Rochester’s whites-only racial covenants applied to the living and the dead – InForum

ROCHESTER — Two years ago, a Rochester group began looking at the city’s past as part of a historical reckoning with the use of racial covenants that once banned blacks and other minorities from living in parts of the city.

The search was slow and gradual: Volunteer researchers searched a database of decades-old real estate records and keywords in Olmsted Country to determine the contours of Rochester’s former segregated housing market.

The document search is a kind of “root canal,” said one researcher. It was a time-consuming search of more than a million files and documents, piece by piece and block by block.

But new technologies not only make searches faster and more efficient. Records are also uncovered that challenge assumptions about how these racial covenants were used, that they were exclusively residential in nature, and that they served to separate living whites and blacks.

They were wrong: the covenants extended to dead people in Rochester.

During a recent search, Phil Wheeler came across a document from the 1950s that designated a plot of land in one of the city’s cemeteries, Grandview Memorial Gardens, as a whites-only burial site. The deed for the sale of the cemetery property stipulated that the grave – the burial place – could only be used by white people.

“We never thought to look,” said Wheeler, who leads the NAACP’s Rochester branch’s racial mapping efforts.

Jim Crow isn’t quite buried when it comes to U.S. cemeteries. Just three years ago, a Louisiana cemetery informed the widow of a 55-year-old black man that he could not honor his dying wish to be buried near the site where he served as sheriff because it was a burial site only act for white people. The cemetery later lifted its race-based restrictions.

According to Atlas Obscura, such restrictions on burial sites were effectively banned in a 1948 Supreme Court case, Shelley v. Kraemer. The ruling is best known for clearing the way for black families to move into white neighborhoods by ruling that racially restrictive covenants violate the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. The ruling also removed legal protections for cemetery contracts, but did not completely abolish the practice.

Rochester isn’t the only city in southern Minnesota that has found a rest stop that was once reserved only for whites. A group of Mankato searchers also found one in their city as part of a similar historical calculation.

The discovery that a separate burial site once existed in Rochester was made possible by technology that has both facilitated the search for such alliances and expanded the universe of such searches, including cemeteries.

Optical character recognition software searches huge data sets for keywords. In the current case, documents containing the words “Federal,” “Negro,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “Mongolian,” and “African blood or ancestry” are identified and unearthed much more quickly.

“So instead of going through 100 certificates and finding one, the OCR software achieves an 80 to 85 percent hit rate, which is a much better use of the volunteers’ time,” Wheeler said.

Technology is breathing new life into efforts to map the city’s segregated past. Nevertheless, the search remains extensive. There are 65,000 parcels in Olmsted County. Assuming each parcel generates 20 records due to zoning changes, transactions, and other actions, that’s 1.3 million documents. Wheeler has recruited volunteers from the First Unitarian Universalist Church, where he belongs, and Rotary to help with the work. But he is also looking for more.

Racial covenants were first introduced in Massachusetts in 1843 and in Minneapolis in 1910. It is less clear when they were first used in Rochester, but it is believed to be the 1915 time frame.

In 1926, the Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants were enforceable. After years of litigation by the NAACP, it reversed course and declared it unenforceable. They were made illegal in Minnesota in 1953.

The first half of the 20th century saw a time in Rochester when the city was almost entirely white and the black population was nowhere near the critical mass that whites would have considered threatening.

Post / Rochester Branch NAACP

Addressing this chapter of Rochester’s racist past began in 2021 when the Rochester City Council decided to join Just Deeds, a project that helps homeowners and cities enter into racist agreements and then revoke them through the judicial discharge process.

The harsh, dry language of exclusion contained in such agreements can be jarring to 21st century ears. Homeowners in Rochester are often surprised, if not shocked, that the strongly worded exclusions no longer have the force of law, but do apply to their property title.

Cynthia Daube, former owner of Daube’s Bakery, lives in Pill Hill, an upscale neighborhood in southwest Rochester where such arrangements were commonly used. Last year she had a lawyer at her home and wondered if the language was in her deed. The lawyer suggested taking a look. In fact, the language was there. She wants to dissolve the agreement — essentially adding a statement to the property title that rejects the racist agreement.

“It was very explicit and horrible,” Daube said. “It was bad enough that I should do something about it.”

Before the group began using OCR technology, it had identified 1,024 objects with racial conventions.

Using improved search technology, the group has made discoveries that have upended other long-held assumptions.

For example, Wheeler assumed that most contracts were bundled to cover entire neighborhoods to preserve ownership and resale value. It made economic and financial sense, even if it meant the exclusion and dehumanization of an entire race of people. Instead, volunteers find isolated houses and blocks covered by the agreements where there was no apparent prospect of financial benefit.

“If you’re really not covering an entire neighborhood, but just covering a block or blocks, that’s a different logic,” Wheeler said. “This is not developer logic. It’s an I-hate-blacks logic.”

Maya Giron/Post Bulletin

Her research has uncovered several examples of such logic and biases. Why did Mayo Clinic’s first trustee Harry Harwick’s second home on Lake Shady have a racial covenant when no property on Lake Zumbro had one, even though they closed in a similar time frame?

Once racially linked properties are identified and screened, the records are collected into a master file accessible to the City of Rochester Attorney’s Office. The office is coordinating layoff efforts, Wheeler said.

Once the mapping is complete, notice cards will also be sent to homeowners whose properties have these dormant covenants to alert them to their ability to comply. An addendum attached to the deed states that the property owner is “abandoning the racial covenant.” Once the relief takes effect, the homeowner can post a sign indicating it.

Maya Giron/Post Bulletin

Maya Giron/Post Bulletin

Maya Giron/Post Bulletin

Maya Giron/Post Bulletin