South Minneapolis’ Edmund Boulevard is about as nice of a place as you’ll find in an American City. A leafy street in a quiet neighborhood, each house faces the stunning Mississippi River gorge, itself a huge linear park boasting one of the city’s best recreational paths. Throw in good public schools, not to mention the private ones, and countless cultural amenities and restaurants within an easy drive, it’s easy to get enchanted.
Yet whether they like or not, the residents of Edmund Boulevard are becoming symbols of Minneapolis’ often invisible racism. For historians, the street reflects the structural racism that’s made Minneapolis a poster child for deeply rooted racial inequality. That’s because the mile-long street is named after Edmund Walton, the man who brought legal racial segregation to Minnesota.
“It wasn’t until about 2020 until I realized who Edmund Boulevard was named for,” said Mark Brandt, who has lived a few blocks away since 1987. Since that day, he’s been spending a good percentage of his waking hours trying to change the name. So far, it’s been a difficult slog.
Edmund Walton’s place in history
A brief history: Edmund Walton was the real estate developer who first used racially restrictive covenants in Minnesota. An Englishman who arrived in the city in 1890, he spent his inherited wealth building residential developments throughout then-booming south Minneapolis. One big breakthrough came in 1910, while selling a home on 36th Avenue South, when he put the following language into mortgage deeds:
“The premises hereby conveyed shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent. Said restrictions and covenants shall run with the land…”
[image_credit]Minnesota Historical Society[/image_credit][image_caption]Edmund G. Walton outside his real estate office at 314 Nicollet Avenue, around 1916.[/image_caption]
These kinds of housing developments quickly swept through the city in the period surrounding the first world war, which offered fertile soil for discrimination. The idea spread quickly in upper-middle class communities, and if you look at a map, these racial covenant neighborhoods still shape the Minneapolis landscape.
How street names get changed
Thanks to a small group of researchers and scholars at the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice project, the Twin Cities is on the cutting edge of coming to terms with this history. For example, Mark Brandt first heard about the history of Edmund Walton when someone had mentioned their work. He was dismayed to learn Walton’s role in Minneapolis segregation. He quickly began organizing like-minded people in his neighborhood, chatting online and tabling events, building support about changing the name of the street five blocks from his house.
Today, he’s working with Ben Howery, an organizer for the Longfellow Community Council (LCC), the city neighborhood group that includes Edmund Boulevard. They’ve been trying to build awareness of Edmund Boulevard’s symbolic legacy, and get people on board for officially changing the name.
The LCC office looks right out into the corner of Minnehaha Avenue and Lake Street, and the burnt out husk of the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd precinct, where the movement for racial justice that swept the globe in 2020 began. For that and many other reasons, talking about Minneapolis’ history of racial injustice seems to hold an extra weight in this small building, the sense that you’re in the presence of history.
That’s probably one reason that Brandt, Howery, and others like Joseph Larsen have fliered Edmund Boulevard itself a few times now, hosting two community meetings aimed at an official petition. The first went well, but the second back in early December attracted mostly skeptics. It was disheartening for the LCC crew, but they’ve regrouped and are aiming to broaden the discussion to include more people throughout the city.
As Brandt explained to me, changing a city street name can go through a few different processes. The first is to collect the consent of 2/3 of a street’s residents, asking for a new name. Barring that, city officials can do it themselves, if led by the local city council member (in this case Aurin Chowdhury), the public works director, or the mayor. In other words, a name change is doable with political will.
‘Opportunity to do the right thing’
Morgan Smith and her husband bought a house on Edmund Boulevard two years ago, and have spent their few months nursing a newborn. Her son’s first trip out of the house, eight weeks old, was to a meeting to support changing the name of her street.
“Once you know about something you’re responsible for it,” Morgan Smith said, after attending the October meeting with the LCC. “That is information that you cannot just cast aside and be blissfully ignorant about. We know this beautiful strip of land we get to live on was named in honor of a racist, hateful person.”
Smith does not buy the complaints from some neighbors that changing their paperwork or driver’s licenses would be too onerous. Neither is she compelled by the argument that symbolic change is meaningless. Like Brandy and Howery, she sees it as a concrete action that leads to future change.
“Symbols are one way that we as a society demonstrate what we care about,” Morgan Smith said. “Renaming the street is one small step that we as a community can take to say this is not what we are anymore.”
The group has just launched a new website aimed at educating and organizing people around changing the name and raising awareness of the harmful influence of racial covenants in south Minneapolis.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke[/image_credit][image_caption]The mile-long street is named after Edmund Walton, the man who brought legal racial segregation to Minnesota.[/image_caption]
Rethinking names and symbols has accelerated in the last few years, for a whole host of reasons. There’s a kind of inertia that develops as people begin to unearth the often troubling history behind our cityscape. Everything from lakes to schools are named after people that often did terrible things, and statues and flags are not immune to scrutiny. In that context, the name on the sign of a short street seems rather insignificant.
And yet, changing a street sign is an achievable accomplishment, a rarity in a world where change often seems impossible.
“Those of us who are lucky enough to have children or even grandchildren must know that they will look back on moments like this,” Smith told me. “They will look back and ask, ‘What did you do?’ To be clear, renaming a street is not the end-all be-all of social justice, but these are moments when we have the opportunity to do the right thing.”
Smith’s newborn is likely the youngest resident on Edmund Boulevard, and arguably the one with the most at stake in its future. She assures me that “he’s a great baby” and doing well. I just hope baby Smith grows up in a city where he never has to hear that he lives on a street named for someone like Edmund Walton.
