The history of Arthur and Edith Lee: Segregation then, outsiders now

Racial covenants across Minnesota divided neighborhoods by race, with the first one enacted in 1910. The effects of systematic policies like these led to historically segregated neighborhoods and hostility toward Black residents who chose to live in white areas. Today, Black residents who move into these neighborhoods say they are still treated as outsiders.

One well-known story of white violence toward Black residents is that of Arthur and Edith Lee, who bought a house in the Field neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Four years before the Lees moved there in 1931, members of the Field Neighborhood Association had signed “contracts” to prevent people of color from moving into the area, according to MNopedia. After harassment, vandalism, and violence, the couple moved just four blocks away, but into another neighborhood formed by restrictive covenants. Black newspapers reported many similar cases.

“Moving in is now the easy part,” one Black resident, who requested to be anonymous, said, “but once in the neighborhood, some Black residents are targeted through overpolicing and homeowners association fees.” Another resident said conditions have changed somewhat, as the environments aren’t as abrasive.

Kirsten Delegard, co-founder, historian, and director of the Mapping Prejudice Project, began researching racial covenants and their impacts in South Minneapolis, where she was raised.

“I had grown up in Minneapolis and was taught a lot of stories about how this was such a progressive, liberal place and how it was on the cutting edge of all these social policies,” she said. It wasn’t until she returned after 20 years and began searching for an integrated school for her children that she discovered statistics about racial inequality in the city.

“I became really interested in trying to figure out how a place that prides itself on being so progressive and liberal ended up with some of the highest racial disparities in the country,” Delegard said.

The Mapping Prejudice Project began in 2016, focusing on all of Hennepin County along with Ramsey County. Ten years later, it has expanded across Minnesota to map and conduct historical recovery work. At the start, Delegard said she was shocked by the sheer number of racial covenants she uncovered.

“There comes a point in the 1920s when any new neighborhoods that are coming online are racially restricted,” she said.

After this, the Twin Cities shifted from relatively integrated neighborhoods to highly segregated ones.

Delegard said the shift occurred around World War I, as ideas about what made a “safe and prosperous” neighborhood became common assumptions and were institutionalized through racial covenants and later, redlining.

Decades after racial covenants became illegal nationwide in 1968, neighborhoods remained divided; segregation had become normalized.

“[Racial covenants] set patterns for where people can live,” Delegard said. “Once a neighborhood was racially restricted, it was very difficult to be the only Black family to move in, not just because of hostility, but also due to barriers related to wealth.”

Homeownership programs that began in the 1930s did not help Black residents, and all of these factors have continued to have intergenerational consequences, she said. In fact, houses that once had racial covenants are now worth 15% more than houses that never had them.

Delegard said she believes most initiatives created to address discriminatory housing practices are too little, too late.

“They don’t seem to have much enforcement power,” she said. “They don’t really get at the root causes of the issues. I would say there has never been a full-throated effort to repair the intergenerational damage caused by racial covenants, white violence, real estate steering, discriminatory lending practices, all of those things together.”

Kiarra Zackery grew up in the early 2000s in the Hale Page Diamond Lake neighborhood, just south of the Field neighborhood from which the Lees were pushed out.

Her father would joke that there was a quota allowing one Black family per block, they have been the only ones for the 25 years they have lived there. Zackery later discovered her neighborhood was “pervasive” with racially restrictive covenants.

She described her childhood and teen years as safe and quiet, aside from the noise from the nearby Minneapolis–St. Paul Airport. The neighborhood is ideal in terms of accessibility to Uptown, Downtown, the airport, and the Mall of America, and is walkable with small businesses. But she never realized she was expected to have neighborhood friends.

“My parents were very intentional about making sure that I was still socialized in Black spaces,” she said. “It never really hit me until adulthood that I didn’t socialize with the other kids in my neighborhood. I was very much, kind of, on my own.”

She believes her father has connections and a sense of belonging in the neighborhood because he has lived there so long.

“When we first got there, we didn’t receive outright hatred, but there was definitely reservation and hesitation to getting to know us, to wanting to meet us,” she said.

Zackery sees this as consistent with the quiet, second-guessing, distant racism often observed in Minnesota.

“It’s either distance because there’s fear of a misperception, or overcompensation, people are overly nice, overly trying to prove they’re not racist.”

Even now, Zackery said, when she visits her father, she notices neighbors watching her drive down the street; once she pulls into his driveway, their shoulders relax.

“So I think conditions have improved in that it’s not as abrasive, but it’s definitely quiet and distant, it’s what you would expect in Minnesota.”

Delegard found that while mapping instances of racial violence in the Twin Cities, areas with racial covenants saw fewer violent episodes, because there was no one to terrorize. In neighborhoods that formed before covenants, more violence occurred.

“Part of the reason white people wanted to put in racial covenants was they didn’t want to stand on someone’s lawn with a pitchfork or burn a cross, they wanted a legal remedy to seal the neighborhood off completely.”

Zackery also reflected on her father’s experiences after George Floyd’s murder. Living just a few miles from where Floyd was killed, her father received gifts: beer, food, liquor on his doorstep from white neighbors during the uprising.

“Because he was the only Black man on the block, they felt this was the one way to mitigate it, through white guilt, which is also symbolic of their racism,” she said.

Zackery, a co-founder of the Just Deed Coalition, works to educate about housing racism in partnership with Mapping Prejudice. Her father, proud of their work, encouraged neighbors to participate and remove their covenants, which many of them did.

Damenica Ellis welcomes reader responses at dellis@spokesman-recorder.com