47
Part of what turned the eventual outcome in favor of Marion, Mary, and Greg, besides their own courage and persistence, was public support from some white families. Organized by the Hasbroucks, who lived just a few doors down from the Taylor lot, as well as the Hoags, who were a couple of blocks over from Scott Terrace, this other group of Morningside residents publicly confronted the opposition at the Village Council meetings, once with petitions signed by 251 residents (some signatures representing whole households). “We fully support the council,” they read, “in our policy that there must be no discrimination in the matter of ownership of property in Morningside.” The Hoags also hosted the Taylors and a large group of supporters at their home, where, the Edina Courier thought it was necessary to point out, “nobody among the dozen or so residents present seemed unduly ill-at-ease.” One of those present (and presumably not “ill-at-ease”) was Village Mayor Ken Joyce, who had intervened in his own way by circulating an open letter, “A Matter of No Prejudice.” Ken and his young son, Jim,delivered the statement to every mailbox in the neighborhood, helping to turn the tide of sentiment and prepare Village Council trustees to move the issue forward. 48
The arguments sympathetic whites made for integration were an eclectic set of ideas, a mix of American creed, Cold War era ethics, Christian principle, and regional comparison. “Our forefathers fought for freedom and equality among men and we praised them for it,” local resident Jean Sedgewick wrote in one letter to the editor of the Edina Courier. “Why then,” she asked, “are we so aroused when men of a different color also try to gain the rights that are legally theirs?” Similarly, in his open letter, Republican Mayor Jim Joyce called on Morningsiders to dedicate the community to fair play, to live by commitment to the Brotherhood of Man, and to follow the Golden Rule. Since the regional and national media had picked up the story, as an emblematic example of civil rights battles happening throughout the upper Midwest and Northeast, Joyce also used the South (and northern white notions about the South) as a foil. “We are now in a position to demonstrate the real spirit of an honest, God-fearing community,” he declared, “or to act impulsively, unthinkingly, and become known as a bigoted, prejudiced, hateful little area that is no better than a portion of the South that we have probably in the past presumed to judge.” 49
Later, when the Taylor family did move in, this sentiment rejecting racial prejudice continued, and some (though not all) neighbors befriended them, visiting however irregularly, inviting them to dinners, and asking Mary to join the PTA and League of Women Voters. In fact, in the fall, when Greg started first grade at Morningside Elementary, the house was not yet finished and so when kids went home for lunch, he joined the Hoag children. One of his other classmates was Jim Joyce, Ken’s son, and they became good friends over the next few years. Yet there were limits. As soon as the Taylors moved in, the immediate neighbors moved out. More than once, a group of teenagers called Marion and Mary “niggers” to their face, and someone shot a “BB” through their front window. 50 Also, while Greg reportedly attended school without serious trouble, he was always the only African American in his grade school and high school, and navigating that absolute whiteness must have been exhausting. The year he graduated, 1972, teachers and students organized a two-day Human Affairs Conference, focused mostly on “racial problems” and “the interrelations of blacks and whites,” but (in a fit of anger or boredom or both) a large number of students simply walked out 51 (see Figure 2 and Figure 3).
Morningside Elementary first-grade class (1960), Jim Joyce.
Edina-East High School Whigreen yearbook (1972), Edina Historical Society.
Not surprisingly, the gauntlet the Taylors had to pass through to live in Morningside (and that other black families had to hazard to move into all-white suburbs elsewhere in the Minneapolis and St. Paul region) effectively dissuaded other African Americans from making the same move. “Although Minnesota residents are working to bring about a total change in the ‘traditional’ community attitude,” SCAD reported in 1968, “there are at present, few communities which would welcome minority families into the mainstream of activity and encourage them to participate in the total spectrum of community life.” 52 Set against what Edina Village once was, this observation suggests a story of decline for the suburb it became, from inclusive to exclusive, welcoming to intolerant, egalitarian to racist. After Edina became segregated in the postwar period, and even after the community reabsorbed Morningside in 1966, it saw no larger demographic or cultural shift for quite a while. Except for the Taylor family, the area was still all white until 1977, when Sandy Berman (a white librarian), his wife Lorraine (an African American schoolteacher), and her two kids from another marriage, moved to Morningside, a few blocks from Scott Terrace. And while there were residents who seriously questioned racial exclusion and prejudice, they did little, or in the face of neighbors’ opposition they could do little, to transform their community accordingly 53 (see Map 3).
Twin Cities minority distribution (1973), Minnesota Historical Society.
Although the challenge of housing desegregation in the suburbs was never entirely a question of class (by the postwar era there were an increasing number of black professionals in Minnesota who could afford to live in places such as Edina, Bloomington, and St. Louis Park), income had been and was a hindrance for many. Recognizing that fact at the national level, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Federal Housing Secretary George Romney attempted to entice and coerce suburbs to move toward both racial and economic diversity, but President Nixon fired him for that. Then, at the end of the 1970s, the Minnesota state legislature tried to facilitate integration by creating the Metropolitan Council and passing the Metropolitan Land Use Planning Act, requiring all suburban communities to provide “a fair share” of moderate- and low-income housing. This failed, too, however, undermined by persistent white resistance in the suburbs as well as competition with central cities housing agencies and urban developers for resources. Consequently, the number of severely segregated schools and the population of segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods in the Twin Cities increased and regionwide the suburbs remained more or less racially and economically homogeneous into the 1980s. 54
Resistance to integration in Edina (and elsewhere) was also buttressed by attempts to write race out of the city’s past, to suggest that geographic segregation had somehow happened on its own, without purpose or intent, in much the same way minstrel shows once helped reconfigure local whites’ collective memory to reconcile it with the newly achieved absence of African Americans. Even just several years ago, during the summer of 2014, Amarin Young, who worked as an intern with Jim Loewen to research the history of racial exclusion for his book Sundown Towns, tried to update Edina’s Wikipedia page by adding several relevant paragraphs. Repeatedly, over the months following, however, someone working under the username “Juno” deleted Amarin’s corrections. To justify those edits, Juno claimed that Amarin’s sources were “highly suspect” and “questionable.” Eventually, she gave up, and the Edina entry was left without any mention of the suburb’s racial conflict.
In response to what the Star Tribune dubbed “the edit war,” Edina Communications Director Jennifer Bennerotte disclaimed any role in maintaining the Wikipedia page, although, in fact, at the time, the first sentence on a front page of their official website performed its own whitewashing. “The Irish and Scot families who settled Edina in the mid-1800s,” it said, “wouldn’t recognize the city that 100 years ago boasted a profitable Minnehaha Creek gristmill and a Grange Hall.” By that telling, the Yanceys, Gillespies, and others did not exist, and Edina did not become all white, and the Taylors did not have to fight their way in. Fortunately, as the controversy simmered, various other people intervened—including members of the Human Rights & Relations Committee—and the Wikipedia page and city website have since been slightly updated. Evidently, though, even today, there are many living in or near the suburb who would rather hold to the censored version of history and befuddle efforts to make sense of contemporary race and racism. And this is obviously a problem. “The past is all that makes the present coherent,” James Baldwin once observed, and “the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.” 55
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Sandy Berman, Jim Loewen, Jim Joyce, Kristen Harol, Peter Rachleff, Debbie Miller, and Marci Matson for their assistance in researching and writing this article. The Journal of Urban History’s anonymous reviewer also made a close and thoughtful reading of the manuscript and offered many insightful suggestions for revision.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.