A controversial legacy: The unique history of transracial placements in Minnesota

This story is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice.

There’s a unique history to transracial placements of foster children in Minnesota. Seventy-five years ago in this midwestern state, a Black child moved into a white family’s home — the first such adoption formally recorded in the nation.

At the time, discriminatory adoption agencies refused to work with Black children and families, and some state laws in the Jim Crow era explicitly forbade such placements. But in 1948, a pioneering Black social worker and civic leader in Minneapolis challenged that taboo, arranging for a Black infant who had languished in foster care for months to move in with white adoptive parents.

“I refused to place this baby in yet another foster home,” Laura Gaskin told sociologist Joyce Ladner, author of the book “Mixed Families: Adopting Across Racial Boundaries,” which was published in 1977.

Ladner’s research found that concern for the welfare of Black children peaked in the 1960s, amid civil rights activism against racial segregation and surging demand for babies from childless white couples. Adoption agencies statewide took heed, placing a growing number of Black, “Chicano,” and Native American children into cross-race and cross-cultural adoptive homes, Ladner wrote.

But as the practice grew nationwide, so did pushback — most notably from Indigenous rights leaders and groups such as the National Association of Black Social Workers.

“We affirm the inviolable position of Black children in Black families where they belong physically, psychologically and culturally in order that they receive the total sense of themselves and develop a sound projection of their future,” members announced in a 1972 public statement.

Under pressure from Indigenous activists, Congress conducted hearings in 1974, 1976 and 1977 to investigate the damage inflicted on Native Americans families emerging from centuries of forced assimilation through adoptions and Indian boarding schools run by churches and the federal government. At the time, the Association on American Indian Affairs reported that nearly one in four tribal children in Minnesota had been adopted.

“Culturally, the chances of Indian survival are significantly reduced if our children, the only real means for the transmission of the tribal heritage, are to be raised in non-Indian homes and denied exposure to the ways of their people,” Calvin Isaac, chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, testified before the U.S. Senate in 1977.

To this day, Indigenous and Black children remain the two groups most likely to end up being taken into foster care. In a story published today, The Imprint found that in Minnesota, children of color who are removed from parents and placed with caregivers who are not their relatives, odds are they will end up in a white home.

Some corrective measures are now taking place. This year, Gov. Tim Walz signed the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act into law. New rules taking effect in 2025 strengthen requirements to maintain family ties for all children who are over-represented in the foster care system.

The sweeping new state law is novel in the nation, and modeled after the federal 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which prioritizes the placement of Indigenous children with their relatives and tribes. In contrast, federal law that governs all other U.S. children explicitly states that “race, color, or national origin” cannot be considered for foster or adoption placements.

Minnesota was among the first states to shore up the federal ICWA law, with a state version passing in 1985.

Subsequent revisions increasingly strengthened the rights of tribal members in foster care cases, said Shannon Smith, executive director of the Minneapolis-based ICWA Law Center. The state’s Indian Family Preservation Act is stronger than the federal law and other state laws on several key provisions: “active efforts” required of social workers to keep Native American communities intact; the involvement of “qualified expert witnesses” in court hearings, and a definition of children’s “best interests” that is linked to how closely child welfare agencies adhere to ICWA.

The most recent update to the Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act passed the Legislature last year, led by two Indigenous lawmakers, state Sen. Mary Kunesh and Rep. Heather Keeler.

“This bill says that we agree on Minnesota land that our children deserve the opportunity to have access to their family, their culture, their beliefs, and what I believe is the most beautiful part of Minnesota,” Keeler told lawmakers in advance of a floor vote on her bill.

American families of African ancestry have their own history of subjugation and family separation embedded in the institution of slavery and subsequent segregation laws — and a different set of laws dealing with the aftermath in the child welfare system.

In 1982, the Council on Black Minnesotans held a four-hour public hearing on the issues of heightened concern. The advisory panel making recommendations to the governor and state Legislature — now known as the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage — heard testimony from 19 people who shared a similar view: Foster care agencies needed to expand recruitment of Black foster and adoptive parents.

Then-Gov. Rudy Perpich signed a law addressing the concerns the following year.

The Minnesota Minority Child Heritage Protection Act established an “order of preference” when placing children of color with foster families. To serve the children’s best interests, the law established relatives as the top priority for placements, and next, families of the same racial and ethnic background. When the law was passed, Minnesota became the first state to prioritize race when considering adoption and foster care placement, and to keep track of its success.

Attorney Steven Belton, retired president and CEO of the Urban League Twin Cities, helped write the law when he was executive director of the Council on Black Minnesotans.

“There wasn’t a law in place, but the de facto practice was that white children were almost guaranteed that they would get the best-case scenario, the preferred practice, which was that they would be placed with a family that culturally looked like them,” Belton said. “But Black children did not have those same protections.”

In 1991, Belton successfully defended the law before the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Legislature would soon begin rolling back the state’s racial and ethnic preferences for foster care placements.

The debate peaked nationally in 1994, when Congress approved the Multiethnic Placement Act. That law aimed to reduce the length of time Black children were waiting to be adopted, and was even supported by some Black civil rights leaders. But later amendments prohibited child welfare agencies receiving federal funds from delaying or denying a foster or adoptive placement due to the race or national origin of a child or prospective parent.

As a result, Minnesota’s Child Heritage Protection Act fell out of compliance with federal law. And In 1997, the act was amended to remove nearly any mention of the child’s “heritage” or “background.” In its place, lawmakers added language stating the “best interests” of the child were all that mattered, allowing only for a parent’s expressed religious preference.

Still, child welfare agencies could not ignore the issue altogether. The federal law required agencies “to recruit foster and adoptive parents that reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of children in out of home care.”

The feds have held states to account. Nearly 20 years ago, the Ohio child welfare agency was fined $1.8 million for “illegal administrative rules” that required caseworkers to evaluate parents seeking to adopt children of another race based on their ability to “value, respect, appreciate and educate a child regarding a child’s racial, ethnic and cultural heritage, background and language.” They also were barred from assessing the racial composition of the neighborhoods and caregivers’ ability to meet children’s child’s “transracial” and “transcultural” needs.

But the aftermath is still apparent.

As recently as 2016, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services warned the state: “Minnesota has a severe shortage of foster homes for all children, especially for African American and Native American children. Areas of the state have shown an increasingly diverse population, but Minnesota has not adequately assessed the need.” In 2020, the same agency noted the state still had “few specific strategies” for increasing the diversity of their foster parent pool.

Although ICWA was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023, a case now before the Minnesota Court of Appeals is challenging the law, and the state version of its provisions.

The dispute involves twins born in 2022 to a mother from the Red Lake Nation. Shortly after the twins were placed in the home of white foster parents Kellie and Nathan Reyelts, a qualified expert witness said the siblings needed a “culturally appropriate” foster home. But the couple have continued to argue in court that the children should remain with them, and that their cultural needs could be met in their home.

Lower court Judge Michael D. Trushenski disagreed. He ruled that “while the children were in the Reyelts’ care, they did not attend a single tribal event. They never met their older sister or many of their other extended family members.” The higher court has not yet ruled on the Reyelts’ appeal.