Housing, Hatred, and Indomitable Women

A friend recently gave me a copy of the 1955 book Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing by Charles Abrams. I gather that it was one of the early academic works that began to form the field that has now led to works like Keeanga-Hamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit and Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law.

I haven't spent much time with the book, but the one thing I did was check the index to see if it had anything to say about Minneapolis and Saint Paul, which we now know were hotbeds of segregation and redlining. Despite the fact that this is literally the exact time when the interstate highways were being planned through the heart of our Black communities, Saint Paul is not mentioned at all, and Minneapolis is noted on just one page, where Abrams is listing his program for action. The 12th aim is to integrate "minorities" into neighborhoods, and Minneapolis is given as an good example of a city with a minority population under 2 percent that is widely "distributed throughout the city." And he continues:

This is a healthy pattern and should stay that way. FHA and VA should not encourage housing projects which disrupt it. Suburban development should follow a similar pattern; urban redevelopment or slum-clearance projects should not aim to oust the minority or force it into ghettos elsewhere (page 382).

I don't know where Abrams got his information on Minneapolis having a healthy pattern, since the city was redlined and covenanted well before 1955, and segregated public housing like the Sumner Field project in North Minneapolis was built in the 1930s. White flight from Minneapolis to the segregated suburbs was well underway at this time as well.

A much better look at these practices comes from the Mapping Prejudice project, which has completed work on racist covenants in Minneapolis and is described in this one-hour documentary called Jim Crow of the North. Because of the nature of record-keeping and digitization, it doesn't cover Saint Paul, unfortunately, but we know there is more to come from oral histories already on record.

A few things I learned from this documentary that I didn't know.

Franklin Avenue in the Prospect Park neighborhood was where white racist terrorism around housing started in Minneapolis. In 1907, the Jackson family built a house in the up-and-coming neighborhood. 

The Jackson house today, at 2003 Franklin Ave. SE. (It was originally built with a covered porch.)

When they moved in and the neighbors realized they were Black, the reaction was not great (in fact, the white woman across the street screamed at them.) But when a second Black family, the Simpsons, who were friends of theirs, started to build in 1909, things got really bad. 150 people, "some of the most power people in Minneapolis" marched on the house to present a threatening message.

 The newspaper clippings shown in Jim Crow of the North are hair-raising. Imagine living through this:

 

This was during an era when lynchings were common in the U.S., so referring to rumors of "parties in this vicinity" being willing to "take any steps necessary" is obviously a threatening, terroristic message.

The Simpsons' house today. 

It's not a not a coincidence that the next year, 1910, the first racial (racist) covenant was incorporated into a Minneapolis housing deed. 

Mapping Prejudice has identified covenants all over South Minneapolis, and acknowledges that their effects extended beyond the houses they specifically applied to. One example is the Lee family, who bought an uncovenanted house in 1931 (located in the blue area) between covenanted houses, marked in red on this map from Jim Crow of the North.

Arthur Lee was a World War I veteran and a postal worker. He, his wife, Edith, and daughter, Mary stuck it out for three years, enduring crowds of thousands outside their home, having their dog poisoned and paint thrown at the house, and being forced to sleep in their basement. 

 

That's terrorism, by any description. They were protected by Arthur's fellow postal worker and veterans. But they finally sold the house and moved.


A monument at the street corner of 4600 Columbus Ave. S. marks this ignoble history today. (Here's a recent Star Tribune story that reprints a contemporaneous version of one of the white race riots.)

From the Jim Crow of the North documentary I learned about two women I had never heard of before.

The first is Lena Olive Smith, attorney for the Lee family in their struggle. Smith was the first Black woman lawyer in Minnesota and the first black lawyer of either sex to practice in Minneapolis. She moved here in 1906 at age 21, working at first as a real estate agent, where she saw discrimination in action (big surprise). She started attending law school part-time at age 31, finishing her degree and passing the bar when she was 36. She cofounded the local Urban League in 1925 and was president of the Minneapolis NAACP from 1930 to 1939.

Smith would have been working in real estate, I think, while the Jackson and Simpson families were being harassed and threatened in Prospect Park. She practiced law until she died in her 80s.

The second woman I learned of is Marvel Jackson Cooke. Cooke was one of four daughters in the Jackson household in that house on Franklin Avenue, along with her parents Madison and Amy. (Madison had a law degree, but worked as a Pullman porter, which tells you something about opportunities for Black men in the early 20th century in Minnesota.) 

Despite the harassment during their early years, her family stayed in the house on Franklin Ave. and she attended Pratt School in Prospect Park, then the nearby University of Minnesota. But she left Minnesota immediately after graduating. 

Her Wikipedia page is one amazing thing after another, since it appears she knew and worked with most of the prominent Black figures of the Harlem Renaissance and many in the Civil Rights movement. Her first job in Harlem was working for W.E.B. Du Bois on The Crisis, followed by a career in journalism at the Amsterdam News and other publications, including being one of the first Black journalists hired at a white-owned publication, the Daily Compass. She also was a labor organizer for the Newspaper Guild.

This 1950 article from the Daily Compass, co-bylined with Ella Baker!, was an investigative story about wage theft from Black domestic workers by white women in the Bronx:

As Kirsten Delegard, one of the Mapping Prejudice researchers featured in the documentary said,

I just wonder what it would have been like if they had been welcomed. If Prospect Park had become an enclave for Black intellectuals and Black Civil Rights activists. What would that have been like? How would this city be different?"

In combination with this earlier post about our local history, these stories of our own Jim Crow of the North clearly give the lie to the idea that the South has a corner on American racism and segregation, if that needed any proving.