When Lee’s parents moved to Maplewood in the mid ’70s, they were part of a wave of Black families integrating into majority white suburbs. They were seeking opportunity and safety, but were often met with hostility and racism. In this episode, Lee sits down with Christopher Lehman, a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University, to understand what pushed Black families to want to integrate white suburbs and how they were received. Later, Lee sits down with some childhood friends who grew up in Maplewood, to break down what it was really like being a Black boy in a white Minnesotan suburb in the 1980s and 1990s.

TRANSCRIPT

We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.

My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened in Alabama.

Today we’ll be going back to Maplewood, in particular my high school days. I have many fond memories of that time. I was elected class president all four years, I had a bunch of friends and my weekends were always full, but there were a lot of difficult times too. The racism I experienced in Maplewood was rough. And I wasn’t alone. Today, I’m joined by some brothers I grew up with. Not my biological brothers, but we’re united by our shared experiences. I call them the Maplewood Crew and we’ll be breaking down what it was like to be a Black boy in Maplewood in the 80s and 90s.

But, you’ll get a whole lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first - that’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.

When my dad moved to Minnesota from Alabama, his family settled in the city of St. Paul, in a neighborhood called Rondo. After he married my mom, they purchased a home in a suburb called Maplewood. Other black families had started moving into the community after the development of a highway cut through Rondo and displaced more than 600 families. My parents were just under 30 when they got to Maplewood. They were young, hopeful and growing a family. To them and other black families who moved there in the 60s and 70s, Maplewood represented opportunity and upward mobility, a chance for their kids to flourish in ways they weren’t able to.

And, we did flourish.

As a student leader, I was in the news quite often.

Everybody was proud… My parents, my friends, my favorite teachers, and my coaches. But some people hated it.

Sophomore year, I was doing a lot of guest speaking at schools, churches, and public events. I was doing a lot of acting back then. This time, it was a one-act play, where I delivered the last speech that Dr. King gave to a group of Black Sanitation workers in Memphis, the night before he was killed. And that generated publicity.

That year, there was an article in a Minnesota paper headlined, “Student Brings Meaning to Black History Month,” with a big picture, after I spoke to some kids at a school.

A few days later, I got called down to the principal’s office. I figured it was about a student council matter, or sometimes the news camera crews would call about doing a story. But when I got to the office, those nice sweet ladies who worked in the office said hello and handed me a manila envelope that was addressed to me. I’d never received mail at school before, so I opened it right away and inside of it were letters, and cut out pictures of my face, with bible verses written all over them. The sender didn’t sign their name.

I can still feel the eeriness, standing there, looking at myself on the page. In my photo I had a flattop and a young, naive smile. In that moment, I realized someone out there had to be stalking me. All the letters repeated the same theme: That so-called race-mixing was a form of racial genocide akin to the holocaust. They warned that God did not create mixed race people – that sinful man did – and to destroy God’s races is to hate God.

I read this trash and I kept thinking about my parents, and how they told me as a kid, “Somebody’s always watching you, so watch yourself.” It could have been anyone. Neighbors across the street, teachers at the school, the police, really, anybody. I didn’t know who to trust, so I took the letters home.

I was almost afraid to tell my parents, out of fear that they would tell me I told you so, and that all my activism and speaking out against racism had led to this, and was going to get the whole family killed, as they’d always feared. I knew they would be scared. And man, they really were.

Lee Hawkins: So, you know, that white man that sent me those letters?

These letters gave my father flashbacks to his life in Jim Crow Alabama in the 1950s. That only made my parents even more determined to believe that by cracking the whip and enforcing the rules, they could keep us safe.

Eventually, it was decided, by the police and my parents, that I would need a police escort to school. My whole family was on high alert. For a few days, as I rode to school with that officer, I asked him to let me off at a side door because I didn’t want my classmates to see me getting out of that car. I tried my best to hide the fact that I was on edge, because I assumed the letters could be from someone with ties to the school, and I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had gotten into my head. I only told a few classmates, those who I, for some reason, believed would never send me that racist propaganda.

[PAUSE]

The letters continued to come in for the next few days and eventually, they stopped. What I didn’t know was that the person who sent those letters was under investigation by the FBI. And in 1988, they finally found him.

Lee Hawkins: He was at West Publishing for many years.

Lee Sr: Oh, okay. That sounds right.

Lee Hawkins: Yeah. Elroy Stock.

Lee Sr: Wow. What's his name?

That’s me and my dad reflecting on this period during one of our many interviews.

Elroy Stock had sent over 100,000 letters to people over the years. His letters didn’t just focus on Black people. He clipped out articles about indigenous people and whites. And he lamented the number of Asian and Indian children entering the country for adoption. And to find convenient targets, he scoured and clipped newspapers – sports articles, wedding announcements, birth announcements, and then mailed out his racist rants.

[PAUSE]

It all took a toll. I stressed, but I accepted it as a part of life for any Black person who wanted to excel in a white world. I’d read stories about the pioneers who had fought racism, like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson faced, and I just assumed that anybody who was Black and breaking barriers was going to get hated on.

But being Black in a neighborhood that was more than ninety percent white was a new phenomenon for my dad. Though the population of Minnesota as a whole was largely white, the Rondo neighborhood, the part of St. Paul that he and his sisters moved to when they first came to Minnesota when was 12, did have a strong Black community. So when he grew up and had his own family and moved to Maplewood, it had to be a bit of a culture shock.

When my parents made the move from St. Paul to Maplewood in 1975, they were part of the wave of Black families who’d left cities for the suburbs. Between the 1960s and 1970s, the suburban Black population increased nationally by almost 30%.

CHRIS LEHMAN: And so it was important that after African Americans had the chance to finally do what they had aspired to do and spread their wings and make opportunities available to their children.

That’s Christopher Lehman, he’s a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.

In my research, and speaking out to my Maplewood friends and cousins, I began to understand the distinct nuances of growing up Black in a white suburb in the 1980s. I reached out to Professor Lehman to get a better grasp of the factors that led to Black families moving into white suburbs and the racial dynamics they faced when they arrived.

My research and my personal experiences show me that because my dad was raised under apartheid in Alabama and racism was waiting for us in Maplewood – our move to the suburbs was loaded with all kinds of tension between the parents and the children. They were thrusting us into a world they knew nothing about – one they were often afraid of. And that made them more afraid for us, especially when we began to thrive socially and academically. This world that was so unfamiliar to them was one we thrived in – and that, I believe, is what both mystified and frightened them. But at the same time, they wanted the American dream. My dad used to say, “when those teachers teach the white kids, they can’t make you close your ears. If you’re in the same classroom, they can’t deny you the education they’re giving their kids.” My parents were determined to give us every opportunity they didn’t get.

Lee: My father had a family tragedy, and he was one of the many Black people who moved north and then to the city of Saint Paul from Alabama when he was 12. And he and my mom purchased one home and then another home in Maplewood before they turned 30. I mean, they were very young. There were other Blacks that we knew who had already moved, and they were very focused on pursuing the suburban American dream as they saw it. Some Blacks had made the move earlier, but the few Blacks we knew who moved to Maplewood and other suburbs did so in the 1960s, in