by Tanner Colby
The white supremacist ideology that had underpinned slavery was still baked into the country’s mentality. No longer held in check by the civil rights protections of Reconstruction, those feelings of racial superiority were easily stoked. As populists tried to tie the economic ascendance of blacks and whites together into common cause, the ruling establishment painted the economic ascendance of blacks as a threat to decent white society. Birmingham, Alabama, being the most segregated city in America, was a textbook example of Jim Crow at work. In the 1890s, Alabama’s big planters and industrialists drummed up fears of the Negro menace to get whites behind a poll tax to disenfranchise blacks. Whites supported it, and 98 percent of Alabama’s voting-age blacks were stricken from the rolls. But those same restrictions left thirty-five percent of eligible white voters disenfranchised, too; numerically speaking, more whites lost the right to vote than blacks. When union leaders from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) came South to organize blacks and whites in the steel mills for better working conditions, U.S. Steel put thugs from the Ku Klux Klan on its payroll to terrorize anyone who engaged in union activities. The company also founded its own League to Maintain White Supremacy, which educated workers on the dangers of race mixing and tarred the CIO as “the nigger union.” Driven by racial animus, the white steelworkers of Birmingham spurned the one organization actively lobbying for their own interests, siding instead with the very company that was exploiting them.
But for those keen to present blacks as a threat, the stereotype of blacks as feebleminded children was of little use—children pose no threat. Racism required an overhaul. Blacks needed to be dangerous, disease ridden, violent. These images were pumped into the public consciousness through the work of newspaper propagandists and political demagogues. Scientists got behind the notion, too, propagating biological and psychological theories to explain the black man’s animal nature and his criminal appetites. Leading this charge, same as it had with slavery, was the church. For four hundred years, Christian priests and pastors had exhorted whites to reach down and lift up our little brown brothers for whom Christ also died, to hug them closer to God’s bosom. Now those same clergy pivoted 180 degrees. They started peddling a segregationist theology—God had ordained the separation of the races to keep them pure. A Nashville clergyman, Buckner H. Payne, sold a translation of the Bible in which the devil in the Garden of Eden wasn’t actually a serpent but a Negro man-beast. Race mixing wasn’t just a sin; it was the original sin. And the “serpent” that Eve found so tempting was… well, you can guess what it was. Forbidden fruit, indeed.
Even though Jim Crow did not come north and west as a fully articulated legal framework, the mentality behind it proved highly adaptable to cooler climes. At the turn of the century, many of Kansas City’s blacks lived in enclaves like the Vine Street corridor, Belvedere Hollow, Church Hill, and in one of the worst slums any city has ever seen: Hell’s Half Acre. But these weren’t “ghettos.” Before 1900, no city in America had a black ghetto or even what you’d call a majority-black neighborhood. America had plenty of slums, but it didn’t have ghettos—there’s a difference. A slum is a place with deplorable living conditions. A ghetto, technically defined, is a slum where certain people are compelled to live by law or by extralegal threat (e.g., the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw or the Bantustans of South Africa).
In Kansas City, working-class blacks lived not in ghettos but in apartments and row houses alongside Irish, German, and Italian laborers. A small percentage of black professionals and skilled laborers lived in modest single-family homes among whites of the same socioeconomic class. In 1900, the typical black resident of Kansas City lived in an area that was less than 14 percent black. At such a small percentage of the population, they were of little worry to white Kansas City. Indeed, they were so geographically dispersed, there was no one place you could point to if you wanted to highlight the dangers of “the black side of town.”
The evolution of Eighteenth and Vine as an ethnic enclave was organic, at first. As more blacks came west, they naturally sought company with people they knew. Families reached back and sent home train tickets to bring relatives out. Cousins followed cousins. The established helped the newcomers find jobs, find the right church, meet a nice girl. A strong, tight-knit community began to form, bound together by relationships forged in the Sunday pews and in the after hours. Community brought purpose. Black civic leaders grew more assertive in calls for civil rights and equality. Black workers began going on strike to demand better pay and better working conditions. In 1904, the livery drivers’ union went on strike, led by a majority-black coalition. Black meatpackers did the same. But in becoming a more visible presence, in making demands for economic rights and civic equality, blacks could also be more easily scapegoated as a threat, same as they had been in Alabama.
Before 190o, Kansas City’s black newspapers contained not one report of purposeful discrimination aimed at keeping blacks out of a residential area. By 1907, white real estate brokers would only sell or rent to blacks inside the Vine Street corridor. In 1911, on the still-white fringe of Vine Street, a house was dynamited when a black family tried to move in, the city’s first recorded incident of violence being used to protect a “white” neighborhood. Only one suspect was arrested and sentenced for the crime—a black man charged with trying to scare off whites so blacks could take over. More bombings followed.
As the Great Migration gathered steam in 1910, former sharecroppers came pouring out of the plantation South, seeking the economic rewards of the industrial North and Midwest. Hemmed in on all sides, Eighteenth and Vine grew denser. Jerry-built “apartments” were tacked onto tenement homes in back alleys. Families were crowded into crudely subdivided basements. One survey conducted in 1912 found that 20 percent of the houses in Eighteenth and Vine lacked any water supply at all, 50 percent had no sink, and bathtubs averaged one per every twenty-two residents. Infection rates ran twice the city average for pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases. By 1920, the population of Eighteenth and Vine had nearly doubled in size. At the same time, it had gone from 25 percent black to 75 percent black. Kansas City had its first ghetto.
The driving force that shaped this ghetto was the local Democratic Party. In the city and county elections of 1908, the Democrats had little to run on. Republicans dominated Missouri politics at the time, and the economy was humming along, giving them a strong advantage. But Republicans were also the Party of Lincoln, with a loyal and growing black constituency. If these “dangerous” blacks were seen as a threat to public safety, with the Republicans responsible for helping blacks usurp whites, the Democrats might orchestrate a return to power.
In 1905, a black male guard at a women’s penitentiary, hired under Republican city rule, had allegedly beaten a white female inmate. This guard would be the Democrats’ political cudgel, their Willie Horton. The left-leaning Kansas City Post trumpeted every report of black murder or theft, illustrating its pages with bug-eyed black monkeys riding Republican elephants and truncheon-wielding black gorillas beating white women. Republicans had infested Kansas City’s government with “Negro brutes.” A vote for the GOP would make Kansas City “the stronghold of Negro equality in the whole United States.” In November of 1908, the Democrats swept every available seat in the county.*
This new Democratic political machine, run by “Boss Tom” Pendergast, would control Kansas City for the next thirty years. To keep that position, the party would have to appease whites’ now hysterical concerns over the Negro threat to public safety—a threat, of course, that didn’t actually exist. All the organized crime and vice in Kansas City was controlled by… well, by the Democratic Party, which was in bed with the mafia. So in order to “reduce crime,” Boss Tom moved all the white-owned brothels and gambling houses into the heart of Eighteenth and Vine. There he gave the vice trade free license to operate so long as the racketeering, whoring, violence, and murder were kept away from anybody who mattered.
“HAVE YOU SEEN THE COUNTRY CLUB DISTRICT? 1,000 ACRES RESTRICTED FOR THOSE WHO WANT PROTECTION.”
Thus blared the headline of an advertisement heralding the launch of J. C. Nichols’s brand-new suburban development—christened in 1908, the same year Kansas City’s Democratic machine rode the Negro menace to political victory.
Just six years before, Nichols had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Kansas. Then it was off to grad school at Harvard. Returning to Kansas City, he undertook a few modestly successful ventures and used the profits to buy up a vast tract of seemingly worthless land in the middle of nowhere along the Kansas-Missouri border: an old garbage dump, an abandoned racing track, a brickyard, several tracts of farmland. Then he started building.
J. C. Nichols didn’t sell houses. He sold “suburbia.” He sold a way of thinking about residential living that in turn created the demand for houses in neighborhoods that he owned. According to Nichols, the right protections and restrictions could create an island of certainty and stability in an uncertain, unstable world. Escape “the commonplace of the city street” for “the refinement of the suburban estate,” his Sunday newspaper ads declared.
Having sold this beautiful empty space cordoned off from the tumult of daily life, Nichols then had to give it life. People needed something to do. For the ladies, he started lawn beautification contests and competitive flower shows. To feed the male ego, there was golf and the prestige of membership in the right club. For the kids, Nichols organized annual “Community Field Days” with three-legged races and model-boat regattas. He didn’t invent these sorts of activities. What he did, in the words of one biographer, was to synthesize them. He scheduled them accordingly with the seasons, and gave them the imprimatur of time-honored tradition. He created a culture for a place that had no culture of its own. Nichols even had a name for it. He called it “community work.” Community work fell squarely under the purview of his company’s public relations department. It wasn’t really culture at all. It was just advertising.
Underneath all that, the bedrock of suburbia’s appeal, as Nichols framed it, was the idea that a certain kind of physical space was inherently more virtuous than another. The right kind of leafy green cul-de-sac—and the right kind of neighbors—were essential to raising children with proper Christian and American values. A man’s choice of home said something about his moral character. Is your family a Mission Hills kind of family? What kind of man lets his children live on that side of town? In billboards and newspaper ads, Nichols drove his message home again and again:
Wouldn’t you and yours take pride in a home built in the Country Club District… where your children will get the benefit of an exclusive environment and the most desirable associations?
Children’s lives are affected by the atmosphere in which they are reared. Give them the advantages of out-of-doors living, pure fresh air, desirable associations and beautiful surroundings.
Desirable associations. Subtle. But when translated into legal terminology on Nichols’s property deeds, the meaning of the phrase is perfectly clear: “None of said land may be conveyed to, used, owned, or occupied by negroes as owners or tenants.”
This was the racial covenant, and it would be Nichols’s most lasting contribution to America.* The flaw in racial covenants, as they had been used before Nichols, was that they were applied only to the deed of the individual lot for sale. You could have a whole block of individually restricted houses. If one person decided to sell to a black family and get out, there was little his neighbors could do, legally, to stop that from happening.* Then, in 1909, J. C. Nichols broke ground on Sunset Hill and Country Side, the first of his developments laid out on land unencumbered by earlier deed restrictions. Here, he attached the racial covenant not to the deed for the lot, but to the plat for the entire subdivision. Thus it became harder for one person to break.
Property restrictions at the time were also typically written to expire after a decade or two; as much as stability was sought, most developers allowed that property owners’ needs might change. Nichols disagreed. His faith in his own vision for Kansas City was such that he wanted it to be in place for his grandchildren’s grandchildren. “Planning for Permanence” was his company’s lofty motto, and he meant it. Starting in 1911, with Country Club Ridge, Nichols began writing his restrictive covenants to last twenty-five years with the option to renew. Two years later, when Nichols opened his crown jewel, Mission Hills, he went one better. He wrote all his property restrictions to be self-renewing every twenty-five years unless a group of owners controlling the most street-facing footage† opted to change those restrictions five years prior to the auto-renewal date. It was the first use of self-perpetuating racial covenants anywhere in the country, a fact often touted by Nichols himself. “Self-perpetuating restrictions,” boasted his new Sunday ads, “conceived by the developers of the Country Club District, solve the problem of shifting and declining residential sections, a menace to every city, including our own.”
Nichols’s greatest innovation would come in 1922 with the subdivision of Armour Hills. Up to that point, home owners in each successive Country Club District development had formed voluntary neighborhood associations for general upkeep. In Armour Hills, Nichols made membership in the neighborhood association a contractual obligation incumbent with the land purchase. He then assigned that association and its members full legal liability, alongside the Nichols Company, for maintaining and enforcing the property restrictions, racial and otherwise, for the entire community. Now the home, the home owner, the land, and the land developer were all legally bound together as one entity, protected by an impermeable contractual seal against any undesirable element that might seek to intrude. One by one, Nichols went back to the neighborhood groups for his other developments and proposed a similar arrangement. Each of the neighborhoods voted to adopt it. And, by this point, Nichols’s success had spurred on lots of local competitors. Developers were buying land adjacent to his and piggybacking on his efforts; they all eagerly copied his new template, too. The self-renewing, all-encompassing restrictions used in Armour Hills would become the foundation of nearly every neighborhood built in the Kansas City area from that point forward.
By 1923, Nichols was breaking ground on at least one new subdivision a year, and the sheer mass of his enterprise solidified the symbiotic, public-private relationship he’d been forging with municipal and county government. The city’s infrastructure—roads, transit, water, sewerage, gas, and electric—all pivoted and ran south by southwest, pulled by Nichols’s center of gravity, custom fit to meet his needs, and all at taxpayer expense. What was good for the Country Club District was good for Kansas City.
J. C. Nichols’s suburban creation was a masterpiece. Every last detail orchestrated just so, totally insulated from reality, and with plenty of room for parking. It was unlike anything most Americans had seen at the time. Ladies’ Home Journal called it “a lesson for all cities” to emulate. The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce named it “the most beautiful residential section in America.”
By the early 1920s, Nichols enjoyed a stature in the business that was without peer. He served as pr
esident, booster, or board member for a constellation of industry trade groups. President Calvin Coolidge called him “the father of city planning in the West” and appointed him to serve on the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, responsible for overseeing the development of Washington, D.C. Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman would retain him in that post until 1948. Hoover was a personal dinner guest at the Nichols home, twice.
In 1917, Nichols had also founded and chaired what would be one of the most influential organizations in the history of real estate: the Annual Conference of the Developers of High-Class Residential Property. Membership was open only to the most powerful real estate men in the country. At Nichols’s invitation, these men came together at annual confabs to share ideas and establish a set of industry best practices, including—as discussed quite openly and on the record—the best way to implement restrictive covenants to keep neighborhoods all white. Some developers wanted covenants extended to cover Jews, “Orientals,” and others. Others were undecided on whether to exclude all Jews or to let in the good Jews. There was no debate about blacks.
