Explore the Just Deeds website and see if your city is participating in these efforts to discharge racial covenants from deeds. Mapping Prejudice also completed their map of Ramsey County. If you are inspired by the work of Free the Deeds, contact info@longfellow.org to talk about bringing the lawn signs and the reparations work to your community!

YES! We would love to have you purchase an artist-made print featuring the poetry and visual art of Minneapolis-based poet Miré Regulus and visual artist Jordan Hamilton. You can also look around the Mapping Prejudice map and see if you know anyone who owns a home in the neighborhoods where there are concentrations of covenants and spread the word about this project!

We are relying on the Mapping Prejudice resource to help you research what homes had covenants. We are grateful for Just Deeds for giving you the support you may need to discharge your covenant. We are also grateful for the City of Lakes Community Land Trust, Anam Cara Therapies, the Cultural Wellness Center, and Spark & Stitch Institute for their support of this project. As well as our Funders, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and Forecast Public Art.

A community land trust (CLT) is a nonprofit, community-based organization that works to provide perpetually affordable homeownership opportunities. In the truest sense, a CLT acquires land and removes it from the speculative, for-profit, real estate market. CLT’s hold the land they own “in trust” forever for the benefit of the community by ensuring that it will always remain affordable for homebuyers. For more information, check out THIS explanation of what a Land Trust is on the City of Lakes Community Land Trust website.

The AACLT is an initiative focused significantly decreasing the African American disparities in homeownership rate while increasing African American owned assets in Minneapolis. The AACLT is supported by the CLCLT, the Urban League, Twin Cities, the Stairstep Foundation, and OnTheGroundStrategies. Funds will be dispersed through the City of Lakes Community Land Trust for households purchasing homes through the CLCLT.

The people who invented racial covenants were wildly imaginative. The question is, how can we be equally as imaginative as we dream into repair? While we can use our vote, our voice, and our vision to create more widespread policy change around housing justice issues, we can also act now. Today. We can give financial support that goes directly towards an African American individual or family’s ability to purchase a home, creating generational wealth, stability, and joy. It also means that every home that is purchased through the AACLT is perpetually affordable for generations to come. Together, we can co-create equity, one deed, one home at a time.

When you order your sign or poster, you can pick it up at Longfellow Community Council's office located at 3101 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55406. The signs will also be available at various events, so keep in touch to learn about when and where you can grab a sign.