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 Estate.

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.

You know, all up and down this street, there were black families.

Most of them, Mr. Reiser, Mr. Davis, Mr. White, all of us can trace our property back to Mr. Hughes.

And the transaction that Mr. Hughes did.

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 author of the book,

I am nobody 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 moved to the suburbs, shaped us.

The barriers black families faced in real estate weren't just isolated acts of attempted exclusion. They were 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 in Maplewood, looks back and marvels at what she has

lived and thrived through. 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 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.

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