MPR’s Mark Heistad talks with Evelyn Fairbanks, author of the book “Days of Rondo.” Fairbanks reflects on growing up in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul.
Rondo was a St. Paul black neighborhood that vanished with the coming of the freeways in the 1960s.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: I think I would have written that book even if it was still there. That wasn't the driving force. I mean, as you went on and realized it really wasn't there, that helped move you. But because it was the people I was writing about, not really the neighborhood, it turned out to be the neighborhood as time went on. But Rondo was a small town. It has that same special thing that other small towns have.
MARK HEISTAD: The street you grew up on, isn't there anymore? Your neighborhood isn't there anymore. Does that have a meaning?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Of course, it has a meaning. It's probably the saddest thing that could happen in-- I don't mean that could happen in the whole world, but it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good. Sunday, I walked on the footbridge across McCubbin.
I didn't like looking at the freeway where my house was. I don't know how to explain it, but I didn't like it. It was-- I'm probably going to a funeral and seeing someone you loved is a strong way of putting it. Maybe that's too strong, but it's closer to that than it is anything else.
MARK HEISTAD: Yeah. Tell me about growing up Black in Saint Paul in the '30s. I've talked to people who grew up in Rondo and they say essentially there were three jobs for Blacks-- the packing houses, the railroads, and working in the hotels downtown. How restrictive was life for a person who was Black in this town?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: OK. I think you have to compare. Most of us were raised by Southerners.
MARK HEISTAD: Who'd come North.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Who'd come north, right. So we knew all about the South. And that was a part of our history.
MARK HEISTAD: Your description of that memory of what was the word? conditions in the South when you had visited, I forget which town.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Macon, Georgia.
MARK HEISTAD: Macon Georgia. And your mother had talked about conditions down there being so bad. And as a child of what? 6, 7.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: 7.
MARK HEISTAD: 7, you didn't know what conditions were, but you knew they were bad.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Yeah, right.
MARK HEISTAD: When did you-- when did you find out what conditions were? When did that become real?
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: In high school, probably, when we began to be realistic about our own situation in the North. There was some awareness that things may not change to the degree that we had hoped they would. And then as we began to read and talk to other people from the South who were recently coming from the South, about the conditions, we began to have some understanding that sitting on the front of the bus wasn't-- although there certainly was a big hullabaloo about that, wasn't there, later on.
But about in the teenage years, we became very social conscious of what things were like, not only in the South, but in the North also.
MARK HEISTAD: So you became aware then of the lunch counters in the North where you weren't accepted, and maybe some bigger issues as well.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Right, right, right, right. The day by day. The things that-- when we looked at our vocational plans and realized that they weren't as realistic as we had thought they would be.
MARK HEISTAD: Yeah. One thing about Rondo that I find interesting and I'm really glad that you included part of a city map in your book so you can look at just where Rondo was. It wasn't that many blocks wide.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: No, no, no.
MARK HEISTAD: And it really was fairly long, but it wasn't that gigantic area. But it continues to live on in mythic proportions as this place that used to exist.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Right, right, right. It was small, if you think, and it was a long line, as you said, you know. But it was so real. It was so tangible. As you notice it, the fact they're still celebrating Rondo, these are just started again rather, was it an '83, I believe. And that just shows that it was so real to us and it's real to our children.
MARK HEISTAD: To them as well.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: And to young people who didn't grow up here. I'm just-- I can't get over the way that young people walk up to me and ask me, tell me about Rondo. They were born someplace else. We have made Rondo so real and so solid. It's really going to be a better and better story.
MARK HEISTAD: It gets better with age.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: 50 years from now, it's going to be the most magnificent. I mean, all of Minnesota may be celebrating Rondo days.
MARK HEISTAD: That's an interesting idea. Thanks for coming in. It was good to talk with you. I enjoyed it.
EVELYN FAIRBANKS: Thank you.
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