Whiteness in Plain View: A History of Racial Exclusion in Minnesota Book Launch
Join us and author Chad Montrie for an evening of discussion on the launch of his new book 'Whiteness in Plain View: A History of Racial Exclusion in Minnesota'.
Whiteness in Plain View examines the ways White residents across Minnesota acted to intimidate, control, remove, and keep out African Americans over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their methods ranged from anonymous threats, vandalism, and mob violence to restrictive housing covenants, realtor deceit, and mortgage discrimination, and they were aided by local, state, and federal government agencies as well as openly complicit public officials. What they did was not an anomaly or aberration, in some particular place or passing moment, but rather common and continuous. Chapter by chapter, the book shows that Minnesota’s overwhelming Whiteness is neither accidental nor incidental, and that racial exclusion’s legacy is very much woven into the state’s contemporary politics, economy, and culture.
-– JoJo Bell, board president, African American Interpretive Center of Minnesota
Author Information:
Chad Montrie is a professor in the history department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is the author of four books, including The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism. His article “In that Very Northern City: Recovering a Forgotten Struggle for Racial Integration in Duluth” appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Minnesota History magazine.