Unlocking the Gates: How the North Star State Pioneered Structural Housing Discrimination in America

Airs Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 8 p.m. on WKSU
In this limited Marketplace series, Host Lee Hawkins investigates how a secret nighttime business deal unlocked the gates of a community called Maplewood for dozens of Black families seeking better housing, schools, and safer neighborhoods. His own family included. Hawkins returns to the place where he grew up to discover that state officials were instrumental in the practice of adding clauses to property deeds specifying that it could be held only by white people. These clauses or covenants as they are known, set the stage for other kinds of discrimination including redlining, which has exacerbated the racial wealth gap.