🏘️ Push to rename Edmund Boulevard gaining momentum

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There is mounting momentum for a resident-led push to rename Edmund Boulevard, the river-adjacent street named after a land developer who pioneered the use of racially restrictive deeds in Minneapolis.

The group Reclaiming Edmund Boulevard is soliciting votes on one of three new names for the street, a final milestone before advancing the plan to the city council. Though it will require several layers of approval, it has gained the support of the Longfellow Community Council and City Council Member Aurin Chowdhury. If approved, the process of changing the name could begin later this year.

Background 

Members of the group that would become Reclaiming Edmund Boulevard first conceived the idea of renaming the street in the summer of 2020. At the time, the lasting impact of segregated real estate restrictions in the Twin Cities was gaining new attention from projects like the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice and the TPT special Jim Crow of the North. 

In particular, the U’s project had volunteers pore over property deeds across the metro in search of “racial covenants,” legal language that prevents the property from ever being sold to most non-white buyers. They found more than 8,000 such clauses in Minneapolis alone, which were set to be permanently tied to the parcel, under the penalty of losing the land. These were the precursor to racially restricted federal housing developments and the “redlining” practice of denying mortgages to non-white buyers, which would further cement disparities in home ownership along racial lines — a disparity especially pronounced in the Twin Cities, which has among the largest homeownership gaps between white and non-white residents in the nation. 

As far as the researchers can tell, the first racial covenant recorded anywhere in the state was in Longfellow, on 36th Avenue and 33rd Street, in 1910. It mandates that the lot “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.”

They're almost certain it was put in place by Edmund G. Walton, a British developer who platted and sold wide swaths of the city for development around the turn of the century. He’d go on to include such language in thousands of deeds in the first half of the century, including a notable concentration within Longfellow. In other developments, he'd advertise the covenants as a selling point, a chance to live in a permanently whites-only neighborhood.

As was common during that period of development, he also named many features of his developments after himself. Most notably, Edmund Boulevard, a 1.5-mile stretch of idyllic road that parallels West River Road, has borne his first name since at least 1909.  

The U.S. Supreme Court nullified these types of covenants in 1948 and the federal Fair Housing Act did away with remaining racial restrictions in housing in 1968. In 2019, Longfellow's state representative Jim Davnie led the passing of a bill to make it possible for homeowners to legally discharge the covenants from their deed. But, like the segregated housing landscape he left behind, Walton’s name has remained.

Renaming the boulevard

The Reclaiming Edmund Boulevard group, which is made up of about 10 core members, hosted its first meeting in 2020 and has spent the intervening years building slow support, tabling at community events, and knocking on doors. 

They’ve followed in the footsteps of a similar change on the other side of the neighborhood in 2022, renaming Dight Avenue, named for a Hitler-supporting Minneapolis doctor who was a leading local proponent of eugenics, to Cheatham Avenue, after a former slave who became Minneapolis’ first Black fire captain. (Which itself built on the momentum of the 2018 renaming of Lake Calhoun, from a South Carolinian vice president who was the nation’s foremost defender of slavery, to the Dakota name for the lake, Bde Maka Ska.) 

The group hosted a pair of contentious community meetings in late 2023, where they argued that the change was an achievable way to acknowledge one of the city’s most significant transgressions. Opponents characterized it as an unnecessary symbolic act that would create expenses and hassles for properties along the boulevard, and argued that the civic energy required would be better spent in other ways. A contingent proposed keeping the name but rededicating it to a different person named Edmund.  

But the group has proceeded with the original plan and appears to have much of the necessary support in place. They've received a series of media profiles in the Star Tribune, MinnPost, and the Longfellow-Nokomis Messenger. The Longfellow Community Council has helped organize the community outreach, and Chowdhury has committed to bringing the idea to city council. (The primary way to change a street name is to collect signatures from two-thirds of the people living on the street, but it's also possible for council members or the mayor to carry it forward.)

But first they need to propose a new name. They've narrowed it down to three options:

• "Lena Smith Boulevard," after Lena Olive Smith, Minnesota's first Black female lawyer and first female president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, who litigated a high-profile case of housing discrimination in south Minneapolis
• "Wakpa Tanka Boulevard," after the Dakota name for the Mississippi River
• "Francis Wheaton Boulevard," after John Francis Wheaton, a civil rights lawyer and Minnesota's first Black state legislator

The group hosted a public meeting to restate their case and to take feedback on the name options this weekend. They're now taking votes on the options via an online survey.

Once it's chosen and Chowdhury submits the application, the change will require a public hearing before the city's Business, Housing, and Zoning Committee and then final approval from the council. If approved, the change would take place over the following months.

You can learn more about the renaming effort at reclaimingedmund.com and about racial covenants at the Mapping Prejudice Project. The group Just Deeds offers free legal help for people who want to discharge a racial covenant from their property.