Robbinsdale is considering renaming a beloved park named after a family that tainted the city with racial covenants.
The City Council will hold a public hearing to potentially rename Sanborn Park on Tuesday evening.
The park was named after the Sanborn family, which owned much of the land throughout Robbinsdale in the early 1900s. They placed racial covenants on their real estate, prohibiting “any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent” from leasing or mortgaging their properties, according to Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota database of racial covenants in the Twin Cities metro.
Racial covenants were used to segregate the metro during the early- to mid-1900s, the effects of which are still present. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial covenants unconstitutional, and Minnesota outlawed them in 1953. Thus, the covenants hold no legal power but remain on deeds to scattered properties around the Twin Cities.
The Robbinsdale City Council, with the assistance of the city’s Human Rights Commission, established naming and renaming policy for parks and facilities in the spring that places emphasis on names with “equity/inclusiveness, service to the community, and/or observe local history.”
The council will hear public comments on two Sanborn Park name-change proposals Tuesday.
The Human Rights Commission is proposing the name Castile Park, in honor of Philando Castile, a Black man killed by police during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights in 2016.
Some Robbinsdale residents said they did not want the park to be renamed after Castile.
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