Memorial Day 2026 continued
After finishing planting the urns where my father’s family is buried, I turned to decorating graves on my mother’s side at the cemetery across town. My granddaughter Harper came with me. We stopped at a craft store to buy artificial flowers, which look better throughout the summer in the headstone vases at this cemetery. She is thirteen. I was twelve when these grandparents died, five months apart. A sad situation for my mother who was an only child and my first experience with a loved one dying. We placed the flowers and cleaned the stones along with many families throughout the cemetery.
I happened to come across the deed for these plots in my mother’s papers a few days earlier. After she died, two years ago, I could only make myself look at documents we needed for the estate. But now, I am going through photos, congratulations cards sent to her parents when she was born in 1934, and baptism and confirmation records. There are random items in the box, too, including the deed for the cemetery plots. My grandparents bought them in 1949, two years after the cemetery opened. I was startled to find a racial covenant in the third sentence: “to be used exclusively for the interment of members of the Caucasian Race.” Wow. I had no idea such a restriction applied to cemeteries.
I had been aware of an initiative for homeowners to remove discriminatory restrictions from their property deeds. A group of volunteers, in collaboration with the city of Rochester and the University of Minnesota have helped with this project. But I hadn’t heard of any on cemetery plots. I emailed one of the lead volunteers. Phil confirmed that racial covenants were included on plots sold between 1949 and 1959 at Grand View Memorial Gardens, where my grandparents are buried. He suggested that I contact the city attorney’s office if I wanted them removed.
As I was looking through the city website, searching for contact information on removing covenants, I saw the map and realized that there are many racial covenants in this town. I was especially surprised and disappointed to see that the house my mother lived in and where my daughter and her family now live is on the list. Many people won’t be surprised. I don’t know why I keep thinking racism is only happening in other places, not my hometown.
Large sections of Rochester, including “Pill Hill” on Plummer Circle, one of the most prestigious legacy neighborhoods in town, are saturated with covenants. Some of the restrictions are quite specific: “That none of said respective tracts or any part of any building thereof shall be sold to, used or occupied by any person of Negro, Indian, Mongolian, Chinese, or Japanese descent.” Some of the property was sold by Mayo Foundation to developers and individuals in the 1930s and 40s. This is heartbreaking and unjust.
When the process started a few years ago, removing the covenant was considered primarily a symbolic gesture. Today, civil rights are being reversed weekly, so it might not be a bad idea. Actually, I would say that it is imperative for all property owners to get these off their property deeds asap. It is something we can do at time when it is easy to think our individual actions don’t matter. They do.
Refer to this city website for information on removing a racial covenant on property in Rochester, Minnesota. For more information on racial covenants and other issues related to property development see Rochester: An Urban Biography.