Some of My Best Friends Are Black (17 page)

At the outset of the Civil War, Kansas City’s black population had consisted of just 166 slaves and 24 free people of color. By 1900, it had reached 17,567, roughly 11 percent of the total, which itself had more than quintupled since the war. Blacks were coming west in part to seek opportunity, but also to escape the insidious rise of Jim Crow in the old Confederacy; the legal system of segregation that J. C. Nichols would soon privatize was just then taking shape in the Deep South.

When threatened by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, whites often spoke of segregation in fevered, delusional terms, as if it had been ordained by God, like it had been man’s natural state since the dawn of time. It hadn’t. Measured from
Plessy v. Ferguson
in 1896 to
Brown v. Board
in 1954, the lifespan of constitutionally sanctioned segregation was only fifty-eight years—exactly the same length as the professional recording career of Frank Sinatra. During Reconstruction, blacks and whites in the South had often coexisted freely in restaurants, railcars, and other public accommodations. Even after Reconstruction ended with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise in 1877, an entire decade would pass before the first Jim Crow statute showed up on the books in a Southern state.

This is not to say that Southern race relations were
good
, but they were not yet predicated on the absolute necessity of racial separatism. In his seminal civil rights text,
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
, historian C. Vann Woodward noted the experience of one T. McCants Stewart, a black man from Boston traveling through South Carolina in 1885. Stewart reported from the Palmetto State that he could “go into saloons… and drink a
glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England.” The whites of the South, he felt, “are really less afraid to [have] contact with colored people than the whites of the North.”

Indeed, as Jim Crow laws began cropping up for debate in Southern statehouses, they were often derided as unnecessary—even absurd. In 1898, the year South Carolina passed its first Jim Crow statute, the conservative Charleston
News and Courier
ran a scathingly satirical essay on the sheer ridiculousness of it all. “If there must be Jim Crow cars on the railroads,” it said, “there should be Jim Crow cars on the street railways. Also on all passenger boats… and waiting saloons at all stations… and Jim Crow eating houses… and Jim Crow sections of the jury box… and a Jim Crow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss.…” And so on. Within a few years, nearly everything the editorial had predicted
as a joke
had actually come to pass.

The turnabout was driven by fear. The ideology of white supremacy used to justify slavery had been rooted in the notion that blacks were somehow less than human, childlike in their feeblemindedness. They were destined to be kept—even happy to be kept—in a state of bondage. The working relationship between master and slave was one of physical proximity, not separateness. By the 1880s and 1890s, however, the economic dislocations of the industrial revolution and global trade had triggered a recurring cascade of market panic and financial insecurity. Across the South, a populist People’s Party rose up in an effort to galvanize the working class—black and white, reaching across the color line—to rise up against the robber baron industrialists and landowning aristocrats who exploited their labor. The ruling class in the South had no interest in dealing with a third party that united working-class blacks and whites in a solid voting majority. Fortunately for them, any popular uprising built on racial cooperation was a fragile one, quickly divided and easily conquered.

The white supremacist ideology that had underpinned slavery was still baked into the country’s mentality. No longer held in check by the civil rights protections of Reconstruction, those feelings of racial superiority were easily stoked. As populists tried to tie the economic ascendance
of blacks and whites together into common cause, the ruling establishment painted the economic ascendance of blacks as a threat to decent white society. Birmingham, Alabama, being the most segregated city in America, was a textbook example of Jim Crow at work. In the 1890s, Alabama’s big planters and industrialists drummed up fears of the Negro menace to get whites behind a poll tax to disenfranchise blacks. Whites supported it, and 98 percent of Alabama’s voting-age blacks were stricken from the rolls. But those same restrictions left thirty-five percent of eligible white voters disenfranchised, too; numerically speaking, more whites lost the right to vote than blacks. When union leaders from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) came South to organize blacks and whites in the steel mills for better working conditions, U.S. Steel put thugs from the Ku Klux Klan on its payroll to terrorize anyone who engaged in union activities. The company also founded its own League to Maintain White Supremacy, which educated workers on the dangers of race mixing and tarred the CIO as “the nigger union.” Driven by racial animus, the white steelworkers of Birmingham spurned the one organization actively lobbying for their own interests, siding instead with the very company that was exploiting them.

But for those keen to present blacks as a threat, the stereotype of blacks as feebleminded children was of little use—children pose no threat. Racism required an overhaul. Blacks needed to be dangerous, disease ridden, violent. These images were pumped into the public consciousness through the work of newspaper propagandists and political demagogues. Scientists got behind the notion, too, propagating biological and psychological theories to explain the black man’s animal nature and his criminal appetites. Leading this charge, same as it had with slavery, was the church. For four hundred years, Christian priests and pastors had exhorted whites to reach down and lift up our little brown brothers for whom Christ also died, to hug them closer to God’s bosom. Now those same clergy pivoted 180 degrees. They started peddling a segregationist theology—God had ordained the separation of the races to keep them pure. A Nashville clergyman, Buckner H. Payne, sold a translation of the Bible in which the devil in the Garden of Eden wasn’t actually a serpent but a Negro man-beast. Race mixing wasn’t just a sin;
it was the original sin. And the “serpent” that Eve found so tempting was… well, you can guess what it was. Forbidden fruit, indeed.

Even though Jim Crow did not come north and west as a fully articulated legal framework, the mentality behind it proved highly adaptable to cooler climes. At the turn of the century, many of Kansas City’s blacks lived in enclaves like the Vine Street corridor, Belvedere Hollow, Church Hill, and in one of the worst slums any city has ever seen: Hell’s Half Acre. But these weren’t “ghettos.” Before 1900, no city in America had a black ghetto or even what you’d call a majority-black neighborhood. America had plenty of slums, but it didn’t have ghettos—there’s a difference. A slum is a place with deplorable living conditions. A ghetto, technically defined, is a slum where certain people are compelled to live by law or by extralegal threat (e.g., the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw or the Bantustans of South Africa).

In Kansas City, working-class blacks lived not in ghettos but in apartments and row houses alongside Irish, German, and Italian laborers. A small percentage of black professionals and skilled laborers lived in modest single-family homes among whites of the same socioeconomic class. In 1900, the typical black resident of Kansas City lived in an area that was less than 14 percent black. At such a small percentage of the population, they were of little worry to white Kansas City. Indeed, they were so geographically dispersed, there was no one place you could point to if you wanted to highlight the dangers of “the black side of town.”

The evolution of Eighteenth and Vine as an ethnic enclave was organic, at first. As more blacks came west, they naturally sought company with people they knew. Families reached back and sent home train tickets to bring relatives out. Cousins followed cousins. The established helped the newcomers find jobs, find the right church, meet a nice girl. A strong, tight-knit community began to form, bound together by relationships forged in the Sunday pews and in the after hours. Community brought purpose. Black civic leaders grew more assertive in calls for civil rights and equality. Black workers began going on strike to demand better pay and better working conditions. In 1904, the livery drivers’ union went on strike, led by a majority-black coalition. Black meatpackers did the same. But in becoming a more visible presence, in making demands
for economic rights and civic equality, blacks could also be more easily scapegoated as a threat, same as they had been in Alabama.

Before 190o, Kansas City’s black newspapers contained not one report of purposeful discrimination aimed at keeping blacks out of a residential area. By 1907, white real estate brokers would only sell or rent to blacks inside the Vine Street corridor. In 1911, on the still-white fringe of Vine Street, a house was dynamited when a black family tried to move in, the city’s first recorded incident of violence being used to protect a “white” neighborhood. Only one suspect was arrested and sentenced for the crime—a black man charged with trying to scare off whites so blacks could take over. More bombings followed.

As the Great Migration gathered steam in 1910, former sharecroppers came pouring out of the plantation South, seeking the economic rewards of the industrial North and Midwest. Hemmed in on all sides, Eighteenth and Vine grew denser. Jerry-built “apartments” were tacked onto tenement homes in back alleys. Families were crowded into crudely subdivided basements. One survey conducted in 1912 found that 20 percent of the houses in Eighteenth and Vine lacked any water supply at all, 50 percent had no sink, and bathtubs averaged one per every twenty-two residents. Infection rates ran twice the city average for pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases. By 1920, the population of Eighteenth and Vine had nearly doubled in size. At the same time, it had gone from 25 percent black to 75 percent black. Kansas City had its first ghetto.

The driving force that shaped this ghetto was the local Democratic Party. In the city and county elections of 1908, the Democrats had little to run on. Republicans dominated Missouri politics at the time, and the economy was humming along, giving them a strong advantage. But Republicans were also the Party of Lincoln, with a loyal and growing black constituency. If these “dangerous” blacks were seen as a threat to public safety, with the Republicans responsible for helping blacks usurp whites, the Democrats might orchestrate a return to power.

In 1905, a black male guard at a women’s penitentiary, hired under Republican city rule, had allegedly beaten a white female inmate. This guard would be the Democrats’ political cudgel, their Willie Horton. The
left-leaning
Kansas City Post
trumpeted every report of black murder or theft, illustrating its pages with bug-eyed black monkeys riding Republican elephants and truncheon-wielding black gorillas beating white women. Republicans had infested Kansas City’s government with “Negro brutes.” A vote for the GOP would make Kansas City “the stronghold of Negro equality in the whole United States.” In November of 1908, the Democrats swept every available seat in the county.
*

This new Democratic political machine, run by “Boss Tom” Pendergast, would control Kansas City for the next thirty years. To keep that position, the party would have to appease whites’ now hysterical concerns over the Negro threat to public safety—a threat, of course, that didn’t actually exist. All the organized crime and vice in Kansas City was controlled by… well, by the Democratic Party, which was in bed with the mafia. So in order to “reduce crime,” Boss Tom moved all the white-owned brothels and gambling houses into the heart of Eighteenth and Vine. There he gave the vice trade free license to operate so long as the racketeering, whoring, violence, and murder were kept away from anybody who mattered.

Blacks didn’t matter. They could vote, but they didn’t own. In 1910, only 800 of the city’s 23,566 blacks owned property of any kind. What they did own amounted to 0.0112 percent of the total property in Kansas City. Blacks had no leverage, no control over their own turf. By the end of the 1920s, there would be more than fifty cabarets within a six-block radius of Eighteenth and Vine. Illegal liquor flowed at jazz joints twenty-four hours a day. Prostitutes worked the sidewalks in front of Lincoln High, even during school hours. To whites on the outside looking in, the quality of life in the ghetto seemed irrefutable proof of the Negro character. The Negro’s degeneracy had created the ghetto, and not the other way around. In the moral geography of Kansas City, a black neighborhood
was now a bad neighborhood—and that presented a remarkable and exciting business opportunity.

“
HAVE YOU SEEN THE COUNTRY CLUB DISTRICT? 1,000 ACRES RESTRICTED FOR THOSE WHO WANT PROTECTION.
”

Thus blared the headline of an advertisement heralding the launch of J. C. Nichols’s brand-new suburban development—christened in 1908, the same year Kansas City’s Democratic machine rode the Negro menace to political victory.