"Playground of the People"? Mapping Racial Covenants in Twentieth-century Minneapolis

In the summer of 2014, veteran property researcher Penny Petersen led a group of Augsburg College undergraduates on a history quest at the Hennepin County Government Center. Under Petersen’s tutelage, the student interns for the Historyapolis Project searched at the Registrar and Recorder’s Office for critical lines of text that could illuminate the hidden history of race in Minneapolis during the twentieth century. They were looking for racially restrictive deeds—or racial covenants—which barred people who were not white from owning property. These kinds of deeds were the most powerful instrument of segregation in the urban north during the twentieth century.