Some of My Best Friends Are Black (15 page)

In the spring of 1968, Father Norman Roetert was appointed to serve as pastor at St. Therese of the Little Flower, a Catholic parish and parochial school in the Blue Hills neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Once upon a time, before Roetert arrived, Blue Hills had been Kansas City’s Woodlawn. One of several Woodlawns, actually.

On Kansas City’s wide-open grid, well-to-do whites lived on the west side. Working- and middle-class families lived mostly in little bungalow neighborhoods to the east, like Blue Hills and Troostwood and Linwood, the kinds of places where families used to pass their evenings on the front porch and the neighbors would stop by to say hello. This was Walt Disney’s America. Literally. Walt Disney grew up in a gabled-roof cottage at 3028 Bellefontaine Avenue. Just a streetcar ride away, at Forty-sixth and Paseo, was Electric Park, a playland of games and activities with fireworks that went off every night and an electric train that the young Walt would ride. Disney opened his first animation studio here, too, where he kept a pet mouse whose name was not Mickey but Mortimer.

Though far from wealthy, whites on the east side had done well. The local Democratic political machine, run by “Boss Tom” Pendergast, had been instrumental in winning Missouri for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, and government patronage from FDR’s New
Deal insulated Kansas City from the worst effects of the Depression. When the industrial mobilization of World War II got under way, the city snagged its fair share of those contracts, too. Good jobs with good wages were plentiful, creating a solid tax base for public schools.

Kansas City was home to a vibrant black community, too, also on the east side but well to the north. Like New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, Kansas City’s Eighteenth and Vine District was a hub of black American culture. Music legends like Count Basie and Charlie Parker got their starts here in the 1930s, playing all-night jam sessions and cutting contests at bars like the Hey Hey Club, transforming jazz from New Orleans’ Dixieland sound into Kansas City’s own signature style. Eighteenth and Vine had generated its own bustling black economy as well, served by black-owned livery cabs, black-owned clothing stores, and the
Kansas City Call
, one of the most widely read black newspapers in the country. Sitting at the heart of the neighborhood was Lincoln High, considered one of the finest black schools in the Midwest.

Ordained in 1957, Norman Roetert had ministered in Kansas City’s black community for most of his career, starting at Annunciation parish close to Eighteenth and Vine. He belonged to a new generation of white clergy, committed to reversing Christianity’s ignoble past of sanctioning slavery and Jim Crow; he’d marched with Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965. But when Roetert arrived at St. Therese in 1968, he found himself wrestling with a racial problem that was immune to protest marches and prayer. “
FOR SALE
signs were everywhere,” he says. “Like tulips at Easter time.”

Blue Hills was going black.

For years, white home owners on Kansas City’s east side had been in a panic—not simply because blacks were moving south into their neighborhoods at an alarming rate, but because no one understood how or why it was happening. “The priest who preceded me had no grasp on what he was dealing with,” Roetert explains. “There was no legitimate real estate company operative anywhere in the area. There were no mortgage loans available, no insurance available, and these people were working the neighborhood for everything it was worth.”

“These people” were men like Bob Wood. Wood was a hustler. Through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, all over the country, men like him pioneered an art known as blockbusting. Blockbusters were predatory real estate speculators. They’d buy a house in a white neighborhood, rent it to a black family, wait a few weeks, and then start calling the neighbors. “The coloreds are moving in. Don’t you think you should sell? I can get you a good deal—before it’s too late.” The scare tactics these men used could get quite creative. Some would go into the ghetto and pay a few bucks to the biggest, scariest, right-off-the-chain-gang-looking fellow they could find. Then they’d bring him along, knocking door-to-door, politely informing white residents that “this gentleman is looking in the area.” The
FOR SALE
signs would start to go up.

Once the signs were up, that neighborhood was “in transition.” All the licensed real estate brokers would close up shop; their code of ethics prevented them from selling “white” houses to blacks. Once the licensed agents left, the neighborhood’s housing market turned into an unregulated free-for-all. The blockbusters would descend. As soon as one black family moved in, all the surrounding white residents found themselves perpetually harassed. Widows and the elderly—on fixed incomes, their entire net worth tied up in their house—were targeted first. Six, seven phone calls a night. More and more yard signs would crop up. Within months, sometimes days, the whole block would go black.

In any selling frenzy, prices plummet. Fear makes a motivated seller. A neighborhood might have an average home price of $10,000, but once the old widow is strong-armed into selling for $5,000, that sets the market value for the rest of the block—the myth of black neighbors lowering property values becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But blacks didn’t drive property values down; real estate agents did. In truth, the first blacks to pioneer a neighborhood were so desperate to leave the ghetto they’d sign a $15,000 mortgage for that $10,000 house; the arrival of blacks drove prices up. Supply and demand. The first whites to sell could make a bundle and get out. The last whites to sell might be lucky to get $2,500.

Blockbusters also knew that blacks had little access to mortgage capital. So those brokers would offer to finance the purchase themselves for
an outsized down payment and an unreasonable monthly note. Trapped in tenements most of their lives, having never dealt with complex mortgage instruments, black families would take the deal. Falling behind on the note almost immediately, they’d find themselves foreclosed on in a matter of months. The deed would then revert back to the broker, who’d turn around and sell it again. An enterprising blockbuster might turn the same house over two, three, maybe four times in the space of a year.

Blockbusting hit the northern frontier of Blue Hills, Forty-seventh Street, early in 1968, just as Father Roetert arrived at St. Therese. He watched as the neighborhood crumbled from within. “These brokers would list a house for a white family,” he says, “and then wouldn’t even try to sell it. Then the home owners would get scared, go out to Johnson County, and buy something. Now they had two mortgages to carry, so the broker would offer them a pittance for their old house—he’d just steal it from them. Then he’d jack up the price and sell it to blacks. That was going on all over the place.”

Like others to the north had done, Roetert tried to hold the line. He thought he could help make an orderly transition to a stable, integrated neighborhood. He failed. His priestly authority held no sway over men like Bob Wood, with whom he had frequent run-ins. “Wood made no pretense that he wasn’t doing what he was doing,” Roetert recalls, “and he was doing it well. His attitude was ‘Try and stop me.’”

The pastor often begged Wood to do just that. Stop. For the sake of the community. “But he’d just laugh at me. He thought I was a fool.”

The fate of any residential neighborhood is bound to the fate of its schools. Before
Brown v. Board
, Kansas City ran a strictly segregated school system, based on racial attendance zones. Starting in 1955, in order to “comply” with
Brown
, the city announced that school enrollment would now be based on neighborhood attendance zones—neighborhoods that just happened to be all white or all black. For decades, the residential color line on the east side had held unchallenged at Twenty-seventh Street, kept in place by fear. But the all-black tenements and schools of Eighteenth and Vine were packed beyond capacity. Emboldened by the rising consciousness of civil rights, black families began to move out.

Keeping the schools white now meant keeping the neighborhoods white, and the well-to-do whites on the west side were going to make damn sure that their side stayed whitest the longest. City officials drew a boundary right down the middle of the city along its longest north-south thoroughfare, Troost Avenue. Let the east side go black, it was decided. We’ll hold the line here. Still today, nearly every zip code, every census tract, every voting ward—and, for a long time, every school district—all split right along Troost.

Most every city in America has a Troost. In Chicago, it’s the fourteen-lane Dan Ryan Expressway that divides the South Side from the Bungalow Belt. In Detroit, it’s Eight Mile Road, a jurisdictional barrier excluding city residents from county services. In Birmingham, it’s a mountain you have to go over. Kansas City’s Troost Avenue is unique in that it’s not an elevated thruway or set of railroad tracks—it’s merely a street, like any other, running down the center of the city’s flat, open grid. Yet everyone who lives here knows. East of Troost is black; west of Troost is white. A local newscaster once dubbed it “the Berlin Wall of Kansas City.” The name stuck.

Before 1955, no real estate listing in the city had ever used the designations “East of Troost” or “West of Troost.” Now they all did. Under the city’s new neighborhood attendance policy, the vertical axis of Troost remained fixed, but as blacks began to come south on the east side, the school board would resort to gerrymandering the northern boundaries of the schools on the color line; year to year, the attendance zones twisted and contorted themselves around the expanding black residential areas in order to keep schools white. Once the black migration had reached a critical mass and the school district could no longer pivot around it, the city would reverse itself and regerrymander the neighborhood boundaries the other way, shifting the attendance zone to go majority black. In the name of preserving “neighborhood schools” and “neighborhood stability,” the school board was tearing the east side neighborhoods apart one after another.

Once a neighborhood school was zoned to go black, the neighborhood it served had essentially been thrown to the blockbusting wolves; Bob Wood knew the whites in that district would be the most vulnerable to
threats. One of the first schools to flip was Walt Disney’s own Benton Grammar School. Just a year after
Brown
, it was suddenly reborn as D. A. Holmes Elementary—named after a local black preacher—and thrown out as a sacrifice by whites fleeing the broken color line at Twenty-seventh Street. Then Thirty-first Street fell. Then Thirty-second. By 1960, blockbusting had flipped nearly every street clear down to Thirty-ninth. As school districts were gerrymandered this way and that, black residential tracts cascaded down the east side, always moving in unnatural squares and rectangles. In 1954, the two main high schools serving east of Troost, Central and Paseo, had both been 100 percent white. By 1962, Central was already 99 percent black; by 1968, Paseo was 88 percent black and rising. That same year, west of Troost, the well-protected Southwest High was still 99.5 percent white.

Catholic schools on the east side were inundated by the blockbusting turnover as well. Some had tried to set a limit on the number of incoming black students, as an incentive to get whites to stay. It hadn’t worked. “It just turned off the African-American community,” Roetert says, “and then the church lost those schools anyway. I decided we were not going to do that here.” In the spring of 1969, Roetert announced that there would be no cap on black enrollment at St. Therese in the fall. “Some of the parishioners were angry that I did that, but I said, ‘Look, we are not going to destroy this parish. We’re going to welcome these people into our school and our community.’ I hoped that people would stay, but by then I knew it was over. The following year, the school went from 80 percent white to 98 percent black. Just like that.”