Some of My Best Friends Are Black (18 page)

Just six years before, Nichols had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Kansas. Then it was off to grad school at Harvard. Returning to Kansas City, he undertook a few modestly successful ventures and used the profits to buy up a vast tract of seemingly worthless land in the middle of nowhere along the Kansas-Missouri border: an old garbage dump, an abandoned racing track, a brickyard, several tracts of farmland. Then he started building.

J. C. Nichols didn’t sell houses. He sold “suburbia.” He sold a way of thinking about residential living that in turn created the demand for houses in neighborhoods that he owned. According to Nichols, the right protections and restrictions could create an island of certainty and stability in an uncertain, unstable world. Escape “the commonplace of the city street” for “the refinement of the suburban estate,” his Sunday newspaper ads declared.

Having sold this beautiful empty space cordoned off from the tumult of daily life, Nichols then had to give it life. People needed something to do. For the ladies, he started lawn beautification contests and competitive flower shows. To feed the male ego, there was golf and the prestige of membership in the right club. For the kids, Nichols organized annual “Community Field Days” with three-legged races and model-boat regattas. He didn’t invent these sorts of activities. What he did, in the words of one biographer, was to synthesize them. He scheduled them accordingly with the seasons, and gave them the imprimatur of time-honored tradition. He created a culture for a place that had no culture of its own. Nichols even had a name for it. He called it “community work.” Community
work fell squarely under the purview of his company’s public relations department. It wasn’t really culture at all. It was just advertising.

Underneath all that, the bedrock of suburbia’s appeal, as Nichols framed it, was the idea that a certain kind of physical space was inherently more virtuous than another. The right kind of leafy green cul-de-sac—and the right kind of neighbors—were essential to raising children with proper Christian and American values. A man’s choice of home said something about his moral character. Is your family a Mission Hills kind of family? What kind of man lets his children live on
that
side of town? In billboards and newspaper ads, Nichols drove his message home again and again:

Desirable associations. Subtle. But when translated into legal terminology on Nichols’s property deeds, the meaning of the phrase is perfectly clear: “None of said land may be conveyed to, used, owned, or occupied by negroes as owners or tenants.”

This was the racial covenant, and it would be Nichols’s most lasting contribution to America.
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The flaw in racial covenants, as they had been used before Nichols, was that they were applied only to the deed of the individual lot for sale. You could have a whole block of individually restricted houses. If one person decided to sell to a black family and get out, there was little his neighbors could do, legally, to stop that from happening.
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Then, in 1909, J. C. Nichols broke ground on Sunset Hill and Country Side, the first of his developments laid out on land unencumbered by earlier deed restrictions. Here, he attached the racial covenant not to the deed for the lot, but to the plat for the entire subdivision. Thus it became harder for one person to break.

Property restrictions at the time were also typically written to expire after a decade or two; as much as stability was sought, most developers allowed that property owners’ needs might change. Nichols disagreed. His faith in his own vision for Kansas City was such that he wanted it to be in place for his grandchildren’s grandchildren. “Planning for Permanence” was his company’s lofty motto, and he meant it. Starting in 1911, with Country Club Ridge, Nichols began writing his restrictive covenants to last twenty-five years with the option to renew. Two years later, when Nichols opened his crown jewel, Mission Hills, he went one better. He wrote all his property restrictions to be self-renewing every twenty-five years unless a group of owners controlling the most street-facing footage
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opted to change those restrictions five years prior to the auto-renewal date. It was the first use of self-perpetuating racial covenants anywhere in the country, a fact often touted by Nichols himself. “Self-perpetuating restrictions,” boasted his new Sunday ads, “conceived by the developers of the Country Club District, solve the problem of shifting and declining residential sections, a menace to every city, including our own.”

Nichols’s greatest innovation would come in 1922 with the subdivision of Armour Hills. Up to that point, home owners in each successive Country Club District development had formed voluntary neighborhood associations for general upkeep. In Armour Hills, Nichols made membership in the neighborhood association a contractual obligation incumbent with the land purchase. He then assigned that association and its members full legal liability, alongside the Nichols Company, for maintaining and enforcing the property restrictions, racial and otherwise, for
the entire community. Now the home, the home owner, the land, and the land developer were all legally bound together as one entity, protected by an impermeable contractual seal against any undesirable element that might seek to intrude. One by one, Nichols went back to the neighborhood groups for his other developments and proposed a similar arrangement. Each of the neighborhoods voted to adopt it. And, by this point, Nichols’s success had spurred on lots of local competitors. Developers were buying land adjacent to his and piggybacking on his efforts; they all eagerly copied his new template, too. The self-renewing, all-encompassing restrictions used in Armour Hills would become the foundation of nearly every neighborhood built in the Kansas City area from that point forward.

By 1923, Nichols was breaking ground on at least one new subdivision a year, and the sheer mass of his enterprise solidified the symbiotic, public-private relationship he’d been forging with municipal and county government. The city’s infrastructure—roads, transit, water, sewerage, gas, and electric—all pivoted and ran south by southwest, pulled by Nichols’s center of gravity, custom fit to meet his needs, and all at taxpayer expense. What was good for the Country Club District was good for Kansas City.

J. C. Nichols’s suburban creation was a masterpiece. Every last detail orchestrated just so, totally insulated from reality, and with plenty of room for parking. It was unlike anything most Americans had seen at the time.
Ladies’ Home Journal
called it “a lesson for all cities” to emulate. The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce named it “the most beautiful residential section in America.”

By the early 1920s, Nichols enjoyed a stature in the business that was without peer. He served as president, booster, or board member for a constellation of industry trade groups. President Calvin Coolidge called him “the father of city planning in the West” and appointed him to serve on the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, responsible for overseeing the development of Washington, D.C. Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman would retain him in that post until 1948. Hoover was a personal dinner guest at the Nichols home, twice.

In 1917, Nichols had also founded and chaired what would be one of the most influential organizations in the history of real estate: the Annual Conference of the Developers of High-Class Residential Property. Membership was open only to the most powerful real estate men in the country. At Nichols’s invitation, these men came together at annual confabs to share ideas and establish a set of industry best practices, including—as discussed quite openly and on the record—the best way to implement restrictive covenants to keep neighborhoods all white. Some developers wanted covenants extended to cover Jews, “Orientals,” and others. Others were undecided on whether to exclude
all
Jews or to let in the good Jews. There was no debate about blacks.

Prominent in the group was J. C. Nichols’s close friend Robert Jemison of Birmingham, Alabama. In 1924, Jemison wrote Nichols that he was planning to build Birmingham’s own premier, high-class development and asked if Nichols could, “at his earliest convenience,” send templates for “the latest form of deed and restrictions, with the proper provisions for maintenance.” Nichols was more than happy to share. Shortly thereafter, Jemison broke ground on his own “Country Club District.” He called it Mountain Brook. It was a carbon copy of the Kansas City original—right down to its shopping village, built just for the automobile. In 1947, inspired by Jemison’s success, a developer named Charles Byrd went south of Mountain Brook and bought up the ostentatious estate of a recently deceased eccentric. Byrd chopped it up, cordoned it off for white folks, and called it Vestavia Hills.

The High-Class Developers conference included New York City’s John Demarest, Detroit’s Judson Bradway, Baltimore’s Edward Bouton, Dallas’s Hugh Prather, San Francisco’s Duncan McDuffie, Omaha’s J. E. George, Indianapolis’s Emerson Chaille. Like Jemison, these men would all leave the conference each year and put their ideas to work. Self-perpetuating restrictive covenants soon found their way into Bloomfield Estates outside Detroit, Highland Park north of Dallas, St. Francis Wood in the heart of San Francisco, and many other high-end subdivisions—plus all their Vestavian imitators—north and south, east and west.

Together, these High-Class Developers made up the brain trust of the
National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), one of the most powerful trade associations in the country. Nichols and the others rotated through the presidency and other high-ranking offices, each gentleman taking his turn. Not by coincidence, in 1924 NAREB made racial discrimination official policy, updating its code of ethics to say, “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood… members of any race or nationality… whose presence will clearly be detrimental to the property values of that neighborhood. Like termites, they undermine the structure of any neighborhood in which they creep.”

All of which was legal.

In 1916, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, had passed a zoning ordinance delineating where blacks could and could not live. In
Buchanan v. Warley
, the NAACP challenged the law, taking their petition all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. The court’s opinion cited Louisville’s ordinance as a public infringement on private property rights. Ten years later, when the issue of private racial covenants came before the court in the case of
Corrigan v. Buckley
, the justices held that said covenants were legitimate and binding; they represented an arrangement between a private buyer and a private seller, which was not the government’s business. The combined effect of these decisions, as pointed out in the
Kansas City Call
, was to say that cities and states could not violate blacks’ property rights, but with restrictive covenants, private citizens could unilaterally take those same rights away with nothing but a pen and paper and a trip to the notary public. Soon, thanks to the public-private partnership, the distinction between government policy and corporate policy would cease to matter entirely.

The Great Depression nearly killed the residential gold rush. In its first four years, the number of permits issued for new home construction fell by 93 percent nationwide. But out of this crisis came suburbia’s great leap forward.

In 1932, as the economic disaster showed no signs of abating, the Hoover administration passed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act. Its goal
was to stimulate home building and home buying through government-backed, long-term amortized mortgages,
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as well as housing subsidies to stimulate private developers. In 1933, Roosevelt’s New Deal extended Hoover’s efforts by establishing the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), tasked to determine the creditworthiness of home owners the government helped to finance. Roosevelt then chartered the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), whose task was to issue and administer loans and subsidies based on those assessments. And since most politicians aren’t experts in land development, they turned to those who were: the National Association of Real Estate Boards and its most prominent representative.