Minneapolis and the rhetoric of civil rights

As our last two posts have illuminated, Minneapolis was seen as a bastion for civil rights in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet today the city is known for its racial disparities. A new study just ranked Minnesota the second worst place in the nation for African Americans. How did we get from there to here over the last 50 years? Or was the civil rights rhetoric of the mid-twentieth century all talk with no structural change?

Image is from the Minnesota Historical Society.