Rochester adopts initiative aimed at ridding city of racially-restrictive covenants

The city of Rochester will begin to record and remove hundreds of racist covenants included in housing deeds from the early 20th century, the City Council voted Monday — striking language that barred people of color and non-Christians from owning homes in large swaths of the city.

In a 7-0 vote, the Rochester City Council approved a motion to partner with the Just Deeds Coalition, a Twin Cities-based group that has removed more than 100 racist covenants from housing deeds statewide since October 2020. Rochester will become the eighth city in Minnesota to join the coalition, and the first outside the Twin Cities metro area.

Council members enthusiastically supported the motion, noting that some of Rochester’s most prominent leaders from that time period — Will J. Mayo included among them — were instrumental in segregating the city through racist covenants and redlining certain areas of the city. 

“We have a very dark history and we can’t undo the past,” said Council Member Molly Dennis. “So we can just chip away and get rid of all the written covenants — and then work on the silent covenants that have founded this country in racism.” 

Members also showed support for instituting an educational component to the program; by making these covenants public and mapping where they were instituted, Council Member Mark Bransford said, many residents may find out about the practice for the first time.

“Shining the light on this is super important,” said Bransford. “This is our history, and it’s not a good one, but people need to understand our past so we don’t repeat our mistakes.”

The practice of including racially restrictive language in housing deeds began in the 1910s in Minnesota, and quickly became commonplace before the state Legislature made it illegal in 1953. The federal government later outlawed the practice in the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

That means any deed for a home built in Rochester after 1953 would not include a covenant of this nature; however, no effort to remove prior covenants has ever materialized locally.

City Attorney Jason Loos says the practice was “widespread” in Rochester, with the Pill Hill and Kutzky neighborhoods likely to be the main hotspots. 

“We have a fairly good idea of where most of them are, so it’s just a matter of going back and looking at the abstracts on those individual properties,” said Loos. “I imagine it being somewhat like ‘Battleship;’ once you hit one, you'll just keep going down that line and you’ll probably get more. It’s about hunting, and it’s going to take some time.” 

Loos says a handful of people have already stepped forward to help comb through the mountain of housing deeds on file with the city — local volunteers Phil Wheeler and attorney Ray Schmitz have agreed to assist, as well as members of the Rochester chapter of the NAACP.

Isaac Jahns is a Rochester native and a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He reports on politics, business and music for Med City Beat.