Some of My Best Friends Are Black (23 page)

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 committed 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.

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.