Robbinsdale is considering renaming a beloved park named after a family that tainted the city with racial covenants.

The city council will hold a public hearing to potentially rename Sanborn Park Tuesday evening.

The park was named after the Sanborn family, which owned much of the land throughout Robbinsdale in the early 1900s. They placed racial covenants on their real estate, prohibiting “any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent” from leasing or mortgaging their properties, according to Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota database of racial covenants in the Twin Cities metro.

Racial covenants were used to segregate the metro during the early to mid 1900s, the effects of which are still present. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial covenants unconstitutional, and Minnesota outlawed them in 1953. Thus, the covenants hold no legal power but remain on deeds to scattered properties around the Twin Cities.

The Robbinsdale City Council, with the assistance of the city’s Human Rights Commission, established naming and renaming policy for parks and facilities in the spring that places emphasis on names with “equity/inclusiveness, service to the community, and/or observe local history.”

The council will hear public comments on two Sanborn Park name change proposals Tuesday.

The Human Rights Commission is proposing the name Castile Park, in honor of Philando Castile, a Black man killed by police during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights in 2016.

Some Robbinsdale residents said they did not want the park to be renamed after Castile.

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office added five charges of third-degree murder Monday against Derrick Thompson in the car crash from June 2023 that killed five young Somali women in Minneapolis.

Reached by phone, Thompson’s attorney, Tyler Bliss, said he had no comment. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a prepared statement that Thompson’s “lengthy record of dangerous driving, the trail of devastation he’s left in his wake, and his conduct in this case make these more serious charges appropriate.”

Terms of the plea called for Thompson to serve between 32 and 38 years in prison and in return the county would drop the other five charges of criminal vehicular homicide while operating a motor vehicle in a gross or negligent manner.

The crash came after Thompson allegedly ran a red light at 95 mph in Minneapolis last year, killing the five young women and devastating the Twin Cities Somali community. The victims were: Sabiriin Ali, 17, of Bloomington; Sahra Gesaade, 20, of Brooklyn Center; Salma Abdikadir, 20, of St. Louis Park; Sagal Hersi, 19, of Minneapolis; and Siham Adam, 19, of Minneapolis. On the night they were killed, the women were on their way home after running last-minute errands before a friend’s wedding the next day.

According to court documents, Thompson was observed driving at 95 mph on Interstate 35W in a Cadillac Escalade. A state trooper followed but did not turn on his lights. Thompson exited on Lake Street and plowed through a red light, hitting a Honda Civic with such force that it was pushed out of the intersection and pinned against a retaining wall. The five women in the Civic died at the scene.