Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  Black Power began with the premise that the community needed to control its own turf. In its more radical and fantastical conceptions, this idea manifested itself in calls to break off part of the continental United States and form a Republic of New Africa. At the more practical end of the spectrum, urban leaders simply called for rejecting the obtuse white paternalism that had botched all the school and housing issues in the first place. Black America’s needs were such that only black America knew how to fix them. In urban communities across the country, black-run organizations sprang up, advocating for a community-based nationalism: black consumers shopping in black business districts with black dollars. Through collective action they would police their own neighborhoods, teach their own school curriculum, organize tenants to lobby for better living conditions—control their own destiny in every regard. Given the aims that racial solidarity intended to achieve, any notion of integrated housing was anathema. Blacks should have the right to live anywhere, of course, but given that right, it was still politically and culturally advantageous to stick together. Integration meant dispersal, being dissolved into white America, destroying the black community as they knew it.

  The idea that black America should control its own turf fell apart, unfortunately, when faced with an inconvenient truth: black people didn’t have enough turf. In 1970, black families held just 3.5 percent of the total housing equity in the country, and their holdings in commercial real estate were far less than that. In the great American game of Monopoly, Black Power essentially told white people we could keep all our hotels on Broadway and Park Place because blacks were going to take back Baltic and Mediterranean, and that would show everybody. But as one open-housing advocate pointed out, “If there were any relationship between blacks per square foot and power enjoyed, ghetto people would be the most powerful people in the world.”

  If black America wanted to assert control over black turf, it would have to surrender the fight over how business was done on the white turf, which was pretty much all of the turf. That was the devil’s deal that black politicians and community groups had to make, and that’s the deal Freedom, Inc. made in Kansas City, Missouri. “It was the same as in Detroit or Birmingham or other cities where blacks were either in the majority or near the majority,” Brooks explains. “People were saying the only way to hold this stronghold was to let white folks run and flee—it was pretty much said without saying it. If it had not been for that, Freedom, Inc. would not have been as strong as it was.”

  Behind its long list of successfully elected officials, Freedom, Inc.’s official bio boasts of having built strong coalitions in Kansas City’s second, third, seventh, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth voting wards. This is touted as a sign of strength, but if you take a ruler to a map of those districts and draw a straight line north to south along their western boundaries, you’ll find that it runs right down the middle of Troost Avenue. Black solidarity required not only accepting the Berlin Wall but reinforcing it from the inside.

  Over on the white turf, largely unchallenged, housing discrimination just kept right on. With opposition-free, white Republican majorities, the suburbs of Johnson County voted to cordon themselves off from “undesirable” residents in ways that weren’t explicitly discriminatory: jacking up property taxes, opting out of public transit systems, restricting their zoning codes to prohibitively expensive homes, etc. Redlining by banks and racial steering by brokers lived on well into the eighties and nineties (and they continue in more subtle forms right up to the present). In those rare cases where suburban developers were legally compelled to create mixed-race or low-income housing, it was generally clustered, “warehoused,” shunted off to some part of the county where there was no chance it would spoil the view from the eighteenth fairway. Back in Kansas City proper, with so little done to stem the tide of white flight, property values cratered. In the 1980s, the Nichols Company and other developers went on a buying spree, scooping up land that buffered the Plaza and the Country Club District. Whole neighborhoods were bought for pennies on the dollar, then leveled to make way for high-end condos, office towers, and luxury hotels. Meanwhile, the black side of town remained the black side of town. The only time white people had to think about east of Troost was to remind themselves not to go there.

  Gene Hardy was quite right about the 49/63 Coalition: the biggest thing they accomplished was proving that “you could have black and white living in the same neighborhood and it didn’t go to pot.” Which sounds good, but “not going to pot” is pretty much the baseline of what should be expected from a functional human society.

  Blacks and whites in 49/63 shared the same zip code but they didn’t share much else; it would be a stretch to call them “neighbors” in the true sense of the word. White social life oriented west, toward the university. Black social life oriented east and north, to the churches and clubs that had always sustained the black community. The races coexisted; they did not coalesce. And even though the left-wing intellectuals were running 49/63, not every white person on the block was nearly so progressive. There were more than a few Archie Bunkers still hanging around.

  Blacks who resisted integration were not being unreasonable. Where exactly was the average black person in Kansas City supposed to go to integrate himself when the only successfully integrated neighborhood in town was not, in fact, an integrated neighborhood? Back when he was The Guy Who Handled the Racial Stuff, Alvin Brooks found no shortage of racial stuff to deal with in 49/63. “They had problems,” he says. White folks were still testy, still beefing over turf. It was generally some trivial matter, too, the kind of thing normal neighbors could have settled with a talk across the fence. “You’d have older white neighbors without any kids,” Brooks says, “and you’d have a young black couple in their thirties with a couple of kids and their bicycles and tricycles, the dog pissing and crapping in the white person’s yard. And I was the one who got the complaints. I had a feeling in many cases there was an underlying reason of race; it was race in terms of what they made it. It was inevitable. I think there were whites who were afraid of being called nigger lovers, blacks who were fearful of being called Uncle Toms for aiding and abetting the whites. It was a trying experience for both to try and deal with that—damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

  In the end, most people didn’t. Ed Hood spent years at the center of one of the most carefully and conscientiously integrated neighborhoods in the country. Today he can sum up a decade’s worth of social interaction between blacks and whites in a single word: “Limited.”

  But that was the parents. Their children tell a different story.

  Despite enduring the worst of the blockbusting on the area’s eastern frontier, Susan Kurtenbach’s family had stayed on Lydia Avenue. Most of her neighbors were black. “I remember right next door to me there was a girl maybe a year younger than me,” Susan says. “I used to love going over to her house. It was the first black family on the block that had kids. The music, the life there. I was just in awe. It always smelled wonderful, just a little different than our house, and I was always welcome because I was their daughter’s little friend.

  “Our parents didn’t socialize. I don’t remember the grown-ups ever having dinner at each other’s houses or that type of thing, but the kids would play together without any problem. I remember going to a birthday party where everyone was dancing, and thinking, Wow, this is so cool. This doesn’t happen at my birthday parties. I think we really liked exploring some of the differences.”

  From the other side of the color line, Helen Palmer reports the same. She might not have been involved in the neighborhood, but “my kids got along fine with everybody,” she says, “and today they all have more white friends than they do black.”

  In those years, 49/63 had two elementary schools, Nelson and Troost. Located in the southeast corner of the neighborhood, Troost had taken the brunt of the blockbusting. Plus its boundaries stretched east of Paseo, so it
had flipped from 5 percent black in 1969 to 72 percent black in 1973. By the end of the decade it had maybe a few token whites. By contrast, Nelson served the area of the community where housing had stabilized the most. Nelson’s classes averaged between 20 and 30 percent black, but the school wasn’t just racially balanced. It was integrated. It had a black principal, Yvonne Wilson, and black and white parents serving together on the PTA. Pat Jesaitis’s daughter, Colleen, went to Nelson, and, to her memory, everyone got along swell. It was all very mixed. Most of the black kids still lived east of Troost, she says, and they would play together on either side without any understanding of what that meant. The only thing she recalls being a point of racial contention was whether you wanted an Osmonds poster or a Jackson 5 poster for your bedroom. “I had the Jacksons,” Colleen says.

  The 49/63 area was hardly a model of racial harmony. What its home owners achieved, on their best day, was a wary, arm’s-length cease-fire. But what they created was a place where children maybe, possibly, had a chance to shed the racial baggage of their fathers. To the kids who grew up here, all you needed to get across the Berlin Wall was a bicycle. A world of mixed-race peers was perfectly normal. Very few children in Kansas City had that chance. Every “racially balanced” public school in the city had been artificially engineered by court-ordered busing. Pandas in captivity, every single one. Except at Nelson. There, all the kids felt that this was their school because all the kids, black and white, walked to school. Through years of dedicated effort, 49/63 had created the only residentially integrated school in the entire district.

  Then the city shut it down.

  Once school busing moved from the small towns of the South to the major metropolitan areas of the North, it stopped making sense. The Supreme Court’s mandate for America’s schools was to eliminate the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation “root and branch.” But the root of the school problem was always the housing problem. Since nothing was done to fix the housing problem, by the time school desegregation plans became law, everybody was already running for the exits. Trying to corral the suburban stampede with a bunch of school buses was like herding cats. Actually, it was worse than herding cats. It was herding white people, earth’s only species with a greater sense of entitlement than a cat.

  Though legally required, busing was logistically impossible, especially since so many whites had already fled. For Detroit to have met the standard of racial balance set by HEW in the late 1960s, it would have had to expand its bus fleet by 295 new vehicles at a cost of over $12,000 each in order to move 310,000 children across 53 independent school districts at a hard cost of $25 per student per month—at a time when the Detroit school system was already several million dollars in debt. The city of Los Angeles, to meet its court-ordered desegregation remedy, would have had to redistribute 60,000 students across a school district that covered 710 square miles.

  To comply with HEW’s mandates, Kansas City had adopted its first desegregation plan in 1969. By the mid-1970s, the district’s enrollment had already fallen by a third, from 75,000 pupils to less than 50,000. More students were leaving each year, meaning more busing was needed to even out the racial balance, which then prompted more people to leave, which meant even more busing the year after that. It was a program built to self-destruct.

  Stuck in the middle of this madness was Nelson Elementary. Nelson remained stable and integrated because of a release valve, a transfer policy that allowed 49/63’s high schoolers to attend the majority-white Southwest High rather than the east side schools they were technically zoned for, all of which had flipped to 99 percent black. In the summer of 1974, the school board announced that all transfers sending white students west of Troost were suspended; those students had to be used to balance out the attendance rolls on the east side. So 49/63 sued.

  “Here we are,” Ed Hood says, “we’re obviously having tension between the races, and these white kids would have to go to a 99 percent black school? People weren’t going to do it. They would move. We filed the lawsuit to stop the federal desegregation effort because it was shortsighted. It countered what we were trying to do residentially, which was working.” After the suit, the school board reversed itself, allowing 49/63’s kids to stay at Southwest. Then, the following February, HEW came down harder, threatening to cut off $1.6 million in school funding if whites were allowed transfers. The board reversed its reversal and announced—on just a few days’ notice, in the middle of the school year—that hundreds of children would be taken from their classrooms and bused to completely different schools. Still today, Ed Hood is dumbfounded at the memory of it. “Pull ’em out in February and send ’em to a different school? It made no sense. Not only did it adversely affect our de facto integrated neighborhood, it would damage the kids. But the district was in a bind. HEW would not relent. They were stupid. They didn’t realize it would make things worse.”

  The coalition won an injunction and kept the transfers in place, but it was only a temporary reprieve. By the end of the 1980–1981 school year, between the plummeting enrollment, the shrinking tax base, and the $5.5 million a year it cost to cart all those kids around to comply with HEW, the district was broke. It was time to start closing schools, and Nelson was on the chopping block. With 171 pupils, Nelson was up against the nearest elementary school to the west, Border Star. Upon review, the committee charged with assessing each school’s performance decided that Border Star should remain open; with 318 students, it was the larger school and therefore the more viable choice, the committee said. Nelson’s parents fought back, asking that their school be considered an exception. Border Star was larger, yes, but only artificially. Most of the neighborhood kids there had already been spirited away to private school. Two-thirds of Border Star’s enrollment came through busing at a cost of $287 per kid per year. The cost of busing at Nelson was zero dollars, and the cost to bus 171 kids out of Nelson was nearly $50,000 a year. And Nelson was actually integrated. With the district under court order to produce integration, surely that had to count for something.

  All through the summer, 49/63’s parents were kept in limbo, wondering if their school would stay open. They held bake sales, sold bumper stickers—everything they could think of to raise money to fight on. But by the fall of 1981, when the morning bell rang on the first day of school, the district had stuck by its decision to close the only integrated school in Kansas City, pack its children onto buses, and send them across town to create racial balance at some other schools someplace else.

  * The black newspaper’s official stance at the time was not to fight racial covenants, but to expand Eighteenth and Vine to the east and improve the all-black neighborhood from within.

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  Desirable Associations

  The fate of any residential neighborhood is bound to the fate of its schools. After Nelson closed, the center of 49/63 couldn’t hold. The coalition stayed active, but the headlines in its monthly newsletter once again chart a fairly extreme change in priorities. Around the mid-eighties, “DONATIONS FOR SPRING RUMMAGE SALE!” gradually gives way to “DRUG HOUSES: A SCOURGE ON OUR NEIGHBORHOOD.”

  In 1987, after two terms of Reagan-era prosperity, 49/63’s annual crime report listed 2 murders, 4 rapes, 5 acts of arson, 53 assaults, 292 residential burglaries, 67 nonresidential burglaries, and 296 incidents of auto theft. And that was a 3 percent decrease from the year before. The decade of crack cocaine and the “War on Drugs” brought a slow, grinding decline. Kinko’s had opened a location on Troost, but its free business-phone service quickly proved an effective communications hub for crack dealers to answer their pagers. That closed. So did the Blockbuster and the Kroger. The new black-owned Buick dealership shut down. Soon the neighborhood’s main commercial anchors were an auto garage and Go Chicken Go, a drive-through takeout for wings.

  In the mid-1980s, Kansas City was still beholden to HEW’s racial balance mandates, but the city had long since run out of white kids to go around. The courts ordered the cit
y to ramp up its desegregation efforts even further, pushing a busing and magnet school program that would ultimately cost $1.7 billion and leave the district on the verge of bankruptcy. By the time the Supreme Court invalidated the plan in 1995, the population of white students had declined even further, and pretty soon black flight was under way, too. Integration fatigue. Black people were tired of chasing white people. Whites went west to Johnson County. Blacks went east into new, middle-class black suburbs like Raytown.

  In 49/63, Susan Kurtenbach stayed. So did Helen Palmer. But Pat Jesaitis got a divorce and moved on. Gene and Maureen Hardy left, too, their equity taking a hit as the neighborhood went down. “We stayed too long,” Gene says.

  Ed and Mary Hood eventually packed it in as well. “We were heavily involved for six or seven years,” Ed says. “I know personally we must have spent thirty hours a week on it, each, while she was trying to raise kids and I was teaching at the law school. It ate up our lives.”

  By the end, even Joe Beckerman said good-bye—Jimmy Stewart gave up on Bedford Falls. The rampant crime, the empty houses. Staying didn’t make sense. By that point Beckerman had done well for himself, he says. He could afford to live anywhere he wanted. So when he remarried in 1987, he rented out his house on Forest Avenue, and he and his new wife bought a home in the Country Club District’s Mission Hills. “It’s the real la-di-da part of town, of course,” Beckerman says. “I lived over there in this nice, fancy place. But after three years of that, I eventually looked around and said to myself, ‘What the heck am I doin’ here?’ And I moved back east of Troost.”