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Stearns County approves MOU with University of Minnesota to map historic racial covenants
Summary
The county board authorized a memorandum of understanding allowing University of Minnesota libraries and Mapping Prejudice to process county property records to identify historic racial covenants; staff and presenters said homeowners will not be contacted and the county attorney reviewed the agreement.
The Stearns County Board of Commissioners approved a memorandum of understanding with the University of Minnesota Libraries to allow Mapping Prejudice to analyze county property records for historic racial covenants and return the processed data to the county.
Britney Merritt Nash, an assistant professor of history at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, told the board that her students initially found 101 historic racial covenants in Stearns County using the county's ArcaSearch database but could not find all covenants because of optical character recognition limitations in that system. "We located a hundred and 1 historic racial covenants in Stearns County through that database," Nash said, and the University of Minnesota's proprietary software can improve the search.
Michael Corey, technical lead at Mapping Prejudice and with the University of Minnesota libraries, described the process: the county provides a bulk export of public property records; Mapping Prejudice runs an automated search to flag pages that may contain covenants; volunteers then review flagged pages to confirm whether a covenant is present. "We don't contact anyone," Corey said when asked whether homeowners would be notified; he added that Mapping Prejudice publishes only the final dataset of identified covenants and that the larger raw record set provided by the county would be returned to the county and not broadly distributed.
The board discussed related concerns: the MOU does not waive individual recording fees for homeowners who later choose to file a discharge document; presenters said two donors (Brad Fisher at Edina Realty Title and Ken Holman at CentraCare) offered to pay recording fees for homeowners who opt to discharge covenants, but that is voluntary. Commissioners also asked whether the dataset could be reused by other parties; staff and presenters said the MOU limits the project's use and that the county attorney reviewed and amended the document to protect records.
Commissioner Carr moved to approve the MOU with the University of Minnesota; Commissioner Notch seconded. The motion carried by voice vote.
Presenters said the research will help complete a public map of covenants in the county and support academic and historical research; identified covenants so far are concentrated in five neighborhoods, including two in Saint Cloud and sites in Cold Spring, Collegeville and Sauk Center. The presenters said the work is academic and archival; they will not proactively contact property owners.
