The Withered Clover

Summer 1999

My family and I had been living in Shamrock for about a month after a stint of hotel hopping in Minneapolis. The humidity was thick. As the sun beamed down on the trees, the leaves shimmered like they were honey-coated. I was five, going on six years old.

My hair was adorned with multi-colored beads swinging side-to-side as my brother, father, and I walked to McKnight Halal Meats to buy honey buns and my favorite, Vitner's Kosher Dill Pickle Potato Chips.

Soon after we entered, my dad instructed us to get our two items while he had a lively conversation with Abdi, the store owner. Abdi is Somali-American and treated us like family. He sometimes gave us treats for free without asking, and we respected him like you’re supposed to respect elders who understand the role of looking out for the youth.

When my dad and Abdi wrapped up their conversation, we left (with our fingers already sticky with honey bun frosting) and headed up the steep hill on McKnight Road to Battle Creek Park. While there, we played until we were thirsty and dirty enough for my mama to rush us to the bathroom as soon as we returned home. 

I hold these memories of Saint Paul dear to my heart. Still, there is a darker side to the city’s history, one of institutional racism that impacted the livelihood of mine and many other families living in Shamrock and Sunray.

Saint Paul, formerly known as Pig’s Eye, was initially inhabited by the Dakhóta and Anishinaabe, who called it Imizaska after the beautiful bluffs of the East Side.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, by 1980, 88.6 percent of Saint Paul was white, with 97.5 percent of Saint Paul’s white residents living in the suburban neighborhoods. By 2000, white folks accounted for 64 percent of the population, with 91 percent of white residents living in suburbs. The Black population had grown to 11.4 percent in 2000 from just 4.8 percent in 1980. “Other races,” so unthoughtfully lumped together, increased to 16.6 percent in 2000 from only 3.7 percent in 1980.

As a kid, I wasn’t aware of these statistics. Still, living in Shamrock or attending Highwood Hills Elementary School and observing my classmates showed that Saint Paul had grown racially, ethically, and culturally diverse.

I attended Highwood Hills Elementary from first to fifth grade. Located only about a 15-minute walk from Shamrock, many kids who lived in my building also attended Highwood Hills. As a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse school with a white majority of teachers, few possessed the worldly experience to understand us truly. And at times, we didn’t understand each other, either. But I remember two other girls I went to school with who shared their heritage with me and made me feel as if I belonged despite the implicit racism of my teachers. Kemi, an American-born Nigerian; Farhiya, a first-generation Somali-American refugee; and me, an African-American girl from Chicago, found common ground through friendship. 

We also shared the burden of being othered at school by other students. Kemi and her family are Igbo, and before she was born, her parents came to America hoping to receive medical treatment for her elder brother battling cancer. Kemi’s parents learned her brother was being experimented on by the doctors, not treated. Grief-stricken and needing community support, Kemi’s parents moved to Saint Paul from New York due to Minnesota’s large Igbo community. 

Having community was huge for Kemi because, at school, she was often bullied for being African, often by African-American kids. 

“Other kids would call me ‘African booty scratcher’ or make fun of my food,” said Kemi. “I was also being bullied because of my size. To this day, I still remember the names of those kids.” 

What I saw in Kemi was someone with much knowledge and history to share. I remember her teaching me that to show respect to elders properly, you refer to them as “Auntie” or “Uncle.” I remember her pride in her heritage, giving her the groundedness to be who she is today. Her boldness to be herself despite being bullied by students and misunderstood by white teachers gave me a greater sense of what Blackness is globally. This enriched my cultural understanding of my own identity. 

As a descendant of the Great Migration with Chicago-born and bred parents, I was often stereotyped as “violent,” “ghetto,” or asked things like, “Do you know someone who’s been shot or is in jail?” I even had a teacher ask me to explain how my mom put my beads in my hair. I was often asked to repeat the word “water” as my Chicagoan accent was thick enough for native-born Minnesotans to draw a line between them and me. 

But I found community and comfort when Farhiya trusted me enough to teach me how she wrapped her hijab one day when we were in the girls' bathroom. She explained to me why modesty was an essential part of her faith as a Muslim. As young Black girls being discriminated against due to our background, we were learning how impactful these perceptions are toward more systemic discrimination, like the housing discrimination perpetuated by the staff at Shamrock.

Shamrock and Afton View, another low-income apartment complex affectionately known as “McKnight” by many in the Somali community, are managed by Thies and Talle Management.

Both buildings were less than 15 minutes from Highwood Hills Elementary. The majority of the student body came from one of those two buildings. And at each facility, aggressive policing by security staff, invasive no-notice entries by management staff, and exploitation of tenants were a regular occurrence.

“The management company had no empathy for residents. They always felt they could twist the law, especially because many of the people were on Section 8,” my father recalled. “You know how it is when people think of you as just accepting a ‘handout,’ they believe they can treat you as less. And even though me and your mama worked, the fact that we lived in a low-income building was enough for them to look at us in the same way.” 

Afton View had more Somali and non-English speakers than Shamrock, and due to this, management often used it as an opportunity to violate laws around housing. Many Somali elders who’d moved to Minnesota with their families hardly knew English. This was one of the critical reasons Farhiya often acted as an interpreter for her parents and grandparents. 

“[There] was only one white family that lived in Afton View, so with the majority of the tenants being Somali or from other East African countries, all they experienced was discrimination and management breaking renting laws,” my father said.