This is Part 3 in Exodus and Equity: Reconciling the History of Minneapolis’ Jewish North Side, a series exploring how Twin Cities Jews were unwitting participants in racist real estate policies that shape today’s inequality in Minneapolis and other Midwestern American cities. In Minneapolis, that history is predominantly tied to two regions — Near North Minneapolis and St. Louis Park — and centered around civil unrest on Plymouth Avenue, in Near North, in the late 1960s.
In November of 1964, James A. Tillman Jr., the executive director of the Greater Minneapolis Interfaith Fair Housing Program, sent out a letter inviting residents of Near North to a “Jewish-Negro dialogue.”
The conversation was urgent, and, in a city known for anti-Semitism, particularly sensitive: “Some of the Negro residents believe that attempts are being made by members of the Jewish community…to exploit Negroes,” Tillman wrote, “by seeking to sell them homes at unrealistic prices.”
The accusation stemmed from an urban renewal project in the area of Grant Elementary School, around today’s Bethune Community School. Old houses and apartment buildings were being torn down and the land redeveloped, leaving many residents in search of new housing.
For white residents, that search could lead them anywhere in Minneapolis and the suburbs. But with a racist real estate market, most displaced Black residents would only be able to find housing in and around Near North.
This was a situation primed for moneymaking. Real estate agents marked up house prices in Near North when selling to Black families. And conveniently for the agents, a chunk of Near North — in the predominantly Jewish Homewood neighborhood — had gone up for sale during the Grant renewal project.
“[Civil] Rights leaders are fearful that too many of Grant’s…Negro families will move into a vacuum that may be developing in and around the Homewood neighborhood,” reported the Star Tribune. “For several months now, ‘for sale’ signs have been sprouting in a several-block area on either side of Plymouth Av.”
The most prominent realtor in Near North was Harvey Katzovitz, head of Hark Realty and on the board of directors of the men’s club at Beth El Synagogue. Hark Realty was described by the Star Tribune as “one of the most active in the Homewood area.” In a letter to Tillman about his real estate practices, Katzovitz described himself as “the only Realtor [sic] situated in this area.”
The accusations Tillman wrote about in 1964, though vague, were not baseless. Suffice it to say, for many Black North-Siders, the face of real estate exploitation was Jewish.
This reality can be chalked up to the actions of a few bad apples in the Jewish community. But that would miss the broader context of Near North, a neighborhood shaped by racist real estate policies like covenants and redlining that gave Jews access to the suburbs while driving the Black community into long-term poverty.
The legacy of this process is racial inequality, and Jewish opportunity, in Midwestern cities like Minneapolis today.
But these policies did more than divide Jewish and Black communities by geography and class. They turned the Jewish community — as a whole, unwittingly, and for some individuals, purposefully — into exploiters of Black people and contributors to ghettoization.
The exploitation chipped away at Black-Jewish communal relations and contributed to the explosion of civil unrest across Midwestern and northern cities in the late 1960s — which itself carved a greater rift between the two groups.
Today, “a lot of these issues bubble just beneath the surface,” said Steven Belton, the president and CEO of the Twin Cities Urban League. “Because of the press of time and other exigent circumstances, people move on to talk about other things. But when given an opportunity to pause and reflect…some of this stuff comes up.”
This story of exploitation also complicates a common narrative about why Minneapolis Jews left Near North for the suburbs. In a way, the community sealed its own fate.
For some Jews that used to live in Near North, “t