In June of 2020, right after the globally televised street execution of George Floyd, journalist Sara Holder (Bloomberg Citylab) wrote a powerfully informative piece, especially for a columnist living in the mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was entitled, “Why This Started in Minneapolis: There’s a reason why the Twin Cities triggered a national uprising.”
On the first page of the article was a photo of police in riot gear marching down Plymouth Avenue during riots in North Minneapolis. The year was 1967. 55 years later, the aftermath of the murder of an unarmed Black man brought about worldwide outrage, and yet a Black man in Grand Rapids, Michigan was recently shot in the head while penned down by a police officer.
Holder said that Minneapolis stood out as the site where it all began. “The city’s history of disparate policing, and the ways racism and division molded its physical landscape might help to understand why. Minneapolis is at once considered one of the most livable cities in the country, and one with some of the greatest racial disparities in housing, income, and education. There’s a dissonance, locals say, between its progressive rhetoric and the reality of how people of different races experience completely different cities. This local paradox is a microcosm of the statewide ‘Minnesota Paradox’, a term coined by University of Minnesota economist Samuel L. Myers Jr., to highlight the often-ignored inequality that defines the region.”
Holder cites five experts in the fields of local Minneapolis and Minnesota state history and politics to highlight the racial and cultural divide in a jarring history explaining the paradox of the have and have nots.
“This paradox goes to the very founding of the state: the colonization and the displacement of Lakota and Ojibwe,” said Daniel Bergin, documentary filmmaker for Twin Cities PBS.
“Regarding the African American, there were two constitutions: one that made a statement against slavey. Another that didn’t,” said Bergin
Augsburg University professor, William D. Green spoke of the riot that broke out in Minneapolis in 1860 after abolitionists brought a slave woman to court and freed her. “For the next four or five months, neighbors in Minneapolis walked the streets with loaded weapons waiting for their neighbors to provoke them. When the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter and started the Civil War, Minnesota would be the first state to send volunteers into the Union army averting a racial crisis,” he said.
After the war, Green said, “A third attempt resulted in the ratification of the 15th Amendment extending voting rights to Black men, the legislature passed a law threatening to withhold federal funding if schools continued to segregate based on race, and for the first time, Blacks began to serve on juries. After these political breakthroughs were in place, a few public accommodations laws banning discrimination and segregation were passed, but these laws meant nothing to white shopkeepers and owners of restaurants.”
The Holder article said policymakers and the body politic lived in parallel worlds with regard to race relations. It appears to still be the case, although one must admit some progress has been made. The Black population was small, not enough to test the social customs that permitted segregation to continue and discrimination to exist. It is possible for white people to have no contacts at all with Blacks unless they have kids in the schools or at the universities, in the military, or in prison, the article said.
St. Catherine University English literature professor, Taiyon Coleman, talked about the undercurrent of Minnesota niceness, which she referred to as very ‘homogenized’.
“There are Confederate flags everywhere, even if you can’t see them,” Coleman said. “You see that in housing, education, employment, net wealth, and incarceration. The state has the largest racial disparities in the nation. It’s frustrating!”
“I have all the degrees, all the things that U.S.A. society has said I need to have in order to access citizenship, but it’s never enough. That still never protects you. It’s what the paradox is. You’ve achieved all this, and you have these things, but it doesn’t make you safe. Even with my privilege, I still don’t have access to that. I would argue this is how segregation works in Minneapolis or Minnesota. It re-inscribes the racial stereotypes because it keeps peaceful people isolated. Chauvin couldn’t have gotten away with what he did if we didn’t have a culture that perpetuated that type of action and made it possible,” Coleman said.
In 1946, Minneapolis was labeled the ‘anti-Semitism capital of the U.S.’,wrote Kirsten Delegard, co-founder of Mapping Prejudice which tracked racial housing covenants. “The city had a profound reputation for intolerance, and there was a very powerful group that brutally repressed all labor organized labor. A newly elected young mayor, Hubert Humphrey would make a career out of trying to change the racial climate of Minneapolis. He launches a sociological experiment with a group of Black sociologists wanting Minnesotans to do a self-audit of their own feelings and attitudes about race. There was a passing reference to at least 40% of the city’s population had been restricted by racial covenants that restricted land to be sold or occupied by anyone who wasn’t white.”
When some Black people manage to buy a home or move into affordable housing, says Shannon Smith Jones, executive director of Hope Community, a nonprofit affordable housing organization, green spaces look different in North Minneapolis than they do in other parts of the city.
“Even up until recently when they started investing in inner city parks, there were huge disparities in what parks look like on the Northside vs. Southwest Minneapolis. There’s been a value laid in the infrastructures that have allowed for those that succeed and those who don’t to be held along racial lines,” she said.
Bergin said, “Redlining implemented by the Federal Housing Authority during the Depression was and continues to be clearly based on racial profiling. A geography of intolerance was created which made it hard for African Americans to find a place to live, let alone purchase land, and amass wealth.”
“There’s the paradox again,” he said.
Apathy cannot be the mantra for our people nationwide and globally. As often as we might feel our plight is hopeless because our fight has continued for so long and sometimes gets even harder, we cannot throw in the towel.
We must step up our efforts at the voting polls and at the sides of our children as they attempt to find relevance in their academic studies. We must help them along the way with a social, and emotional structure establishing the framework for happiness and success even in a messy world.
I continue to call for a quiet revolution of soul searching and prayer.
