Podcast details racial housing history of southwest

Some not-so-pleasant parts of southwest Minneapolis’ history are the focus of a new podcast from the Minnesota Star Tribune. 

“Ghost of a Chance,” tells the story of Harry and Clementine Robinson, a Black couple who lived in the same Kingfield house as Star Tribune reporter Eric Roper a century prior, and shines a light on the lesser known housing history of southwest Minneapolis. The six-part series created by Roper and producer Melissa Townsend, is the Star Tribune’s first ever narrative podcast. 

The podcast began as a personal project of Roper’s, who, shortly after moving into his 113-year-old home in 2020, started digging into the history of his house. That research eventually led him to the Robinsons, a middle class Black family who moved to Minnesota in the early 1900s and lived in his house from 1917 to 1931.  

In telling their story, Ghost of a Chance illuminates how housing and employment discrimination and urban development impacted families like the Robinsons during that time – and how that shaped the racial makeup of southwest Minneapolis today. 

“What I like about the project is we walk through time through the eyes of two specific people,” Roper said. “Over the course of the podcast, we discuss all the specific ways Black people were being held back in Minneapolis.” 

Today, southwest Minneapolis is the whitest community in Minneapolis - more than 80% white, Roper said. And, as the podcast highlights, that was likely intentional. 

Racial covenants are one of the more well publicized ways that Black people were kept out of certain neighborhoods in Minneapolis. While some houses in southwest Minneapolis had racial covenants, the area has fewer than other areas of the cities because many of the homes here were built prior to when these covenants started appearing in property deeds, Roper said. 

But that does not mean Black residents were necessarily welcomed in these neighborhoods. In episode 3, Roper and Townsend discuss a particular meeting in 1920 that was held just five blocks from the Robinsons’ home where a group of 200 of their white neighbors met to protest the roughly nine Black families living in the area at the time. 

This was not an isolated event, either. A later episode details similar protest meetings that occurred in Linden Hills in the 1930s. 

As southwest Minneapolis residents, Roper said, “We have to grapple with the idea that people in our neighborhoods were gathering in large numbers to exclude Black people from living here.”

Roper has lived in the Kingfield neighborhood for nine years, yet he was not aware of this part of the community’s history. He is betting that he is not the only southwest resident for whom that’s the case. 

“I’m someone who feels pretty knowledgeable about local history,” Roper said. “In working on this project, there were a lot of things that were very new to me and helped me understand the context of this place where I live.”

The final episode of the podcast addresses the construction of Interstate 35W in the 1960s, which separates southwest Minneapolis from the neighborhoods on the city’s east side. 

By that time, the Robinsons had moved to a new house in the Old Southside area just one block off of what is now I-35W. Clementine, as an elderly woman, would have seen her neighbors’ houses being demolished to make room for that freeway, Roper said. 

“There were many ways in which the Robinsons’ lives took me to some very important places and events in Minneapolis history that helped connect a lot of things together for me,” he said.

Roper said the podcast has done extremely well so far, with people beyond Minnesota listening, too. But he’s focused on the podcast’s impact in Minneapolis itself, particularly southwest neighborhoods most affected by this history. 

“I think this is really important history to fully understand how our neighborhoods were shaped over time, and we’re able to explore it more fully now because of advances in digitization and other things that allow us to find a lot more granular details than we did in the past,” Roper said. 

The end of the podcast doesn’t mark the end of the project - far from it. Roper said he and Townsend have several events in the works for residents to continue to engage with the themes explored throughout the episodes. No dates have been announced as of publication, but anyone interested can sign up to receive updates on the Star Tribune’s website. 

“There’s more for us to look into and to talk about the history of race in southwest Minneapolis,” Roper said. 

In the meantime, the Star Tribune recently dropped a discussion guide for “Ghost of a Chance” for listeners who want to start a dialogue within their own community on the themes covered in the podcast. 

“We really hope that the podcast starts a conversation. Some of those conversations are going to be with friends and neighbors, but I hope that they actually expand beyond that and that we have a larger conversation,” said Roper.

Each episode also has an accompanying episode guide online, which goes deeper into detail on much of the history discussed in the podcast along including maps, photos, and more.  

All six episodes (and a bonus seventh episode) of “Ghost of a Chance” are available now on all podcast platforms. Episode guides, discussion guides, and more can be found at startribune.com/ghost-of-a-chance