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JOHN BIEWEN: Minnesota's image as a Scandinavian and German American enclave is so entrenched that people are often surprised to learn Blacks have lived in the state as long as whites have. In 1846, 12 years before Minnesota became a state, a Saint Paul schoolmaster wrote back East in search of teachers saying applicants would have to be free of prejudice because their students were not only of European, but also of Indian and African stock. Pilgrim Baptist, Minnesota's first Black church, was founded in 1866. It's still going strong in Saint Paul's Summit University neighborhood.

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But Blacks have always been a tiny minority in Minnesota. James Griffin has lived all of his 80 years in Saint Paul. He's a retired deputy police chief. When he was a child in the 1920s and 30s, about 1% of the city's population was Black.

JAMES GRIFFIN: You could go down town when I was, say, 10 years old, spend a whole day downtown in Saint Paul, if you saw one or two Black persons, you would remark about it. That's how thin we were.

JOHN BIEWEN: Like almost any Black man of his generation, Griffin can tell of many encounters with bigotry. But most of the overt racism he's experienced came during travels outside of Minnesota-- getting kicked out of a whites-only railroad car in Ohio, being refused a hotel room in Las Vegas. Griffin says, he did run into housing and job discrimination in Saint Paul, but he believes racism has been more spotty and less systematic in Minnesota than in most parts of the country, not because white Minnesotans were somehow more enlightened, Griffin says whites were so dominant in Minnesota, they didn't need to bother excluding Blacks.

JAMES GRIFFIN: You're in the minority like that, you have less problems because you're not a threat to anybody.

JOHN BIEWEN: Minneapolis Saint Paul is the largest Metropolitan area in the country to have remained so white for so long. Even now, after 20 years of substantial growth in the African-American, Asian, and Latino populations, barely 10% of the region's 2.5 million residents are minorities. As Minneapolis and Saint Paul finally begin to look more like the rest of the country, opinions vary on whether Minnesotans can learn from the troubled racial histories of other regions or are bound to repeat them.

JOHN POWELL: People are having to face this issue for the first time in any real way. And yet, I think, people would like to figure out how to do it differently, but they're afraid.

JOHN BIEWEN: John Powell moved to Minnesota four years ago to found the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School. He grew up in Detroit and has lived in cities on each Coast. In a study earlier this year, Powell found that almost 90% of Blacks and whites in the Twin Cities said they wanted to live in integrated neighborhoods and send their children to integrated schools. He says that's well above the national average in similar surveys.

But the reality doesn't match the survey results. As Blacks and other minorities move into Minneapolis and Saint Paul, whites are heading for the distant suburbs as fast as anywhere in the country. In 25 years, the enrollment in Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools has flipped from 85% white to almost 70% minority. Powell says, some voices in the local debate over school desegregation sound eerily, like those heard in the deep South a generation ago.

JOHN POWELL: All the old arguments that people just want to be with their own and you shouldn't force people to be together and those arguments that we rejected in the '50s and '60s and saying the South needs, they're just making excuses because they don't want white children to go to school with Black children.

JOHN BIEWEN: Powell says, many white Minnesotans have deeply internalized their state's image as a haven of Northern Europeans to the point where they can only see Blacks as visitors at best not real Minnesotans. Twin Cities playwright and newspaper columnist syl Jones agrees. He points out the scarcity of minority reporters and anchors in the local broadcast media from Minnesota Public Radio to the commercial television stations. Jones says Black friends from out of town express shock when they see billboards showing all-white TV news teams.

SYL JONES: That's not the way it would be in any other market, and this is the 14th largest media market in the United States. And it certainly shouts to people who visit the city that there's something different here. And what's different is not something that we should all be proud of. Some of it is just based on plain old racism, not wanting people who are different to be on television.

JOHN BIEWEN: But by some measures, Minnesota is a center of Black success. In 1990, Black Minnesotans had by far the highest college graduation rate in the country, 44%. That's almost twice the number two state Massachusetts and almost double the White college graduation rate in Minnesota. Sharon Sayles Peloton was elected Minneapolis's first Black mayor in 1993, though the city's Black population was less than 15%. She maintains that the quality of life for educated Blacks is nowhere better than in the Twin Cities.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: So an African-American person, Hispanic person, and an Asian person, any person of color who wanted to come and settle in Minnesota and get a job with a big company and all that, they'd find that opportunity here. If they wanted to live in a nice neighborhood, they'd find that opportunity here in the city, in the suburbs.

JOHN BIEWEN: Some say Minnesota's doors may be open to Blacks with money and education but not to poor African-Americans moving to the state from Chicago and other cities. Bill Green, an African-American history professor at Augsburg College and Chair of the Minneapolis School Board, says Minnesota is more welcoming to middle-class Blacks than to those in poverty. But Green points with pride at a school referendum last November in which Minneapolis homeowners, still mostly white, voted themselves a tax increase in order to cut the size of public school classrooms.

BILL GREEN: 80% of the homeowners in this town have no kids in school, let alone public school, and yet they voted by 70% to support a referendum that would benefit kids in the public schools, most of whom are of color and poor and not originally from this community. So there's a special kind of attitude.

JOHN BIEWEN: Green says, white Twin Cities residents are increasingly divided between those who live in fringe suburbs who he says tend to be uncomfortable with minorities and those committed to staying in the core cities and making them work as integrated communities.

BILL GREEN: We are literally a tale of two cities when you look at the Metropolitan area, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area on one hand and the suburban community on the other.

JOHN BIEWEN: Leaders in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are debating how to disperse low-income housing and slow de-facto segregation in the schools. Some suburban politicians and business leaders are involved in those discussions. But Powell of the University of Minnesota says, too many local politicians, police, and media figures continue to associate Blacks with urban decay, playing on fear and encouraging whites to isolate themselves.

BILL GREEN: There is a lot of goodwill out there, but it's tied up with all these other issues crime, property values, schools. Let's deal with schools. Let's deal with property value. Let's deal with crime, but not as a trop to maintain a segregated society.

JOHN BIEWEN: Powell says, the racial attitudes of many Minnesotans are still malleable. And he says the Twin Cities economy is so strong that with the right housing and transportation policies, poor Blacks could be hooked up with jobs all over the region instead of being confined to urban ghettos. He argues the Twin Cities have a rare opportunity to set a new pattern in race relations and avoid becoming more polarized along the usual lines, white and Black, rich and poor. But Powell says, the early signs are not encouraging. For Minnesota Public Radio, I'm John Biewen.