MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) – As a PhD candidate on the Humphrey College on the College of Minnesota, Rebecca Walker knew the analysis into the racial covenants that had restricted some neighborhoods within the Twin Cities.

The U’s personal Mapping Prejudice Challenge had already proven a stark progress of racial covenants, which restricted some neighborhoods to whites-only, through the first half of the twentieth century.

“And simply from a extremely fast overlay, should you have a look at the parks that opened through the time when covenants have been used,” she advised FOX 9’s Rob Olson, “you possibly can see that there’s this actually shut spatial match.”

Her analysis, lately printed within the Annals of the American Affiliation of Geographers, started in 2020. It took a deep dive into Minneapolis property data and Park Board archives to disclose a connection.  

“From there we simply began seeing these transactions between the builders of the racially covenanted neighborhoods and the Park Board, many times and once more,” she mentioned.

She discovered 73% of the parks constructed between 1910 and 1955 have been inside one block of not less than certainly one of these restricted neighborhoods.

And the discrimination was removed from hidden.

“You may see in newspaper ads from the time, they would come with the language of the racial covenant within the commercial, so it was very clear that they have been advertising and marketing these properties solely to white individuals,” mentioned Walker.

“And in the identical ads, we see them together with maps of the proximity to new parks…and they also have been actually deliberately pairing this concept of “green-ness” and this concept of “whiteness” as a part of their advertising and marketing technique.”

For the builders, getting new parks close to their new neighborhoods actually helped promote houses.  And for the Minneapolis Park Board, they have been actually keen so as to add to the park system as the town grew.

Builders would typically contribute land or cash to assist construct these parks.  The Park Board was completely happy to take it.

Regardless of the motivations of the time, the top consequence, says Walker, was an enormous disparity of who had easy accessibility to parks.

“The underside line was that the end result of this was extremely racially unequal.”

The Minneapolis Park and Rec Board isn’t blind to this historical past.  In 2016, they have been the primary parks company within the nation to undertake ordinances to deal with racial and financial fairness.  There’s ongoing work to ensure long-term investments into park enhancements are considerate in how they try and reverse racial disparities.

“This is a crucial matter to us as we proceed our work to dismantle inequities within the park system,” a Park Board spokesperson advised FOX 9.