Minneapolis could soon rename a 14-block stretch of road along the Mississippi River Lena Smith Boulevard, in honor of the state’s first Black woman lawyer.
Now called Edmund Boulevard, the street is named for Edmund Walton, a real estate developer who introduced racially restrictive covenants to Minnesota in the early 1900s, according to a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota.
The proposal for Lena Smith Boulevard is set to go before the Minneapolis City Council, after a city planning commission voted unanimously to recommend it Monday.
Council member Aurin Chowdhury represents the neighborhood and introduced the resolution after a group of neighbors approached her with the idea two years ago.
“We have neighbors who are a part of the BIPOC community that live on Edmund Boulevard, and they don't want to raise their kids on a street that honors a man that did not believe that they should be there,” Chowdhury said.
At Monday’s public meeting, several neighbors and advocates spoke in support of renaming the street.
Some raised questions about the logistics, including signage costs and changing addresses. City officials say 107 parcels, most of them homes, would need new addresses.
Edmund Boulevard resident Ellen Luepker said that could be a challenge.
“There is cost that really needs to be acknowledged especially for long-term residents like ourselves, who must take a lot of time and effort to notify people about change,” Luepker said.
Advocates who proposed the name change have offered to help neighbors, Chowdhury said. Staff would update the city’s internal systems, and would work with partners like the postal service and utility companies. Chowdhury said the city could also help residents change their addresses on file with Driver and Vehicle Services for free.
Fredrick DuBose owns SunBean Coffee, a few blocks from Edmund Boulevard. At the Monday meeting, he said adopting Lena Smith Boulevard will be worth the effort.
“Although I do understand that a name change could be inconvenient, there is nothing more inconvenient than being denied the opportunity to purchase a home for your family because of the color of your skin,” DuBose said.
A majority of the 40 people who signed up to speak at the meeting agreed with him.
Several speakers noted Walton’s legacy of racial covenants: legal clauses in deeds that prevented landowners from selling the property to non-white owners. The practice is banned now, but researchers say it shaped modern homeownership in Minneapolis and beyond, contributing to the city’s sizeable disparity between Black and white homeownership rates.
The proposed new namesake, Lena Smith, represented Arthur and Edith Lee, an African-American couple who faced threats and violence from white neighbors after buying a house in south Minneapolis.
Neighbors and advocates recommended Smith in surveys and other outreach, Chowdhury said.
“Her contributions in addressing the systemic and racial disparities of segregation was kind of a perfect one-to-one, and also her history is one that I feel like has not been uplifted and made visible in the way that I think it should be,” Chowdhury said.
Local advocates told the city planning commission they surveyed nearly 600 people; 86 percent of Ward 12 residents and 69 percent of Edmund Boulevard residents supported the change.
The planning commission voted unanimously to recommend the resolution to the city council.
Chowdhury said a city council committee is expected to take up the proposal on Sept. 2, and it’ll likely progress to a final vote later that month.
