few shops on Plymouth Avenue were burned in protest, and then in 1967, when three days of civil unrest destroyed much of the commercial strip.
As the main artery of Near North, Plymouth Avenue was home to many Jewish-owned businesses that felt the heat — a detail that took on different weights across communities.
“Part of what the uprising was about was a statement about the inequality [in Near North],” said Belton, of the Twin Cities Urban League. “It wasn’t focused specifically on the Jewish community.”
But the image of burning Jewish shops didn’t lend itself to a conversation about civil rights and the systemic exploitation of Black people. Instead, the remaining Jews on Minneapolis’ North Side had had enough, and a new wave left for the suburbs.
“My generation, we were born during the Depression, we grew up during the Second World War…we finally found some peace in the 50s, and I’ll tell you, by the 60s, where it was happening on Plymouth Avenue, I think we were just kind of like, ‘oh shit,’ you know?” said Marilyn Chiat, a local Jewish historian who grew up on the North Side in the 1930s and 40s.
“I think we just didn’t have the energy,” she said. “We just wanted some peace.”
The Black community in Near North had the same wants, Belton said.
“The same fear about the uprising that impacted the Jewish community also impacted the Black community,” he said. “There were lots of Black people who also were fearful, who were uncertain, who wanted to leave.”
But blockbusting, aimed at Jews, points to the larger reality of Near North. The Black community was trapped.
“The ability to abandon is an economic privilege,” Belton said. Jews “were leaving people who were not able to leave.”
One of the few recorded cases of blockbusting in North Minneapolis, found by Star-Lack, happened shortly after the first Plymouth Avenue unrest in 1966. Morris Klugman, head of the realty Gail Company (and then-vice president of the Twin Cities B’nai B’rith Council), put an advertisement for his business in The American Jewish World, the Twin Cities Jewish newspaper.
“Krazy Klugman will buy all the property you have for sale on the North Side,” the ad read. “Watch your neighbors sell when our signs go up.”
Some Jews, seeing the ad, complained to the Jewish Community Relations Council that it was a form of blockbusting, and executive director Samuel Scheiner called Klugman to stop the ad from running anywhere else.
Klugman would pull the ad, but not before candidly defending himself as a product of the Jewish community. A JCRC report described that “Mr. Klugman remained adamant that he was entitled to run this kind of an ad.”
“[Klugman] indicated that he had not created the situation on the North Side but that the Jewish community had created the situation for itself by having made a mass exodus from the area…therefore there was nothing wrong with an individual taking advantage of the situation.”
The Rift of Blame and Anti-Semitism
By the late 1960s, most Minneapolis-area Jews and Jewish institutions had left Near North, and accusations of Jewish real estate exploitation morphed into full-blown attacks.
In 1969, the newspaper of The Way, a Black community center in Near North established after the Plymouth Avenue unrest, published a scathing editorial.
“Just because we have seen many Jewish slumlords own the rat and roach tenements and make no attempt to make these dwellings fit for human dwelling and fight against it; we are called antisemitic,” the editorial read. “Jewish brothers, have no fear, we are not antisemitic…we will fight anyone that is or attempts to exploit the Black Community.”
But Jewish leaders had a tough time engaging with what felt, despite the denials, to be a wave of anti-Semitism. The conversation was irreconcilable.
“We had all kinds of bitter attacks by the Blacks on ‘the Rothschilds of the North Side.’ They never said, ‘the Jews.’ It was ‘the Rothschilds,’” said Rabbi Kassel Abelson, then-rabbi of Beth El, in an interview with the St. Louis Park Oral History Project.
“They were talking, ‘Every revolution has to have its b