Publication Title
Crossings
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2017
Abstract
A few neighborhoods in Stearns County, Minnesota restricted their residents to European Americans by restrictive covenant. Some deeds for real estate in the county stipulated that any resident of the neighborhood could sell or rent only to European Americans. Other deeds listed the ethnic groups that the covenants prohibited from residency. The first of these covenants appeared in the 1910s, and the most recent of them appeared in the 1980s. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made the covenants illegal, but realtors included them in deeds almost out of tradition into the 1980s. Stearns County's population was in the tens of thousands, and the African American population of St. Cloud was in the single digits from the 1920s to the 1950s. Nevertheless, the developers of the covenants devised them as a means to keep that demographic low.
Recommended Citation
Lehman, Christopher P., "Jim Crow in Central Minnesota: Restrictive Covenants in Stearns County" (2017). Ethnic and Women's Studies Faculty Publications. 7.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/ews_facpubs/7
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
This article was published in Crossings, a magazine produced by the Stearns History Museum in St. Cloud, Minnesota.