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.
