What Happened In Alabama?

Real estate accounts for 18% GDP and each home sale generates two jobs. It’s a top priority for state officials and business leaders across the country to build stable communities. In Minnesota, efforts to address inequity that keeps people locked out of the property market are well-advanced. Lee sits down to interview those directly involved.TranscriptPart 3 – Action and AccountabilityLT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN: An apology is powerful. But in the same way that I think things like land acknowledgements are powerful. If you don't have policies and investments to back them up, then they're simply words.You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 3.My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.I investigated 400 years of my Black family’s history—how enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid in my father’s home state of Alabama, the Great Migration to St. Paul, and our move to the suburbs shaped us.Community and collaboration are at the heart of this story. I’ve shared deeply personal accounts, we’ve explored historical records, and everyone we’ve spoken to has generously offered their memories and perspectives.Jackie Berry is a Board Member at Minneapolis Area Realtors. She’s been working to address the racial wealth gap in real estate. And she says;JACKIE BERRY: We need to do better. We have currently, I think it's around 76% of white families own homes, and it's somewhere around 25-26% for black families.If we're talking about Minnesota, in comparison to other states, we are one of the worst with that housing disparity gap. And so, it's interesting, because while we have, while we make progress and we bring in new programs or implement new policies to help with this gap, we're still not seeing too big of a movement quite yet.Jackie says there’s a pretty clear reason for this.JACKIE BERRY: Racial covenants had a direct correlation with the wealth gap that we have here today. Okay, if you think about a family being excluded from home ownership, that means now they don't have the equity within their home to help make other moves for their family, whether it's putting money towards education or by helping someone else purchase a home or reducing debt in other areas in their life.Racial covenants were not just discriminatory clauses—they were systemic barriers that shaped housing markets and entrenched inequality.LT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN In my community of St Louis Park, there is, you know, there are several racial covenants. You know, our home does not have one, fortunately.Lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan is the highest ranking Native American female politician in the country. I asked her about her experience and how it informs her leadership.LT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN: I can tell you that I never forget that I'm a kid who benefited from a section eight housing voucher, and that my family buying a home made a dent in that number of native homeowners in this state, and I take that really seriously,LEE HAWKINS: You know? And it's powerful, because I relate to you on that. You know, this series is about just that, about the way that the system worked for a group of people of color who were just doing what everyone else wants to do, is to achieve the American Dream for their children. And so I see you getting choked up a little bit about that. I relate to that, and that's what this series is about.Homeownership is more than a marker of personal achievement—it’s a cornerstone of the U.S. economy.Real estate accounts for 18% of GDP, and each home sale generates two jobs. This is why state officials and business leaders continue to prioritize stable and thriving communities.Remember earlier in the series we spoke about some other influential men in the state who were involved in creating the housing disparity gap that we have today.LT GOV PEGGY FLANAGAN: I don’t believe that that Thomas Frankson ever imagined that there would be an Ojibwe woman as lieutenant governor several, several years after he was in this role, and additionally, right? It’s symbolic, but also representation without tangible results, right? Frankly, doesn’t, doesn’t matter. And so, I think acknowledging that history is powerful. I think it has to do with how we heal and move forward. And we can’t get stuck there.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: Thorpe Brothers was very much a part of my childhood and sort of upbringing. But my own father, Frank Thorpe, was not part of the real estate business. He chose to do investments.This is Margaret Thorpe-Richards. Her grandfather is Samuel Thorpe. Head of Thorpe Brothers, the largest real estate firm in Minneapolis, which he helped establish in 1885. I asked her to share her memories.MARGARET THORPE-RICHARDS: My uncle, my dad's brother, Sam Thorpe, the third, also followed in the Thorpe Brothers family business and he ran it until kind of that maybe the early 80s or mid 80s. But anyway, they sold off the residential to another big broker

Racial covenants along with violence, hostility and coercion played an outsized role in keeping non-white families out of sought after suburbs. Lee learns how these practices became national policy after endorsement by the state’s wealthy business owners and powerful politicians.TranscriptPart 2 – Discrimination and the Perpetual FightCold Open:PENNY PETERSEN: He doesn't want to have his name associated with this. I mean, it is a violation of the 14th Amendment. Let's be clear about that. So he does a few here and there throughout Minneapolis, but he doesn't record them. Now, deeds don't become public records until they're recorded and simultaneously, Samuel Thorpe, as in, Thorpe brothers, is president of the National Board of Real EstateFRANCES HUGHES (ACTOR): “Housing for Blacks was extremely limited after the freeway went through and took so many homes. We wanted to sell to Blacks only because they had so few opportunities.”LEE HAWKINS: You know, all up and down this street, there were Black families. Most of them — Mr. Riser, Mr. Davis, Mr. White—all of us could trace our property back to Mr. Hughes at the transaction that Mr. Hughes did.CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: What makes me happy is our family was a big part of opening up places to live in the white community.You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 2.My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.I investigated 400 years of my Black family’s history — how enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid in my father’s home state of Alabama, the Great Migration to St. Paul, and our move to the suburbs shaped us.We now understand how the challenges Black families faced in buying homes between 1930 and 1960 were more than isolated acts of attempted exclusion.My reporting for this series has uncovered evidence of deliberate, systemic obstacles, deeply rooted in a national framework of racial discrimination.It all started with me shining a light on the neighborhood I grew up in – Maplewood.Mrs. Rogers, who still lives there, looks back, and marvels at what she has lived and thrived through.ANN-MARIE ROGERS: My kids went to Catholic school, and every year they would have a festival. I only had the one child at the time. They would have raffle books, and I would say, don’t you dare go from door to door. I family, grandma, auntie, we'll buy all the tickets, so you don't have to and of course, what did he do? And door to door, and I get a call from the principal, Sister Gwendolyn, and or was it sister Geraldine at that time? I think it was sister Gwendolyn. And she said, Mrs. Rogers, your son went to a door, and the gentleman called the school to find out if we indeed had black children going to this school, and she said, don’t worry. I assured him that your son was a member of our school, but that blew me away.In all my years in Maplewood, I had plenty of similar incidents, but digging deeper showed me that the pioneers endured so much more, as Carolyn Hughes-Smith explains.CAROLYN HUGHES-SMITH: The one thing that I really, really remember, and it stays in my head, is cross burning. It was a cross burning. And I don't remember exactly what's it on my grandfather's property? Well, all of that was his property, but if it was on his actual home site.Mrs. Rogers remembers firsthand –ANN-MARIE ROGERS: I knew the individual who burned the cross.Mark Haynes also remembers –MARK HAYNES: phone calls at night, harassment, crosses burnedIn the archives, I uncovered a May 4, 1962, article from the St. Paul Recorder, a Black newspaper, that recounted the cross-burning incident in Maplewood. A white woman, Mrs. Eugene Donavan, saw a white teen running away from a fire set on the lawn of Ira Rawls, a Black neighbor who lived next door to Mrs. Rogers. After the woman’s husband stamped out the fire, she described the Rawls family as “couldn’t be nicer people.” Despite the clear evidence of a targeted act, Maplewood Police Chief Richard Schaller dismissed the incident as nothing more than a "teenager’s prank."Instead of retreating, these families, my own included, turned their foothold in Maplewood into a foundation—one that not only survived the bigotry but became a catalyst for generational progress and wealth-building.JESON JOHNSON: when you see somebody has a beautiful home, they keep their yard nice, they keep their house really clean. You know that just kind of rubs off on you. And there's just something that, as you see that more often, you know it just, it's something that imprints in your mind, and that's what you want to have, you know, for you and for your for your children and for their children.But stability isn’t guaranteed. For many families, losing the pillar of the household—the one who held everything together—meant watching the foundation begin to crack.JESON JOHNSON: if the head of a household leaves, if the grandmother that leaves, that was that kept everybody kind of at bay.

Host Lee Hawkins investigates how a secret nighttime business deal unlocked the gates of a Minnesota suburb for dozens of Black families seeking better housing, schools, and safer neighborhoods. His own family included.TranscriptIntroLEE HAWKINS: This is the house that I grew up in and you know we're standing here on a sidewalk looking over the house but back when I lived here there was no sidewalk, and the house was white everything was white on white. And I mean white, you know, white in the greenest grass.My parents moved my two sisters and me in 1975, when I was just four years old. Maplewood, a suburb of 25,000 people at the time, was more than 90% white.As I rode my bike through the woods and trails. I had questions: How and why did these Black families manage to settle here, surrounded by restrictions designed to keep them out?The answer, began with the couple who lived in the big house behind ours… James and Frances Hughes.You’re listening to Unlocking The Gates, Episode 1.My name is Lee Hawkins. I’m a journalist and the author of the book I AM NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.I investigated 400 years of my Black family’s history — how enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid in my father’s home state of Alabama, the Great Migration to St. Paul, and our later move to the suburbs shaped us.My producer Kelly and I returned to my childhood neighborhood. When we pulled up to my old house—a colonial-style rambler—we met a middle-aged Black woman. She was visiting her mother who lived in the brick home once owned by our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Hutton.LEE HAWKINS: How you doing? It hasn't changed that much. People keep it up pretty well, huh?It feels good to be back because it’s been more than 30 years since my parents sold this house and moved. Living here wasn’t easy. We had to navigate both the opportunities this neighborhood offered and the ways it tried to make us feel we didn’t fully belong.My family moved to Maplewood nearly 30 years after the first Black families arrived. And while we had the N-word and mild incidents for those first families, nearly every step forward was met with resistance. Yet they stayed and thrived. And because of them, so did we.LEE HAWKINS: You know, all up and down this street, there were Black families. Most of them — Mr. Riser, Mr. Davis, Mr. White—all of us can trace our property back to Mr. Hughes at the transaction that Mr. Hughes did.I was friends with all of their kids—or their grandkids. And, at the time, I didn’t realize that we, were leading and living, in real-time, one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the American economy and culture. We are the post-civil rights generation—what I call The Integration Generation.Mark Haynes was like a big brother to me, a friend who was Five or six years older. When he was a teenager, he took some bass guitar lessons from my dad and even ended up later playing bass for Janet Jackson when she was produced by Minnesota’s own Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.Since his family moved to Maplewood several years before mine, I called him to see what he remembered.MARK HAYNES: "It's a pretty tight-knit group of people,"Mark explained how the community came together and socialized, often –MARK HAYNES: "they—every week, I think—they would meet, actually. I was young—maybe five or six.LEE HAWKINS: And what do you remember about it? I asked. What kind of feeling did it give you?MARK HAYNES: It was like family, you know, all of them are like, uh, aunts and uncles to me, cousins. It just felt like they were having a lot of fun. I think there was an investment club too."Herman Lewis was another neighbor, some years older than Mark—an older teenager when I was a kid. But I remember him and his brother, Richard. We all played basketball, and during the off-season, we’d play with my dad and his friends at John Glenn, where I’d eventually attend middle school. Herman talked to me about what it meant to him.HERMAN LEWIS: We had friends of ours and our cousins would come all the way from Saint Paul just to play basketball on a Friday night. It was a way to keep kids off the street, and your dad was very instrumental trying to make sure kids stayed off the street. And on a Friday night, you get in there at five, six o'clock, and you play till 9, 10 o'clock, four hours of basketball. On any kid, all you're going to do is go home, eat whatever was left to eat. And if there's nothing left to eat, you pour yourself a bowl of cereal and you watch TV for about 15 to 25-30, minutes, and you're sleeping there, right in front of the TV, right?LEE HAWKINS: But that was a community within the community,HERMAN LEWIS: Definitely a community within the community. It's so surprising to go from one side of the city to the next, and then all of a sudden there's this abundance of black folks in a predominantly white area.Joe Richburg, another family friend, said he experienced our community within a community as well.LEE HAWKINS: You told me that whe