by Tanner Colby
Keeping the schools white now meant keeping the neighborhoods white, and the well-to-do whites on the west side were going to make damn sure that their side stayed whitest the longest. City officials drew a boundary right down the middle of the city along its longest north-south thoroughfare, Troost Avenue. Let the east side go black, it was decided. We’ll hold the line here. Still today, nearly every zip code, every census tract, every voting ward—and, for a long time, every school district—all split right along Troost.
Most every city in America has a Troost. In Chicago, it’s the fourteen-lane Dan Ryan Expressway that divides the South Side from the Bungalow Belt. In Detroit, it’s Eight Mile Road, a jurisdictional barrier excluding city residents from county services. In Birmingham, it’s a mountain you have to go over. Kansas City’s Troost Avenue is unique in that it’s not an elevated thruway or set of railroad tracks—it’s merely a street, like any other, running down the center of the city’s flat, open grid. Yet everyone who lives here knows. East of Troost is black; west of Troost is white. A local newscaster once dubbed it “the Berlin Wall of Kansas City.” The name stuck.
Before 1955, no real estate listing in the city had ever used the designations “East of Troost” or “West of Troost.” Now they all did. Under the city’s new neighborhood attendance policy, the vertical axis of Troost remained fixed, but as blacks began to come south on the east side, the school board would resort to gerrymandering the northern boundaries of the schools on the color line; year to year, the attendance zones twisted and contorted themselves around the expanding black residential areas in order to keep schools white. Once the black migration had reached a critical mass and the school district could no longer pivot around it, the city would reverse itself and regerrymander the neighborhood boundaries the other way, shifting the attendance zone to go majority black. In the name of preserving “neighborhood schools” and “neighborhood stability,” the school board was tearing the east side neighborhoods apart one after another.
Once a neighborhood school was zoned to go black, the neighborhood it served had essentially been thrown to the blockbusting wolves; Bob Wood knew the whites in that district would be the most vulnerable to threats. One of the first schools to flip was Walt Disney’s own Benton Grammar School. Just a year after Brown, it was suddenly reborn as D. A. Holmes Elementary—named after a local black preacher—and thrown out as a sacrifice by whites fleeing the broken color line at Twenty-seventh Street. Then Thirty-first Street fell. Then Thirty-second. By 1960, blockbusting had flipped nearly every street clear down to Thirty-ninth. As school districts were gerrymandered this way and that, black residential tracts cascaded down the east side, always moving in unnatural squares and rectangles. In 1954, the two main high schools serving east of Troost, Central and Paseo, had both been 100 percent white. By 1962, Central was already 99 percent black; by 1968, Paseo was 88 percent black and rising. That same year, west of Troost, the well-protected Southwest High was still 99.5 percent white.
Catholic schools on the east side were inundated by the blockbusting turnover as well. Some had tried to set a limit on the number of incoming black students, as an incentive to get whites to stay. It hadn’t worked. “It just turned off the African-American community,” Roetert says, “and then the church lost those schools anyway. I decided we were not going to do that here.” In the spring of 1969, Roetert announced that there would be no cap on black enrollment at St. Therese in the fall. “Some of the parishioners were angry that I did that, but I said, ‘Look, we are not going to destroy this parish. We’re going to welcome these people into our school and our community.’ I hoped that people would stay, but by then I knew it was over. The following year, the school went from 80 percent white to 98 percent black. Just like that.”
You can’t destroy a Woodlawn without first creating a Vestavia Hills. White flight requires a place to flee, and the road to Vestavia Hills, it turns out, starts in Kansas City, Missouri. If you’re like me, and have ever lived in a house in America, Kansas City probably plays an important role in your story, too. And so, after leaving Birmingham, I’ve come to find myself in the heart of the Midwest on a gray February afternoon driving up a desolate and deserted Troost Avenue.
As racial divides go, Troost may be a purely mental construct, but the real-world effect it has is astonishing. If you go four blocks east of Troost, you can buy a three-bedroom bungalow for about $45,000. Four blocks west of Troost, that same house will run you upward of $130,000. If you live west of Troost, your car insurance payments might be, say, $80 a month, depending on make and model. That same car registered anywhere east of Troost will run you upward of $130 a month. Because black people steal cars, evidently. I guess black people rob delivery guys, too, because you can’t get a decent pizza delivered over there to save your life. All the good pizza places are west of Troost, and they won’t deliver east of Troost. They’ll go across the state line, into Kansas, but not over the Berlin Wall. Average annual income, average level of education, average life expectancy—nearly every statistical measure you can name, they all break right down the line, and the good news always tilts west.
Driving north on Troost, you see little but empty storefronts, one after another. Abandoned homes, burned out and boarded up. Vacant parking lots and junked cars, grown over with weeds. Block after block. There are a few operating businesses here and there. An auto parts supplier, a wig shop, a dollar store next to a self-storage unit. A few people are out and about, all of them black. Mostly it’s just empty. Once a thriving commercial artery, Troost turned into the front line of a long and bitter turf war, after which both armies retreated and turned their backs on it. Plywood and busted glass and crumbling concrete lie in every direction. It’s been this way for decades.
Out your passenger window as you head north are all the Woodlawns—the formerly white, blockbusted neighborhoods that have since fallen into the sinkhole of urban blight. Some pockets, like the Santa Fe area, are stable, safe, middle-class communities. But most white people wouldn’t know the difference, even if they’ve lived in Kansas City their whole lives. It’s all just east of Troost. It’s the Murder Factory—that’s the popular nickname of the 64130 zip code sitting in the middle of the east side. With just 6 percent of the city’s population, 64130 produces 20 percent of the city’s incarcerated killers. Blue Hills is in the Murder Factory.
Just adjacent to the Murder Factory is the plot where Electric Park, the inspiration for Disneyland, used to be. It burned down in 1925; today it’s low-income housing. As you keep going past Thirty-first Street, just one block east of Troost, you pass Walt Disney’s old Laugh-O-Gram animation studio, now an empty husk left exposed to the elements. Somewhere east of that is Disney’s elementary school. After going black, by the 1980s it had been shuttered, too. Turn right off Troost at Armour Boulevard, and that takes you four blocks east to the Paseo. The Paseo was once the gilded heart of nineteenth-century Kansas City. Most of its mansions are long gone. Park Avenue–style apartment buildings, once imposing and grand, now sit either boarded up or packed with tenants on government Section 8 vouchers.
Take Paseo all the way up and you come to the center of Eighteenth and Vine. Today it’s a shell of its former self. The city has tried to make it into a historic district and tourist destination; there’s a new jazz museum and a Negro Leagues baseball museum. But with the exception of Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue—the kind of old-line institution where politicians go to have their picture put up on the wall with a big plate of ribs—there’s not a whole lot going on. It’s not a living place. When Robert Altman made his 1996 film Kansas City, he restored Eighteenth and Vine to its Depression-era heyday with a hefty dose of movie magic, painting fake storefronts on plywood in the windows of abandoned buildings up and down the street. Fourteen years later, the fake storefronts are still here: old Negro taxi stands, dance clubs, soul-food joints. Lifeless replicas of a long-gone era, cracked and peeling in the winter chill.
Pull a U-t
urn and head back west of Troost, and you find a very different scene. The skyscrapers of downtown are just three minutes away. Twenty years ago, even the white man’s business district was a ghost town, almost totally abandoned. Now everything is shiny and new, completely gentrified and reborn. In the past decade, massive government reinvestment in downtown has created the glittering Sprint Center sports arena and the KC Power and Light District, an open-air shopping mall of restaurants, bars, and movie theaters right in the middle of the city. The once blighted warehouse district just south of the downtown loop is now the trendy Crossroads neighborhood, chock-full of wine bars and artists’ lofts and other things that require exposed brick. A bit farther south, you’ll pass the World War I memorial and the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum and come to Ward Parkway, which runs crosswise along Brush Creek before turning south to cut a magnificent, tree-canopied corridor through Kansas City’s Country Club District.
Sitting less than two miles from the urban blight of Troost, the Country Club District is one of the most beautiful cityscapes ever built by man. The city’s rigid north-south grid yields to curving, winding boulevards and cul-de-sacs that run with the gently rolling topography. The homes are stately and grand. Impressive, but rarely ostentatious, every house sits perfectly situated with regard to the trees and lawns that surround it. The Country Club Plaza is home to all the nice restaurants and high-end retailers. Pembroke Hill, the finest college prep school in the city, is nestled at the heart of the area. It’s just a quick stroll from Jacob Loose Park, the jewel of the city’s public park system.
And we haven’t even gotten to the good part.
Just across the Kansas state line is the toniest of the Country Club District’s many subdivisions: Mission Hills. The most sought-after zip code in town. Home to the Kansas City Country Club, one of the nation’s finest and most exclusive. Mission Hills is where houses become mansions, where driveways have gates and sometimes bridges and moats. It’s suburbia’s molten core. There’s even fresh, piping-hot pizza delivered right to your door anytime you want. You just pick up the phone and call. And nearly all of this—pretty much everything that exists from here looking south and sprawling west into Kansas—sprang fully formed from the brain of a single man, real estate magnate J. C. Nichols.
In the twentieth century, Kansas City produced two uniquely American geniuses who would both forever alter the physical and cultural landscape of the country. One of these men built a magic kingdom, a fantasy world that offered nonstop, wholesome family fun and a complete escape from reality. The other one moved to Hollywood and opened a theme park.
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“Have You Seen the Country Club District?”
During the first half of the twentieth century, Jesse Clyde Nichols was the most influential real estate developer in the United States. One could make the argument that he still holds that title today, despite being dead for sixty years. Neither J. C. Nichols nor Walt Disney was an inventor. Disney didn’t invent “fun.” He built a company that took amusement and made it into a product. Then he packaged it, commodified it, and sold it. J. C. Nichols did the same thing for the ground beneath our feet.
At the end of the industrial revolution, America’s cities were ugly. Factories and meatpacking plants belched coal fumes into the sky. Residential districts grew haphazardly around them. There was little beauty and less order. Cities had not yet fully grasped the idea of zoning—setting aside green space for parks, cordoning off industrial enterprise from residential quarters and dictating, in turn, how those residences should be built. Wealthier home owners had their Fifth Avenues and their Paseos, but even those had no zoning laws to protect them. Build your three-story mansion, and there was nothing to stop a feedlot for hogs from going in across the way. In the nineteenth century, neighborhoods rose and collapsed at random, destroying accumulated property values in the process.
For residential property, that began to change with Llewellyn Park, the country’s first high-end suburban development, founded in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1853. Four years later came Lake Forest outside Chicago, the first neighborhood ever built around a golf course. Similar developments followed in Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia. For the well-heeled, these places became oases from urban life, protected by the use of restrictive covenants—stipulations embedded in the property deeds that designated minimum lot size and number of bedrooms, and also forbade unwelcome intrusions.
In Kansas City, Missouri, J. C. Nichols would radically expand and revolutionize people’s ideas of what restrictive covenants could do. In his neighborhoods, he used them to specify the placement of every tree and the curve in every sidewalk. He learned how to make a city do what he wanted it to. Nichols also pioneered and innovated the use of “public-private partnerships.” Once upon a time, municipal governments had the crazy idea to plan their city grids themselves, as was done in New York and Philadelphia. Nichols led the way in making deals with city and county officials in which taxpayers would pay to build out an area’s infrastructure, but they would do it according to his needs, which then allowed him to plan subdivisions to attract the wealthiest residents, whose property taxes would then flow back into the government’s coffers. In his spare time, Nichols invented the shopping mall. In 1922, he opened the Plaza, America’s first-ever retail center designed specifically for the automobile. When Nichols built it, he was ridiculed. Who would ever drive out to the middle of nowhere? In a car? To shop?
But Nichols’s most important contribution to the way we live wasn’t something he invented himself. He just perfected it. And the thing he perfected was the all-white neighborhood, hardwired with restrictive covenants that dictated not only the size and shape of the house but the color of the people who could live inside. This idea, the racialization of space, would take root deep in the nation’s consciousness, for both whites and blacks alike, becoming so entrenched that all the moral might of the civil rights crusade was powerless to dislodge it. In the South, Jim Crow was just the law. In Kansas City, J. C. Nichols turned it into a product. Then he packaged it, commodified it, and sold it. Whiteness was no longer just an inflated social status. Now it was worth cash money.
J. C. Nichols was born in 1880 to a prosperous family of merchants in the small farm town of Olathe, Kansas, but he wouldn’t be content to stay there long. Just across the border in Missouri, Kansas City was booming.
Founded as a frontier trading post dead in the center of the continental United States, Kansas City had grown to become the starting point of the Oregon, Santa Fe, and California trails. When the industrial revolution came, factories and stockyards drew people to the city by the thousands, black and white. They all needed somewhere to live.
At the outset of the Civil War, Kansas City’s black population had consisted of just 166 slaves and 24 free people of color. By 1900, it had reached 17,567, roughly 11 percent of the total, which itself had more than quintupled since the war. Blacks were coming west in part to seek opportunity, but also to escape the insidious rise of Jim Crow in the old Confederacy; the legal system of segregation that J. C. Nichols would soon privatize was just then taking shape in the Deep South.
When threatened by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, whites often spoke of segregation in fevered, delusional terms, as if it had been ordained by God, like it had been man’s natural state since the dawn of time. It hadn’t. Measured from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 to Brown v. Board in 1954, the lifespan of constitutionally sanctioned segregation was only fifty-eight years—exactly the same length as the professional recording career of Frank Sinatra. During Reconstruction, blacks and whites in the South had often coexisted freely in restaurants, railcars, and other public accommodations. Even after Reconstruction ended with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise in 1877, an entire decade would pass before the first Jim Crow statute showed up on the books in a Southern state.
This is not to say that Southern race relations were good, but they were not yet predicated on the absolute necessity o
f racial separatism. In his seminal civil rights text, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, historian C. Vann Woodward noted the experience of one T. McCants Stewart, a black man from Boston traveling through South Carolina in 1885. Stewart reported from the Palmetto State that he could “go into saloons… and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England.” The whites of the South, he felt, “are really less afraid to [have] contact with colored people than the whites of the North.”
Indeed, as Jim Crow laws began cropping up for debate in Southern statehouses, they were often derided as unnecessary—even absurd. In 1898, the year South Carolina passed its first Jim Crow statute, the conservative Charleston News and Courier ran a scathingly satirical essay on the sheer ridiculousness of it all. “If there must be Jim Crow cars on the railroads,” it said, “there should be Jim Crow cars on the street railways. Also on all passenger boats… and waiting saloons at all stations… and Jim Crow eating houses… and Jim Crow sections of the jury box… and a Jim Crow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss.…” And so on. Within a few years, nearly everything the editorial had predicted as a joke had actually come to pass.
The turnabout was driven by fear. The ideology of white supremacy used to justify slavery had been rooted in the notion that blacks were somehow less than human, childlike in their feeblemindedness. They were destined to be kept—even happy to be kept—in a state of bondage. The working relationship between master and slave was one of physical proximity, not separateness. By the 1880s and 1890s, however, the economic dislocations of the industrial revolution and global trade had triggered a recurring cascade of market panic and financial insecurity. Across the South, a populist People’s Party rose up in an effort to galvanize the working class—black and white, reaching across the color line—to rise up against the robber baron industrialists and landowning aristocrats who exploited their labor. The ruling class in the South had no interest in dealing with a third party that united working-class blacks and whites in a solid voting majority. Fortunately for them, any popular uprising built on racial cooperation was a fragile one, quickly divided and easily conquered.
