Unlocking the Gates: How the North Led Housing Discrimination in America

Original release: February 12 2025

In this gripping follow-up to his award-winning podcast What Happened in Alabama?, Alicia Patterson Fellow Lee Hawkins exposes how Northern developers, brokers and legislators engineered a nationwide system of housing apartheid. Drawing on newly unearthed deeds, newspaper archives and first-person testimony, Hawkins traces the story of James and Frances Hughes, a Black couple who—in furtive, night-time “handshake” deals—bought ten acres in Maplewood, Minnesota, and sold lots exclusively to other Black families shut out by whites-only covenants.

Through interviews with Hughes descendants, longtime Maplewood residents, and scholars from the Mapping Prejudice project, the episode shows how racially restrictive clauses—championed by real-estate titans such as Samuel Thorpe and codified by figures like former Lieutenant Governor Thomas Frankson—spread from private contracts to federal policy, ultimately shaping the underwriting standards of the FHA and the GI Bill. Survivors recount cross burnings, midnight phone threats and institutional indifference, yet also describe how hard-won homeownership became a launchpad for generational wealth, education and community leadership.

Hawkins’s reporting makes plain that today’s racial home-equity gaps are not accidents of the market but the legacy of calculated exclusion—and it asks what accountability and repair look like for families who never had a chance to “unlock the gates.” Unlocking the Gates is a three-part Marketplace & APM Studios special report, having received research support from Alicia Patterson Foundation. The series builds on Hawkins’s 10-episode 2024 APM Studios investigation What Happened in Alabama?, which explored Black land loss and intergenerational trauma.