Some of My Best Friends Are Black (24 page)

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 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 city 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.”

In 2009, Kansas City snagged a big chunk of federal stimulus funds for the Green Impact Zone, an urban planning initiative to rehabilitate east of Troost with energy-efficient, green technology. The first thing produced by the study was a block-level survey of every lot in the scorched-earth path created by blockbusting and redlining. The report shows huge swaths of foreclosures and abandoned houses, tear-downs with rotted roofs and cracked foundations. On some blocks, two-thirds of the houses are gone. That’s what was left of Walt Disney’s America after J. C. Nichols and Bob Wood were done with it.

Michael Duffy, managing attorney at Legal Aid of Western Missouri,
has been working on Kansas City housing issues since the late seventies. “Redlining caused a lot of homes to go into complete inhabitability,” Duffy explains. “There are some neighborhoods where 50 to 60 percent of the original homes have been torn down as being uninhabitable. The people who left are the people who could leave, leaving the people who stayed in the crappiest housing. They play musical chairs to stay in the viable houses, and the houses that need credit the most are the ones that get torn down.

“We spent a lot of time going after banks who literally said that the black area of town was not where they wanted to make loans. ‘We’re not going to do business there, period.’ You look at the lending maps and they made loans all in Johnson County, of course, and in the southwest quarter of Kansas City right up to Troost—just thick with loans—and then at Troost it just fell off to zero.”

And, once again, the racist embargo on fair lending just sped the growth of predatory lending. In 1993, along came the subprime mortgage industry. “The subprime lenders saw a real opportunity,” Duffy says. “They came in and said, ‘Well, these inner-city black neighborhoods are not being given access to credit. There’s a demand for credit. We’ll supply that demand.’ They started pouring money into the inner city, taking what had been depressed values and inflating them beyond their real value, which led to people getting into debt way over their heads—crappy debt with huge fees, penalties for early payment, kickbacks to brokers, and, of course, these exploding interest rates that would go up, guaranteeing defaults. The fact that we had these redlined neighborhoods deprived of credit for so long left them wide open. The whole subprime lending thing was the final coup de grâce.”