Some of My Best Friends Are Black (20 page)

At the time, Kansas City had thousands of hardworking black families in need of good housing. The first black family on Susan Kurtenbach’s block was not one of them. “They moved onto Paseo,” she says, “right behind us, a couple houses up. They would have been unpleasant in any neighborhood. They would throw raw garbage out in the backyard. Back then, this was a place with families, with a lot of children, and the pestilence problem it created was really of concern. They put their old toilet out in the back. The parties they would have and the arguments they would have, the domestic violence and the police being called—that didn’t happen in this neighborhood.”

That a family such as this would find its way into a place like Troostwood
seems unlikely, but they didn’t wind up there by accident. That particular family was put in that particular house to scare white people, and the man who put them there was Bob Wood. “It was quite purposeful and quite disturbing,” Susan says, “and it was very effective.”

Much like Kansas City’s more celebrated real estate man, Bob Wood didn’t sell houses. Where J. C. Nichols offered the promise of desirable associations, Wood spread the fear of undesirable associations. Nichols built the supply. Wood stoked the demand. One of these men had a standing invitation to the White House, the other lurked in slums and back alleys, but neither could have succeeded without the other.

Between 1950 and 1970, the white population in Kansas City’s southeast corridor fell from 126,229 to 33,804. In those same two decades, the black population rose from 41,348 to 102,741. Nineteen census tracts lay in the blockbusted path from Eighteenth and Vine down to Blue Hills. All of them were now over 90 percent black. Bob Wood had run right over Norman Roetert, and now he was coming to Susan Kurtenbach’s house. Troostwood would be the next domino to fall.

Only it didn’t.

Ed and Mary Hood moved to Kansas City in 1969. Ed had been offered a teaching position at the law school of the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC). Both native Iowans, the young couple had spent the late sixties soaking up the spirit of the times, living in New York’s downtown bohemia, spending the ’67 Summer of Love in San Francisco, and then settling in to raise a family up the coast in Oregon before getting the call from UMKC. Not knowing the Kansas City area at all, they asked the university for some assistance in locating a house.

“The only thing we got back,” Mary Hood says, “was this glossy, full-color brochure with the title ‘Beautiful Johnson County.’ We looked at the map and saw it was way out away from everything and we were like, ‘Why would we want to live there?’

“So when we came to town we met with this Realtor. We told her what we liked, and she sat down with a map and literally drew big red lines around whole areas and said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to live here.’

“After a few minutes it dawned on us what she was doing, and finally one of us said, ‘No, that
is
where we want to live.’”

With three small children, the Hoods moved into a single-family rental on Rockhill, just west of Troost. Ed could walk to work at the university, their oldest daughter started school at Nelson Elementary just a few blocks away, and they became parishioners at St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic parish located just around the corner at Fifty-second and Troost.

Father Luke Byrne arrived at Xavier in the spring of 1970, and it was clear from the start that something was wrong. A once vibrant church, Xavier was shedding parishioners at an alarming rate; you could almost track it from Sunday to Sunday. Norman Roetert warned Byrne of what was coming his way, and how he had failed to stop it. So Byrne, too, set out to salvage the parish and the neighborhood.

Xavier had a “social action committee.” It had been formed after the church’s Second Vatican Council with vague intentions of civic involvement, but it wasn’t actually engaged in any at the moment. Byrne approached a young, active parishioner who was also a newly arrived UMKC professor, Pat Jesaitis. Like the Hoods, he’d spent the sixties in lefty academic circles—his were at Oberlin and Harvard—and had come to UMKC to teach. “Father Byrne told me they were having problems with shifting neighborhoods, whites selling out of fear,” Jesaitis says, “and asked if I would pull the committee together to investigate it.” The young professor agreed and reached out to the Xavier people he knew, most significantly the Hoods and Father Jim Bluemeyer, a dean at Rockhurst, a Jesuit university abutting UMKC that was loosely affiliated with Xavier. “I didn’t know anything about redlining or blockbusting,” Jesaitis admits, “but I was good at running meetings.”

A charismatic leader who pulled people together and got them motivated, Jesaitis corralled his team of parishioners into their first meeting in Rockhurst’s library basement in October of 1970. Very quickly everyone agreed that the transition wasn’t really a parish problem; it was a neighborhood problem. Actually, it was a multineighborhood problem, as the parish stretched over areas like Troostwood and Troost Plateau to the east of Troost, and Crestwood and Rockhill Ridge to the west. To be
effective, any solution they created would have to cover the whole area. It would have to hold both sides of Troost together.

By the very next meeting, the group had evolved into the 49/63 Neighborhood Coalition, drawing its boundaries from Oak to Paseo on the east-west axis, and from Forty-ninth Street to Sixty-third Street north to south, an area of approximately 10,000 residents in 3,200 homes: 77 percent white, 20 percent black, and 3 percent everyone else. Ed Hood volunteered to draw up the incorporation papers. The group’s first formal meeting was held on February 3, 1971. Its stated mission was to “create a nonexploitative real estate market” and to “sustain a multiracial neighborhood where people, regardless of race or color, can find satisfying conditions.” What that actually meant, nobody had a clue. They were making it up as they went along, and the whole seemingly impossible enterprise was straddling the Berlin Wall of Kansas City.

Many neighborhoods east of Troost had tried and failed to arrest the blockbusting, largely because the working-class families who lived there lacked the skills to do anything effective. But when Bob Wood ran up against 49/63, he was wrestling with a bunch of young, passionate left-wingers determined to fight the good fight. These weren’t your tune in, turn on kind of hippies, either. They were property tax attorneys, PhDs, business owners. “We were out to save the world,” Mary Hood recalls with some nostalgia. But they weren’t really out to save the world, just their homes.

Once the coalition was established, it attracted residents from day one, people like Gene and Mary Livingston, white holdouts living east of Troost, and Maureen and Gene Hardy, an interracial couple (he is black; she’s white). The coalition started a newsletter. Pat Jesaitis organized block captains. Gene Livingston did the accounting. Father Bluemeyer took the crime and safety committee. In less than a year, the coalition had more than sixty core volunteers. Everyone donated their time, and their monthly budget was however much cash turned up at meetings when they passed the hat.

The Hoods were given the most important assignment of all: heading up the real estate and housing committee. Its first order of business was
to stop the panic selling, first by getting rid of the rampant
FOR SALE
signs. “They were everywhere,” Ed says. “We did a survey east of Troost, and there was something like ninety of them.”

“The one who stood out was Bob Wood,” Mary adds. “He had the most.”

In March, the Hoods organized a meeting with all the real estate agents working in the neighborhood. A lot of screaming and yelling ensued, followed by more meetings of the same. Finally, in June, the coalition got six agents to agree to a three-month moratorium on all yard signs and unwanted solicitations. That October, the agreement was extended indefinitely. In March of 1972, the coalition started its own housing office. Through word of mouth, it quickly became the first resource residents turned to in order to sell or rent their homes. Realtors who’d agreed to stop blockbusting were allowed to list their properties through 49/63, and thus were among the first in line for the legitimate home transactions that occurred. “We appealed to their bottom line,” Mary says. “They would make more money if property values stayed up. ‘Work with us, and you might do better in the long run.’”

While the yard signs were easy to root out, the late-night solicitations were harder to stop. It fell to the block captains to educate everyone, house by house, and encourage them to report any unwanted threats. The housing office staff took the complaints as they came in, and the offending brokers were contacted and urged to halt such practices in the area. For residents most susceptible to scare tactics, like the elderly, the coalition took another tack. “We had a woman who called,” Ed recalls, “and she was all upset because a guy had come through saying, ‘Listen, I’ll give you five thousand cash right now, but if you wait you’ll only get two.’ Well, the market value of the house was eleven. She was an elderly white woman, and she was scared to death. So the coalition took out two mortgages for the full value of the house, bought it, and then rented it to a younger white family that was willing to stay.” As 49/63’s budget increased with donations and grant money, it started financing other homes in the same manner. The panic began to subside.

Having shut down the predatory speculators, the 49/63 Coalition now turned its attention to the next greatest threat to the neighborhood’s housing: the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

In Washington, D.C., the issue of fair housing was radioactive. In 1962, President Kennedy had issued an executive order that “banned” discrimination in publicly subsidized housing, then never lifted a finger to enforce it. President Johnson had worked tirelessly to pass the civil rights and voting rights laws of 1964 and 1965, but as both bills moved through Congress, any measures that dealt with housing or mortgage discrimination were deliberately stripped out. That was the price of getting them through. Critical to the passage of any civil rights legislation was a coalition of Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans, all of whom took the moral high ground on racism alongside Martin Luther King, but only so long as the preacher’s crusade remained fixed on the ignorant crackers of the Deep South. Black people were fine, just not in their voting districts. Once King started making noise in the North, marching in the white Bungalow Belt neighborhoods of Chicago to call for fair housing, those same politicians went running for cover. Starting in the congressional elections of 1966, Republicans, in particular, had begun to bank their entire electoral strategy on securing the emerging white majority that lived in the suburbs.
*

For his entire presidency, LBJ had failed to pass any kind of fair housing law. Then, on April 4, 1968, while leading a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Riots broke out in over a hundred cities nationwide, and that crisis gave the president one last ounce of leverage to shove a housing bill through Congress. On April 11, Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law. It contained specific injunctions against blockbusting and redlining; outlawed the use, or even the implication, of racial bias in advertising for property sales; made it illegal for a broker to engage in “steering” (i.e., making false statements about unit availability to steer black residents in
one direction or another); and made it unlawful to not rent or sell property on the basis of color. Once again, however, there was a price to getting it passed: Republicans had attached so many amendments stripping away the bill’s enforcement mechanisms that it was rendered practically worthless.

Under the Fair Housing Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had no power to investigate violators, and no authority to issue cease and desist orders. HUD could only pursue grievances brought by individual complainants, the statute of limitations on which was 180 days from the date of the alleged offense. HUD also had no authority to impose penalties; it could only refer a matter to the Justice Department for prosecution. In the case of a successful prosecution, punitive damages were capped at one thousand dollars. And the Justice Department was not allowed to take a case if the state where the offense occurred possessed a “substantially equivalent” fair housing law. So if a state had already enacted meaningless housing legislation of its own, the local government’s authority to do nothing superseded the federal government’s authority to do nothing. And so it was in Kansas City. After King’s murder, citing fear of ongoing unrest, the city council passed a hasty resolution saying, essentially, that the municipal housing authority agreed to abide by the regulations of the national Fair Housing Act. Washington had passed a law that did nothing, and Kansas City agreed to follow it.