“Expanding the Table” Podcast - Season 1, Episode 3
GCORR’s Award-Winning Podcast on Practicing Anti-Racism
Episode 3: Mapping Prejudice: Racist Land Covenants and How One Church Responded
Emmy Award-Winning Producer and Director Daniel Pierce Bergin ("Jim Crow of the North"), Dr. Kirsten Delegard (Director and Cofounder of the Mapping Prejudice Project), and The Rev. Lisa Friedman (author and Developmental Minister at Universalist Church of Minnetonka) discuss racist US-based land covenants and how one church is taking action to confront this form of institutional racism.
Daniel Pierce Bergin
Dr. Kirsten Delegard
Rev. Lisa Friedman
Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. You can watch the video podcast here.
Season 1, Episode 3 Transcript:
Opening Credits: [00:00:01] Hi everyone, welcome to "Expanding the Table" the podcast on practicing antiracism where we share experiences to inform and inspire you on how to work towards racial justice.
Garlinda Burton: [00:00:18] Welcome to Expanding the Table. I am your host, Garlinda Burton. Today, we are going to talk about the history of U.S. race-based land covenants and their ongoing impact. And we'll hear how growing research is helping to raise awareness about these covenants in Minnesota, particularly, and how one church is taking action to confront this form of institutional racism. I'm happy to welcome our guests today, Dr. Kirsten Delegard, who is director and co-founder of the Mapping Prejudice Project, which is housed in the Portrait Map Library at the University of Minnesota. And Daniel Pierce Bergin, a 15-time regional Emmy Award winning producer and director with the Twin Cities PBS network and a Minnesota State Arts Boards fellow. And Daniel produced and directed the documentary "Jim Crow of the North", which is about the land covenants. And finally, I welcome the Reverend Lisa Friedman, who is an ordained minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church, currently serving as developmental minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Minnetonka, which is in Wayzata, Minnesota. Welcome, everybody.
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:01:44] Thank you for having us.
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:01:46] Great to be here.
Garlinda Burton: [00:01:47] So, Kirsten, I'm going to start with you. What is a land covenant and why are you studying it?
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:01:57] So covenants were clauses that were inserted into property deeds. And the purpose of these clauses was to prevent anyone who is not white from ever owning, but even ever occupying the piece of land that they were attached to. So, we're studying them here in Minnesota, or we started studying them in Minneapolis and have expanded our field of inquiry to the Twin City metro area, which includes Saint Paul and the surrounding suburbs. But there were used in every community across the country and were in fact encouraged by the Federal Government starting in the 1930s. So, this is we'll be talking about the research that we've been doing in Minnesota. But this in many ways is a story that could be told about any community across the country.
Garlinda Burton: [00:02:53] And how did the land covenants work, Kirsten?
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:02:58] Well, they work differently in different places. But what we found here in the Twin Cities is that they were mostly inserted into the property record by developers right at the moment where new neighborhoods came online, starting here in the Twin Cities. They started in 1910. That's the earliest covenant that we found. And they were they were employed to remake the racial geography of urban neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. So, in 1910, Minneapolis was pretty racially integrated, actually. And developers began using racial covenants because that very integration was seen as a problem. It was seen as a as a something an urban ill that needed to be fixed. And covenants were just one of the tools that developers use to try to create neighborhoods that were racially segregated, racially homogeneous, and also to preserve what was seen as the most desirable land and parts of the city for people who are white.
Garlinda Burton: [00:04:12] I see. And so, what is your project focused on right now? So, you have this Mapping Prejudice Project. And so, what is the focus? What is the purpose?
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:04:23] What's the purpose? So, I always try to explain to people that mapping prejudice started as this wild experiment. We had no idea what we were doing in the sense of I'm trained as a public historian. Originally, I I've always understood the power of visuals and the power of maps. But what I was really interested in doing when we when we started this work was using these really deeply disturbing primary source documents from history to get people in my hometown of Minneapolis to understand that the yawning racial disparities that we have right now, which are some of the largest in the country, were created deliberately through to through deliberate policies. So, the purpose of the project was to get people to see the racism behind the racial disparities, to understand that. And so, it wasn't just the creation of a data set or maps, which is something that people find very compelling about our work. But we invited ordinary people with no background in historical research to help us do this work, to help us read these documents and transcribe the information that could be found from them. So, it's not only where these racial restrictions were put in place when they were put in place, who put them in place, but also what they said. And it's the reading of those documents and the process, that process of engagement, which has been just as important as the data set that has emerged in the maps that have emerged. So, the purpose of the project was really to start a conversation to raise awareness that would that our hope was that it would lead to real action. And by reframing how we got to the place that we are today, we were hoping to reframe action going forward.
Garlinda Burton: [00:06:31] And so, Daniel, you picked up on this and created a documentary, Jim Crow of the North. And what did you find? What did you find as you were doing this documentary?
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:06:44] Yeah, well, this is really powerful research. And Kirsten and I are friends and neighbors and previous collaborators, and both of us see in our different modes of work, but also how we work together the importance and impact of history. Dr. King said. We are not makers of history, but we are made by history. And in our case, Minnesota and Minneapolis and the Twin Cities were made by a history that we didn't fully understand. A lot of my history, in fact, is about celebrating the history of Minnesota, the kind of the progressive history of civil rights and achievements of an abolitionist origin story that Minnesota is proud of. But that's only part of the story. And so, Kirsten and I and so many others have kind of grown up and were educated with this sense of Minnesota as this kind of progressive state city on a hill. But there's more to it. And so, seeing the power of the history and as it was emerging in Kirsten's team's research, I saw a potential to kind of relate that through a documentary film. And so, we started quickly following along with the research and also kind of witnessing the experience that Kirsten described of contemporary Minnesotans kind of being a part of that research.
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:08:05] And the power and revelation of them reading and seeing this racist language embedded in countless homes so quickly saw that there could be a powerful and important film that would be a challenging film for our audiences, who are used to a lot of kind of boisterous PBS content. But, you know, my boss is certainly in leadership at Twin Cities. PBS saw the need for this kind of history. And again, this was a few years ago before George Floyd's murder, before some of the reconciliation that we've seen in the last year. And we're excited that the film and the research have helped accelerate some of that movement work. So, it was clearly something we wanted to explore. It's a complicated history and so it's a challenge as a film. But because the clarity with which Kirsten and her team was bringing it forward, this idea then of not de facto or informal segregation, as many of us had kind of learned about Minnesota's racism, but in fact, a kind of Jim Crow of the North formal deeply embedded. And powerful, entrenched, highly impactful segregation in our hometown.
Garlinda Burton: [00:09:21] I see. And I was I watched the I watched the documentary like three times. It was so fascinating to me. And I wanted to every time I watched it, I learned a little bit more. I think one of the things that that was fascinating to me is that these land covenants, as I understand them, were actually embedded in the process of building homes and selling homes and who could buy and build in certain neighborhoods. And not only who could buy and build, but if one wanted to sell one's house, there were restrictions on who you could sell your property to. And I have actually an audio clip that describes how the covenants were put together and what it stipulated about the race of people who could be there. So, let's take a listen.
Audio Excerpt: [00:10:13] The wording can be very different there, working on early 20th century ideas of race Chinese, Japanese, Negro, Moorish, Turkish, Mongolian, Hebrew, sometimes Semitic people of African blood or descent. No Negroes or Jews, only Caucasians except for their domestic servants of a different race who might be domiciled with the owner.
Garlinda Burton: [00:10:37] Okay and that I think that just very telling that it was very specific as to who could and could not buy homes as Kirsten said in particular communities. And those communities eventually went on to become the stabilizing, affluent, middle- and upper-income communities in in in the Minnesota. Is that right, Kirsten?
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:11:03] Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that shouldn't have been it shouldn't have been surprising, but it was surprising to see the correlation so many years after the Fair Housing Act. I mean, so we're talking about more than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act that the areas that were blanketed with covenants are still the widest by far areas of the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County. And that's something that's more challenging for some audiences, I think, to white audiences to really come to really grapple with in in the sense that they're they are pretty comfortable saying, okay, so these terrible things happen in the past. But we passed all these laws, right? And we had all these court cases and that's all in the past, right? So, we don't have to worry about this anymore. We can just condemn it sort of from this distance. But some of the some of the ancillary research that that we've been able to do, because we have this data set, we've been able to show that these neighborhoods that once these patterns were put into place, they have remained pretty much untouched. And then the neighborhoods or the houses that once had covenants on them, they are now today, again, 50 years after the Fair Housing Act, were worth 15% more than identical houses that never had covenants. So this these lingering effects and for me as a historian, where I was trained and now I realize, you know, a very narrow band of subjects, one of the amazing things about the map has been the ability to collaborate with researchers across so many different fields, economists and urban agronomists and environmental scientists who have all used this data to show how the covenants have shaped every sort of factor of well-being in the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County and then in the other geographies where we're doing this mapping work.
Garlinda Burton: [00:13:11] And so, Lisa, as Kirsten and Daniel pointed out, there are people who are sitting around today who are saying, well, that was in the past, we don't have that anymore and it has no impact on us anymore. But what you found in your church and some work that your church was doing, that you found that there was an ongoing impact, what was what was the story with your church?
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:13:38] So, you know, we had for many years been looking for new property to build a new congregation, a new building, and that the values that were going into that were that we wanted a more accessible, welcoming, inclusive space for our congregation. And so, we purchased property in the holy rich neighborhood of Wayzata, and it was in the process of purchasing that property and planning to build a new church building that we discovered the covenant on the property deed that we were buying. And it. Right up against the values of what we were trying to do in purchasing the property. But this was at a time when there was really not an option of what to do to remove it from the deed. And so, we learned that with this racialized covenant on our property that the land could only be owned or occupied by a member of the Caucasian race. And so, it went right up against the values of what we were trying to do in building a new church home. And we learned that it was true of the whole Holdridge neighborhood all around us, right on the border of Wayzata and Minnetonka. As Kirsten mentioned, so much of these covenants were right at the borders of communities, but at the time there was not anything we could legally do about it. We sat with the discomfort that it was on the property. We knew we couldn't do anything about it, and we knew that it was no longer legally enforceable. But the symbol, the symbol of having it on the property did not sit well with us. It didn't sit with our values of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, of seeing everyone as a child of God.
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:15:24] And it didn't sit well with our call to the work of justice and equity of trying to build collective liberation. We knew that housing is fundamentally connected to educational equity and other things. And so, it wasn't until actually we partnered with Mapping Prejudice and Kirsten came and offered a session at our congregation that we realized that the laws had changed and after 2019, it was actually possible to remove the covenant and through the work of just deeds in the nearby Golden Valley community, and that they were offering free legal help on how to do this. So, we reached out to them immediately and started the process and got the covenant removed. And then we wanted to share that story out. And so, we partnered with the Wayzata Community Center to offer an educational moment to the whole community about this issue. And we actually hand-delivered letters to all of our neighbors and the whole community to let them know that these covenants were on their properties as well, and that it was possible to do something about not only for the importance of removing them, but also for that educational piece of how that's interconnected to the inequities that we have today. So, I would say that it's not only helped us understand the impact that these covenants had and the role that we have in addressing them and continuing that work of liberation. But it also has built relationships in the larger community, and so that now the city of Wayzata, Minnetonka, Plymouth are looking at the work that just needs is doing in Golden Valley and saying, how could we bring that here? How could we continue that conversation among our community here in the affluent western suburbs of the Twin Cities?
Garlinda Burton: [00:17:30] And so what kind of feedback are you getting from your neighbors or is it generally, yeah, we need to do this. No, we don't. What do you see as the ongoing impact of this education and witness that your church has made?
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:17:48] People are showing up to the conversations. There were over 80 Zoom households in the room for the conversation at the Wayzata Community Education Program and in many of them I recognized as neighbors in the Holdridge neighborhood. It's also people are sharing it out. They're recommending the documentary. They're telling the story. And so, we've gotten good response. I think people I think people sat with the discomfort and didn't know what to do about it. I expected that we might get some push-back or some calls of concern or questioning. But we have. We haven't. So far, it's been people said, I didn't know this, it didn't know this, and I didn't know that. I if I did know it, I didn't know I could do something about it. And that that opportunity and call to action has felt important to people in this year after George Floyd's murder. In this year, when we are showing up to conversations that we really haven't engaged as fully as we've needed to.
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:19:02] Can I ask a question? I know. But this is such a wonderful opportunity for me to learn more about this process. And I. I would love to hear from you, Lisa, what you have observed about the legacies of covenants, you know, so that we talk a lot about the language. Right. And you were talking about how your congregation read this language and understood it immediately to be a contradiction to your core values. But what do you see? I mean, beyond the language, I'm just curious about what your congregants and your neighbors have seen as the legacies, the way the covenants continue to manifest themselves in in in the neighborhood and what ways that they are talking about addressing that.
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:19:51] So we've been very active in looking at issues around educational equity in the Minnetonka School District, for instance, and looking at the dynamics of the covenant and community and access into the community has been a piece of it's been housing is connected to everything. And though the ways in which it shapes communities, the cultures of communities whose welcome in the communities who’s not welcome, the dynamics around policing, who gets pulled over, who gets questioned on whether or not they belong, is they're pulling into the church parking lot to, you know, or stopping. So, I think that that question of radical welcome, radical hospitality, how do you cultivate that in a community? And I mean, if you have these covenants on your property, how are you cultivating radical hospitality? How are you cultivating relationships and conversations across so many different dimensions of difference in our society right now we have lost, I think that we are increasingly losing the ability to have difficult and complex conversations on things. And for us, this was an opportunity to reach out to our neighbors and say we welcome we welcome a chance to connect with you, to talk with you, to explore with you. We're new at this, too. We didn't know we are learning as we go along. And we welcome you to learn with us.
Garlinda Burton: [00:21:35] The whole idea of having conversations and looking at what the impact continues to be, I think is a challenge for many people. I know that it is a challenge for many church people. As Lisa said, we talk about hospitality and welcome and being a place for all people. But these are the kinds of things that I think it's important for us to talk about and to be aware of in order to have a real-world impact on our communities. And Daniel, one of the things that struck me, there were many things, but in the Jim Crow of the North was that the racial covenants mentioned different kinds of people, depending on how they're constructed. So, it may have Chinese, Turkish, Jewish people mentioned as people not desirable to be in the neighborhood. At the same time, those categories might vary across covenants. But one consistent piece was that 100% of the covenants restricted the sale or transfer of property to African Americans. And I know that you focused on that in the film. So, I'm interested in what you learned about the specific impact on the black community, as Lisa mentioned, on education, on policing, on property rights. What were some of the things that you learned?
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:23:08] Yeah, and I appreciate you kind of pointing out that there were other cultural, ethnic and racial groups that were affected by covenants. And we did focus on the African American experience. So, I think that is an important thing to point out, that in person, I get asked a lot in discussions about some of the other groups listed and then indigenous people who aren't interestingly listed because they were effectively exiled from the Twin Cities area historically because of the Dakota conflict in the 1860s. But I appreciate your question. I mean, you see the impact and I grew up around it in South Central Minneapolis, but we just didn't have that context and understanding. And so, knowing that and then as we start to as a society, develop a bit of red line literacy, we start to have this term that's useful and helps unpack and explain. Some of what we're seeing. But one of the breakthroughs of this research that we wanted to relate in the film was that the red lines have their own origin story and that they're rooted in the restrictive covenants. And that's part of what I think has been so transcendent about this research. And the knowing is the red lines. We kind of had a sense of we didn't fully know who was responsible.
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:24:24] I think a lot of us assume it's a private sector malaise and that, you know, the banks and the insurance companies and they're, of course, a part of it. But that learning that it was in fact, the, you know, the federal government, but that they were basing it on the landscape that covenants had laid out, was really a breakthrough. So to your question, you know, seeing, you know, some of the poverty and the then red-lined parts of my south Minneapolis that were historically black and brown and immigrant communities and seeing how, you know, complicated by a war on drugs in the eighties these became some of the neighborhoods that were devastated by, you know, then gang violence and prostituted women and human trafficking and, of course, the crack epidemic. But that all of that, again, has this connection because as we've been discussing, the power of home and neighborhood. And so, you do have to kind of keep going back to how this initial landscape of in this case, our city of Minneapolis was laid out. And so, you know, from all of those health implications, education, you know, the idea that the first schools, notably integrated in south Minneapolis in the early seventies after years of lawsuits and litigation and then ultimately community led work were there, segregation was rooted in the covenants.
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:25:46] And so, you know, I think even some of the parents and mostly moms who were doing that activist work probably weren't even aware, again, of that. They knew the color lines for sure. They knew where neighbors, black folks could be and couldn't be. They knew which school was kind of for whom. But that that all has roots in the covenants. Again, it's clarifying and helps us kind of work to repair that. But so, and now here we are seeing a retrenchment of some of that same segregation in our schools. And I appreciate you asking about schools, seeing, you know, because we talk a lot about disparities. But to be clear, the heartbreaking disparities of educational success or the lack thereof are so prominent in Minnesota in terms of how poorly, you know, African American students are doing, and indigenous students are doing compared to white students, that that really is an important disparity. And it's linked to housing, to be sure. But just thinking about those young people. So yeah, it's you we're seeing it today and confronting it and trying to deal with it. But it's important for us to know how we got to now.
Garlinda Burton: [00:26:54] We know that there is a real world right now impact on home ownership. And we know that home ownership stabilizes communities. It just as people put down roots and own homes, stabilize a community. And so, I think we have another clip about the impact of these covenants on home ownership. And so, we're going to listen to that right now.
Audio Excerpt: [00:27:20] 75% of white families in Minneapolis own the homes that they occupy. About 25% of black families in Minneapolis own the homes that they occupy. It's actually the largest in terms of percentage gap in the country. And this has huge implications for the racial wealth gap.
Garlinda Burton: [00:27:39] We look at where our high-income communities live right now. There has been an investment home ownership for certain communities versus others where if black folks were able to have participated in that during the rise and proliferation of racial covenants, you might see a different notion of black wealth. We have to first acknowledge that history and understand how we're implicated in it. So then get to reparative solution. Yeah. So, as you said, Daniel, a real world right now impact. Lisa, you were trying to get in there.
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:28:08] Well, you know, I wanted to just say, as Daniel was talking one, one of the things that really that we really held in holding the discomfort that these covenants existed on our property and in our neighborhood is how deliberate and how deliberate this all was. This was not an accident. This was not a plan of even one moment or one realtor.
Garlinda Burton: [00:28:35] It wasn't that people just didn't know any better.
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:28:37] Right. Right. I mean, this is a systemic, sustained plan over years, over decades. And so, from the standpoint of understanding that the racism, our society certainly has many personal dimensions. But the systemic power, the systemic intent and deliberateness of it has to be wrestled with. I mean, it's very uncomfortable to hold and look at and say, how am I participating in the system as an as an individual, as a community, as a congregation? But we have to be able to see the systemic nature of it to really try to dismantle it. And so, I think that that is one of the things I've just I have gone back to that map, that visuals of what just watching the map change in front of me, both around the congregation or where I live in northeast Minneapolis. And you cannot look at that that image. You cannot look at that map and not see the systemic, deliberate intent behind it. And so, I just wanted to name that that's been a piece of our education and is really kind of understanding that this was no this was no accident. This was no just one. One realtor with racist intentions. This was a whole system that's spread out throughout the region.
Garlinda Burton: [00:30:02] Kirsten. What? What? When Lisa's describing the map, what is she seeing? What is she? When you map it out, what do people see if they come to your website or look at the map? What is the visual?
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:30:16] Mm hmm. So, what the what the map shows is. Well, now we have a couple of different we have two different maps on the on the website. And there we just have put Hennepin County up, which is our first site. Soon it will be joined by Ramsey County. And then the whole seven county metro is our goal. And then some other geographies that we've been working in. But so, what you see when you go to our website is you see a time lapse. We call it the contagion map of the spread of racial covenants over time in Hennepin County, starting with the very first one in 1910 and ending in the 1950s. And it shows this this expanding blue blob, as you see a couple of dots. And then and then suddenly huge, huge swaths of the county land is covered with these restrictions, which I always emphasize to people. This is this was land that was for the exclusive use of white people. Not only could you not own that land, not only could that land never be transferred to someone who is not white in perpetuity, but that you couldn't even occupy that land if you're not white. And so, and as Daniel said, people have I mean, one of the fascinating things to me about this is that people have operated in this landscape and they know where these racial boundaries are, even if they don't know if even if they've never heard of a racial covenant.
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:31:53] And so I feel like what our map is in some ways is it's like the secret decoder ring, right? That shows the original, you know, it shows the original intent. Like we know there are these we know there's a pattern here. But what's the what's the what's the code? What's you know, so it was very telling to me very early on. One of the first places we showed the map was to a group of folks who work at City Hall in Minneapolis. And one of the data people there said she just looked at this and she sighed, and she said, Yeah, it's all the same map, but our map is the original. You know, our map shows where the streets were maintained, where the parks were built, where the trees were planted, where the where the freeways would run, where you know, where are the metal recycling? Very polluting metal. Metal recycling facilities would be located. You can see everything follows from these racial the secret racial patterns.
Garlinda Burton: [00:32:58] So it's almost been like an unspoken language, a secret language, a way of being that people knew the boundaries without really without really having to say it, that there were the boundaries drawn. And then there were sometimes when the covenants weren't just a passive kind of way of being. But there were times that Daniel cited in the documentary where there were actual confrontations when people tried over the years to flout or confront the land covenants. Daniel There were a couple of examples in the documentary that I thought were fascinating. Can you talk about those? What happened when a person decided to challenge or flout the covenant?
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:33:56] Yeah, well, in quickly, if folks haven't seen the documentary, it begins before the covenants. And as Kirsten and her team kind of surfaced, it's a likely origin of why these covenants which existed elsewhere were brought here because of an African American family and then a second who were trying to move into a nice neighborhood called Prospect Park in Minneapolis, sort of adjacent to the University of Minnesota. And so that was that origin story of this weaponizing contracts and clauses in land development to keep blacks from moving in so that you didn't have to form the mob, which they did. But then following that, there were, you know, any number of sometimes noted in the news and then other times maybe just passed down through oral history incidents where African Americans and others cross these color lines. And as is mentioned in the film by Kirsten, even if there isn't a covenant, but it's covenant adjacent, the barriers are installed in society. And so, the case of the Lee family in the early thirties moving into a neighborhood in south Minneapolis. That wasn't covenanted but was getting close and close enough so that the white neighborhood kind of marshaled a lynch mob and for several nights kind of laid siege to this family's home. And I mean that lynch mob, they weren't lynched, but that was called out by the crowd. That was there was violence in the crowd towards white allies, certainly threatening the black family. You know, there dog any police who were trying to patrol the area. And so that was one of the more dramatic instances of color lines being patrolled by in this case, white residents.
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:35:39] But knowing that the systems, the police, the National Guard, in their absence in this case, were also supporting and ultimately, you know, defending those same color lines, if not for the kind of the courage of families like the Lees and some of their allies in this case, Arthur Lee was a World War One veteran, and some of his colleagues from the Post Office and other veterans stood guard. And I imagine they must have been a mixed-race group. But there were other African Americans who he worked with who helped, and of course, he was involved with the NAACP. So, a lot of this was intentional of testing some of these lines and really be creating an outpost for desegregating housing. But so those incidents occur and only the ones we have captured in the news and so they often are dramatic, are kind of carried through history. But you have to imagine there were more. In fact, we know there were more. Michelle Norris, kind of famously in her book, talks about her family's pioneering further south in Minneapolis, deeper into the green. And I think, Kirsten, those are in kind of solidly or predominantly covenanted areas near the Minnehaha Creek, a kind of lovely part of South Minneapolis, where then Michele Norris talks about her family's experiences a few decades later of dealing with the pressure of being the black family who had crossed the line.
Garlinda Burton: [00:36:58] Yeah, the that whole idea of actively confronting families of color for just trying to buy into a nice neighborhood and raise their families. A lot of times again today, it's very easy for people to say, oh, that was then. But you know, as you're talking about the 1950s, I was born in the 1950s. So, you know, I'm old, but I'm not that old and that it's been in my lifetime. And I'm also from the Deep South. So, some of these things were also they were also encoded and embedded for even longer. We recently very recently in our United Methodist Church and I mean the denomination, I mean, we ended racial segregation in the church in 1968, legalized segregation. And some of our adjudicators did not end racial segregation in in their legal life until 1976. So, this is not very long. And so, I'm always mindful of that. And with that in mind, Kirsten, I wanted to ask so if a person or a group or a congregation wants to know if their land, if the land they own or the businesses that they frequent or, you know, the folks that they work with, if they want to know that that about a possible land covenant in their area, what should they do besides call you and ask you to do it? Because I know you all are just kind of inundated. But how could a how could just an organization and an everyday person find out if they're living in a place that is covered by a land covenant, even if it's no longer enforceable?
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:38:46] Well, if they're lucky enough to live in Hennepin County, Ramsey County, parts of Seattle, Washington, D.C., there's an Essex County, north of Boston. These are all communities that we partnered with to continue this mapping work. So, and our goal as a project is to empower as many communities as possible to do the same kind of documentation of structural racism with the belief that this knowledge is a is a will activate people not only to be aware of this history, but also to figure out how to dismantle the harms or how to address the harms from it. So, so, so that's so that's one way, one route. But if you live in, in another in another community, I would say you need to befriend your local county recorders, the people in your local recorder's office who can help you navigate the property records for your community. It's an incredibly technical and difficult bit of historical research. But. But it can be done. You have to check. Every time your property has changed hands to make sure that to figure out whether or not a covenant was inserted at any one of those moments of transaction. So, that's why that's why our map is the first of its kind in the country. That kind of comprehensive research is just very hard to do. And we've done it only through leveraging some new digital technology and computers. But I but I think I think some of the power is actually in in the research or some of the meaning is in the research. So, I would encourage people to not be discouraged from, you know, my description of what's involved and say that it's really important to know and it's really important to take the time to, to, to find your own secret decoder ring for your community. And then and then work with other people to figure out what you do with that code once you once you have it.
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:41:05] Yeah. And if I could just offer that, you know, what's the breakthrough that Kirsten and her team have offered? Is this community wide countywide assessment, which would have been untenable just years ago before some of these digital tools. But what Lisa has shown us and what we've Kirsten and I and others have heard is because of the awareness, the film and the movement, the mapping prejudice movement, people can pull out their deeds. You know, I'm not very good with my house's paperwork, but certainly for a congregation that has some administrative organization and good record keeping, it's there. And so, to do it en masse, you know, really does help and accelerates it when it's this digitized record. But we've heard from individuals who say, I saw your film, I checked my deed, we have a racist covenant. And so, you know, individuals can certainly kind of do that exploration themselves. And certainly, institutions and organizations like faith organizations will have those records as well. And then, as Kirsten said, what's cool is building those alliances. And what we're seeing with just deeds is when municipalities and counties and government say we're accountable for some of this history where we have access to some of the records. And now we're going to take the kind of courageous leadership step and kind of reach out and make change. We're going to work with our NAACP or Urban League or, you know, Jewish organizations and others. We're going to work with activist scholars like that Mapping Prejudice team in Minnesota to make real change and work towards reparations. And so we're seeing that with this amazing group and their work, just deeds, as Lisa described, which is kind of interestingly spreading and starting in the suburbs, not in, you know, Minneapolis, you know, but really and maybe it's because these are kind of smaller, maybe a little bit more nimble government entities who have come to the realization that they are part of the history and the problem and they can be a part of the solution.
Dr. Kirsten Delegard: [00:43:04] Oh, I love people at just deeds. And, you know, and I have to reveal that I am part of the founding group of Justine's, but I am mostly supportive. They're the ones driving. So, it's a group of people in city government planners, lawyers, people in the real estate industry who see the contemporary legacies of these racial covenants and the structural racism and see this as this. This is an opportunity, this knowledge and this moment of when people come to them and ask for help discharging these covenants as a moment to then fold those people into this movement, which is just been really exciting. But as you're talking, I am I'm envisioning a project of faith organizations. What would happen if to Daniel's point, like you all have great records for your congregations, what would happen if every church in your denomination went and looked at your deeds and saw whether or not you had a racial covenant? And we put that on a map and use that sort of visualization to bind together this this history. You know, I, I would just be curious to know, like, how many how many churches have this kind of skeleton in their closet and then and how would that change your interaction, I guess, with the with the community in the way that Lisa is describing?
Garlinda Burton: [00:44:37] Well, it's really interesting, because in the United States, our denomination, I think is 90 to 92% white. And that's almost 7 million people. And so, you've got a large white majority. And also, most of our churches are racially divided. So, you have you don't have many, very many interracial intercultural churches. Many of them are monocultural. And a lot of that has to do with the historic segregation in our society. And I'm thinking that the racialized covenants would have would feed into that, because a lot of the churches are located in monocultural neighborhoods. You know, the historically black churches many times are located in historically black neighborhoods. The majority white churches would be located in white neighborhoods, Latino churches, in Latino neighborhoods, etc. And so, it would be interesting to find out about the covenants that created a community and a church and a fellowship of faith group that operates in a minor racial way. Because like, like many groups, we have a lot of folks who are in denial about the impact of racism and the ongoing legacy it was. That was then. This is now. We're all one. But in fact, our function and our way of being as a as a faith community is still very racially segregated, particularly in in in local settings.
Garlinda Burton: [00:46:21] And so I think the whole idea of checking to see if there have been racial covenants are or are that helped to set up this dynamic of racial isolation and segregation might help congregations. And we have colleges related to us as well to find out at whose cost were these lines drawn? Because many times, not always, but in most cases, the white churches tend to be more affluent, and the land is worth more. They have more, you know. And so, it would be I think it would be important for folks who are really interested in in understanding and rooting out systemic racism to look back at our history, to see what the ongoing impact is. Lisa, I'm thinking that you in your starting with your church, there was a desire to get this get this blot off of your church's record. But it sounds like it grew into more than just a symbolic removal. And so, I would ask you to talk about or just to say to my listeners, many of whom are with churches, what are the real world impacts that you have seen from the time you all started to challenge the covenant and to try to get it removed?
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:47:49] Thank you for that question. I think that people really took it to heart in terms of their own personal journey and with trying to become more antiracist and trying to understand their own position and in systems of privilege. And I think that in many, you know, I wanted to lift up as Kirsten was talking, the power does, both with justice and mapping prejudice, the power of kind of this grassroots movement. So, people not only came to the Mapping Prejudice program and understood what might be possible for us to do as a congregation. They not only went home and checked the covenant, you know, their own property deeds, but then they showed up to volunteer with the work that mapping prejudice was doing in Ramsey County to help build it out. Because I think it took, in addition to the professionals working on it, it took countless hours of just ordinary citizens showing up and saying, I want to help, I want to help understand this. I want to help build out that map and make that real. So, I want to lift that up for the work of congregations wherever they are is there are other communities that want to kind of look more closely at their own local history, that it takes grassroots power to do that. And that is the power of community.
Rev. Lisa Friedman: [00:49:11] That's the power of faith community. You know, this also this opportunity came about in this year of George Floyd's murder, Daunte Wright's. And in this year, as our congregation was also engaging in the process of putting up a Black Lives Matter banner and of holding a congregational process decision point and ultimately putting that up. Our new home is literally right. Along one of the major highways and thoroughfares of the western suburbs. So in putting up a Black Lives Matter banner, it is not only seen by the neighborhood, but it's seen by every car that drives by on that thruway. And when we went through that process, we talked about how important it was for that not to just be a symbolic statement, but how it needed to be needed to be embodied in our lives and a call of the work that we were continuing to engage into. And so I think that this work that we did around the racialized covenant and the reaching out to our community was part of just this larger moment that we've been in as a whole Twin Cities community about saying enough is enough. We have to be part of the change. And that change is within us. It's among us. It's also beyond us.
Daniel Pierce Bergin: [00:50:33] You know, Lisa, I just want to kind of affirm that and for this audience, especially that, that's also a part of the history. And it should be noted that, you know, we know the role of the church of many faiths in the movement, you know, from abolitionists and its origins in faith to the civil rights movement proper and the black church being the center. But even in the Twin Cities in the early sixties, you know, there was a group called the Greater Minneapolis Interfaith Fair Housing Program, and this group was working actively to work towards these goals then not in response, you know, decades later, to try and work towards fair housing, to break color lines. They had kind of a cool old school social media campaign where there was an ad in the newspaper where you could tear off a coupon and sign the petition and join this pledge, so to speak, because we know churches and faith communities are also, as I say, that, responsible for upholding, enslaving people and all of the kind of systemic caste and race problems that we have. But like Lisa's congregation today in so many others, it's important to note that in this history and Kirsten and I kind of point this out a lot, there was always resistance, certainly in the black church, but also in this really interesting interfaith, largely white movement that was working towards and helped support what became one of the nation's first state fair housing laws in in the early sixties here in Minnesota.
Garlinda Burton: [00:52:03] I think it's important you all have pointed out, again, how important it is for people of faith and people who, you know, who claim to, as we do, hold a strong moral foundation and, you know, follow a moral compass. That part of our calling is to make the world better than the one we found and to be the change, as the saying goes. And so I think this this is one way the Mapping Prejudice project. And I think finding out what your history is and working to correct the ills of that history is one important way that we can be the change in our society. And I have hope that we will do that. I want to thank all of you all for being with me today. This has been robust, and I want to thank our listeners for being with us on Expanding the Table, the podcast from the General Commission on Religion and Race. Our topic today has been mapping prejudice, racist land covenants and how churches can respond. I want to thank our guests especially so thanks to our award winning Twin Cities public television executive producer Daniel Bergin. Thanks to Mapping Prejudice project director Dr. Kirsten Delgado of the University of Minnesota, and especially thanks to the Reverend Lisa Friedman of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Minnetonka, which is located in Wayzata, Minnesota. To learn more about land covenants, please watch Daniel Bergen's wonderful documentary, Jim Crow of the North, which is available on YouTube, or check out the project website mappingprejudice.umn.edu. We love hearing from our listeners, so tell us how we're doing and give us your ideas for upcoming topics by emailing us at podcast@GCORR.org. Again, podcast@GCORR.org. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe and share our information with others and follow us on social media. Please rate and review this and all of our podcasts because every five star review from you sends a message that podcasts like ours are valuable and appreciated. Until next time I am Garlinda Burton reminding us that God is calling us for such a time as this.