Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  What made sense was to jettison the racist redlining standards and start lending in ways that didn’t further destabilize the urban infrastructure. Instead of investing only in “safe” neighborhoods, NHS used capital to make neighborhoods safe to invest in. Low-income prospects willing to take on a fixer-upper could get a flexible, minimal-interest mortgage, part of which could be worked off with sweat equity. Paint your house or resod your lawn, and the appraised value of the capital improvement went to pay down the principal of your original loan. If you hit a rough patch, you went down and talked to Joe Beckerman and he’d work with you on it, person-to-person, to find a solution. Helping you stay and improve your home’s value enhanced the value of the house next door and so on down the block, which only brought more business to the area. “Basically, it’s the perfect program,” Beckerman says, “and that’s why it’s still around today.”

  Neighborhood Housing Services worked because it wasn’t a bank. Its goal wasn’t to maximize the profit on each transaction, but to ensure the viability of the neighborhood, thus lowering the area’s overall risk and, ultimately, generating sustainable revenue. In its first year, NHS issued forty-six mortgage loans totaling $246,299, loans that would have been rejected by FHA standards as “high risk.” Nonetheless, coalition records show that after two years only five of those loans were thirty days in arrears. No resident was more than sixty days in arrears, and not a single NHS mortgage had resulted in foreclosure. Those same records show that in 1976 the average price of a three-bedroom home east of Troost was around $12,200. Since “the blacks” had moved in, property values had either held or gone up.

  “It was so simple,” Beckerman says.

  In the years that followed, 49/63 thrived. While banks were disinvesting from the city as fast as they could, the NHS program was so successful lending east of Troost that its operations soon expanded up to Thirty-ninth Street, and would later expand again. Through lobbying the city, the coalition had secured $60,000 to create a neighborhood park and over $800,000 for infrastructure improvements to curbs, streetlights, and sidewalks. More than five hundred delinquent properties were brought up to code, representing a private capital investment of over $680,000 in the neighborhood (about $2.3 million in today’s dollars). The results of this homegrown, seat-of-the-pants experiment took down every single myth on which white flight was based, including the big one. In 1976, the local police precinct reported that crime in the neighborhood, by every index, had gone down.

  Gene Hardy still shakes his head about the fears of black crime. “Everyone was saying, ‘The blacks are coming in! You’re gonna have crime!’ Hell, we had less crime in that neighborhood than anywhere else in the city. We didn’t lock our doors. Never had any problems as an interracial couple, either. We’d walk down the street, and everybody knew everybody.”

  If the archives of 49/63’s newsletter serve as any kind of barometer, by mid-decade the sense of fear and panic had widely subsided. The bold-type headlines on redlining and abandoned properties fell back to page three, and the front-page features focused on neighborhood arts festivals and Fourth of July barbecue tips. Expanding from its original goal of residential real estate protection, 49/63 launched an after-school tutoring program, a summer recreation program, and a Business Renewal and Redevelopment Corporation to maintain the commercial district on Troost. While the north end of the avenue had been long deserted, the stretch in 49/63 still had two grocery stores, a few drugstores, several college bars, a bowling alley, and a brand-new, black-owned Buick dealership.

  In terms of policy, nothing 49/63 did was all that revolutionary. The only thing that set it apart was the willingness to do it. Coalition members made 49/63 their lives, putting in twenty to thirty hours a week, on top of their regular jobs and family duties. It was a grind. “But it was fun,” Ed Hood insists. “I liked it.” Rallying around the neighborhood had galvanized the group, created a real sense of community that spilled over from council meetings to late-night dinners or drinks at Mike’s Tavern, one of the local bars down on Troost. It was the opposite of the neighborhood associations in the Country Club District, which weren’t really “neighborhood” associations at all. Those were more like corporate subcommittees, established by J. C. Nichols to maintain the artificial stasis of race and class that would inflate his company’s land values. The 49/63 Coalition was everything that a J. C. Nichols subdivision was not. Yet it offered in reality what Nichols had sold as fantasy: a community that fostered strong moral character and desirable associations.

  “The biggest thing we did,” Gene Hardy says, “was prove to the rest of the city that you could have black and white living in the same neighborhood and it didn’t go to pot. We had a ten-year stretch where it was the finest neighborhood there was.”

  “And we made a lot of friends,” Maureen Hardy adds.

  There was only one hitch to the whole 49/63 integration experiment: nobody made any black friends.

  * In 1966 and 1968, with the Democrats now owning the incendiary issue of race, the Party of Lincoln would reach back and copy verbatim the race-baiting playbook that had been used against it in Kansas City in 1908. “Every man’s home is his castle. Keep it that way. Vote Republican.”

  * In January of 1973, citing the rampant corruption in the 235 program and problems with HUD policy in general, President Nixon announced a moratorium on any and all federally subsidized housing efforts for the next eighteen months in order to “reevaluate the program’s effectiveness”—a handy excuse to neutralize any attempts to push integrated public housing into the suburbs.

  * Widespread loan discrimination couldn’t even be documented, much less litigated, until the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) in 1975, which compelled banks to disclose where and to whom they were making loans. Once that information became available, the Kansas City Star reported that $642 million in home mortgages were written in the metropolitan area in 1977, less than 1 percent of which was issued east of Troost.

  [4]

  Turf

  Despite being the leading proponent of residential integration in Kansas City, 49/63 itself was white, almost entirely white. Father Jim Bluemeyer remembers exactly what happened when the group first tried to move beyond that. “When we started,” he says, “we brought in some black people, good people, and they just thought we were crazy. They said, ‘This won’t work. Integrated neighborhood? You’re dreaming.’”

  Even as the coalition ramped up, black residents opted out. The few who did participate did so sparingly, and rarely for very long. “We didn’t have a lot,” Ed Hood says, “and it was very difficult to get them involved.”

  “I doubt if we had six,” Gene Hardy says of the group’s black volunteers, including himself. Most of the time, he was the only one there. “Blacks chose not to participate,” he says. “A lot of it was a lack of education and a lack of understanding. Maureen was on the board, but I worked fifteen hours a day, and then I took the time at night and went to the meetings. It’s a sacrifice to do something like that.”

  “There was a big difference in socioeconomic scale,” Ed Hood says. “Most of the coalition people were university people, and a lot of the African Americans coming in were on those 235 loans; they were coming out of the projects. Bridging that gap was problematic.”

  Helen Palmer moved her family onto Virginia Avenue in Troost Plateau in 1963. She was one of the black residents in the area and is still there today. “The woman I bought this house from,” Palmer says, “she was the type of person who would never let a black person inside. If she had to let a black person come in to do any kind of work for her, she would have to have another white person in here with her while the black person came in here and did the work. When blacks moved in, she moved out. Myself, I wasn’t afraid that it was all white. It was prejudiced, but I never had any harassment.”

  Nor did she have any involvement, mostly because she was never around. The university professors and stay-at-home moms who f
ormed the backbone of the coalition had a good deal more free time. Helen Palmer, like many blacks working two and three jobs to be “middle class,” did not. “At the time I moved in here,” she says, “I was working twelve hours a day, seven days a week at a printing shop. Did that for forty-two years. I would come home, have a little sleep, and get back to work. Never really had a day off, so I didn’t hear much about 49/63.”

  But the problem went deeper than conflicting schedules. As reported in coalition meeting minutes and status reports, the group’s lopsided racial makeup was a persistent and troubling concern. “We tried to find blacks who were willing to help out,” Pat Jesaitis says. “We found a couple. We had one guy from Chicago, this other black woman, Gene Hardy. When we had meetings on individual blocks, you’d get black families there, but that was a very slow process. And then they’d never come to the monthly planning meetings or really participate.

  “As the president, when a black family moved in, I’d go knock on their door to talk to them, welcome them, but my impression of it was that there was too much fear, too much ‘I don’t know if I believe this guy.’ We were just getting started, and they couldn’t see enough concrete evidence that we were with them, not trying to keep them out. There seemed to be a lot of mistrust.” It was more than mistrust.

  “49/63 was called racist,” says Alvin Brooks.

  Alvin Brooks joined the Kansas City Police Department as a patrolman in the early 1950s, one of only a handful of blacks on the force. Today, his career in public service is now entering its seventh decade, and he shows no sign of slowing down. Brooks has been elected to the city council, served for a period as mayor pro tem, and was most recently appointed to the police department’s board of commissioners. In the late 1960s, Brooks was serving as director of Kansas City’s Department of Human Relations—a vague title that translates roughly to “The Guy Who Handles the Racial Stuff.” Not too long after Pat Jesaitis started knocking on doors, Brooks started hearing talk about a group of white people calling themselves 49/63.

  “I attended some of the meetings,” Brooks recalls, “and you’d hear some very strange, but very familiar, voices from the whites. There was this whole plan of restricting how people could move in. You’d hear about ‘stabilizing the community.’ Stabilizing? What does that mean? It means keeping it as it is. Blacks had started to come in, and this group was worried about being overrun by blacks, so they were suspect. Integration? All of a sudden white folks wanted us to do this? There were some who heard these things and questioned why. Why now? We’d been duped before.”

  The 49/63 Coalition wasn’t the only group of well-meaning white folks left standing at the integration altar. At the height of the fair housing movement in Chicago, a group called Home Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) sent direct-response mailers to some eight hundred black organizations, advertising housing opportunities for black families in the suburbs. It received zero replies. In Los Angeles in the mid-seventies, community leaders in the sprawl of the San Fernando Valley thought they’d evade the government’s school desegregation dragnet by making their own racial balance, reaching out and encouraging upwardly mobile blacks to move to the area. Through the San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council, a $92,000 public awareness campaign was launched across local black radio and newspapers, urging city residents, “Move on into the Valley!” The council fielded only a hundred queries from black families. Of those, seven bought homes.

  For black America, the right to live wherever they wanted was a moral imperative. The reality of trying to exercise that right had bred a mistrust that bordered on fatalism. For years, blacks who set foot in certain working-class white neighborhoods were often beaten or harassed. Those who tried to buy had bricks hurled through their windows, their front porches burned. Blacks who made it out to middle-class suburbia endured a more refined and WASPy version of the same—indignant housewives with picket signs and a steady drumbeat of neighborly reminders that “maybe you’d just be more comfortable someplace else.” As early as 1926, the publisher of the Kansas City Call had written, “It is time wasted to try to prove to whites that they should not refuse to live as neighbors to Negroes.”*

  Alvin Brooks has spent almost his entire life policing the residential color line of Kansas City’s turf war. As a cop in the 1950s, the color line determined where he and other black cops could patrol: first the black neighborhood, then only low-end pockets of immigrants, never the middle-class whites. In 1960, he and his wife rode the first wave of blockbusting, buying a house not far from Walt Disney’s boyhood home. Only the fifth black family on the block, they were able to finance a mortgage without going through a bank. “I was a cop at the time making $560 a month,” he says. “My white counterparts could qualify, and although my credit was good and I had a steady job, if I had gone to a bank we would have had trouble. I would have had to put a lot of money down. We were lucky.” Many of his neighbors weren’t. Once optimistic about buying their stake in the American Dream, black home owners quickly grew frustrated as the blockbusting con played itself out. “Realtors were pretty slick. Black families were paying higher interest rates, getting sold these balloon mortgages. People got took. Integration wasn’t kind to those who it was supposed to be kind to.”

  Once Alvin Brooks overcame his initial doubts about 49/63, he came to see it as a good working model for other neighborhood groups in the city. But he also had a front-row seat to see the ways in which “integration” failed to be kind, as the government simultaneously did too much and not enough. Brooks watched as the north end of Eighteenth and Vine was plowed under to make way for the Wayne Miner Homes, five vertical towers of ultramodern public housing. Billed as the salvation of the urban poor, it turned into a vertical slum instead. Brooks was there when HUD opened up the money spigot of housing vouchers for low-income families while providing no safeguards against the systemic discrimination in how they were used—in effect further subsidizing residential segregation. “A few blacks ventured out into white neighborhoods with those Section 8 vouchers,” he says, “and they were fought. So most of it went back into the black community. Absentee landlords would fix up the house to Section 8 qualifications and rent it out because they knew it was good income. HUD was as guilty of perpetuating segregation as anyone.”

  Well before the 1960s stumbled to a close, faith in Martin Luther King’s idealistic, integrationist crusade had waned. Black frustration boiled over in the urban riots of Watts and Newark and Detroit. That frustration found a symbol and a voice when the young Stokely Carmichael raised his fist and issued a rallying cry of “Black Power!” during a Mississippi march in the summer of 1966. Integration, Carmichael and his coauthor Charles Hamilton wrote in their seminal Black Power manifesto, was simply an “insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.” It was a kind of cultural genocide, forcing blacks to assimilate—to “give up their identity” and “deny their heritage” in a servile, slavish imitation of white society—and all for naught as well. The white establishment, immune to appeals of conscience, was eternally racist, entirely dependent on exploiting the black underclass, and would never accept blacks as equals. “Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks,” went Black Power’s central thesis, comparing blacks to Jews and Italians, groups that had thrived in America through ethnic loyalty and solidarity. “Black people must lead and run their own organizations… consolidate behind their own, so that they can bargain from a position of strength.”

  This defiant, self-reliant streak of black nationalism had been present all along, from Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement to Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam. Now, with white America so clearly acting in bad faith, assertive calls for solidarity and self-empowerment struck a chord with many in the black community, especially the young. But at the same time, the power of King’s vision of a color-blind society proved enduring as well; it wasn’t so easily dismissed. In truth, the majority of black Americans at the time were not so commi
tted one way or the other. They didn’t want an ideology. They wanted jobs, housing, fair treatment under the law, opportunities for their children—they were going to throw in their lot with whoever or whatever delivered results. If integrated labor unions provided better wages, great. If integrated schools treated black principals like janitors, thanks but we’ll pass. According to one Ebony magazine poll in 1973, only 7 percent of blacks considered themselves “radicals” in the paramilitary Black Panther mold. A good 47 percent still wanted “traditional integration,” but a majority, close to 60 percent, also believed that some forms of separatism and solidarity were necessary to bolster the race and provide material progress. Strung between the poles of integration and separation, black America found itself in the very awkward position of needing both.

  In Kansas City, black citizens closed ranks through a coalition called Freedom, Inc. Originally a grassroots activist group, as the civil rights movement shifted from marching in the streets to working in city hall, Freedom, Inc. evolved into an urban political machine. “It became a real force to reckon with in the sixties, seventies, and eighties,” says Brooks, who has enjoyed the coalition’s backing in his runs for elected office. “They were able to negotiate, to get the first blacks elected to the city council.”

  The group has racked up a long list of African-American “firsts” in Kansas City: the first black city council members in 1962, the first black school board member in 1970, the first black mayor, Emanuel Cleaver, in the 1990s. The group has engineered more than a few electoral victories at the state and federal level as well. But like many all-black organizations, Freedom, Inc. was caught in the paradox of the moment. Even as the group lobbied for fair housing, school desegregation, and all the rest of it, the group’s power was rooted in maintaining a solid, majority-black voting bloc, which meant keeping black people right where they were.