Some of My Best Friends Are Black (22 page)

“The biggest thing we did,” Gene Hardy says, “was prove to the rest of the city that you could have black and white living in the same neighborhood
and it didn’t go to pot. We had a ten-year stretch where it was the finest neighborhood there was.”

“And we made a lot of friends,” Maureen Hardy adds.

There was only one hitch to the whole 49/63 integration experiment: nobody made any black friends.

Despite being the leading proponent of residential integration in Kansas City, 49/63 itself was white, almost entirely white. Father Jim Bluemeyer remembers exactly what happened when the group first tried to move beyond that. “When we started,” he says, “we brought in some black people, good people, and they just thought we were crazy. They said, ‘This won’t work. Integrated neighborhood? You’re dreaming.’”

Even as the coalition ramped up, black residents opted out. The few who did participate did so sparingly, and rarely for very long. “We didn’t have a lot,” Ed Hood says, “and it was very difficult to get them involved.”

“I doubt if we had six,” Gene Hardy says of the group’s black volunteers, including himself. Most of the time, he was the only one there. “Blacks chose not to participate,” he says. “A lot of it was a lack of education and a lack of understanding. Maureen was on the board, but I worked fifteen hours a day, and then I took the time at night and went to the meetings. It’s a sacrifice to do something like that.”

“There was a big difference in socioeconomic scale,” Ed Hood says. “Most of the coalition people were university people, and a lot of the African Americans coming in were on those 235 loans; they were coming out of the projects. Bridging that gap was problematic.”

Helen Palmer moved her family onto Virginia Avenue in Troost Plateau
in 1963. She was one of the black residents in the area and is still there today. “The woman I bought this house from,” Palmer says, “she was the type of person who would never let a black person inside. If she had to let a black person come in to do any kind of work for her, she would have to have another white person in here with her while the black person came in here and did the work. When blacks moved in, she moved out. Myself, I wasn’t afraid that it was all white. It was prejudiced, but I never had any harassment.”

Nor did she have any involvement, mostly because she was never around. The university professors and stay-at-home moms who formed the backbone of the coalition had a good deal more free time. Helen Palmer, like many blacks working two and three jobs to be “middle class,” did not. “At the time I moved in here,” she says, “I was working twelve hours a day, seven days a week at a printing shop. Did that for forty-two years. I would come home, have a little sleep, and get back to work. Never really had a day off, so I didn’t hear much about 49/63.”

But the problem went deeper than conflicting schedules. As reported in coalition meeting minutes and status reports, the group’s lopsided racial makeup was a persistent and troubling concern. “We tried to find blacks who were willing to help out,” Pat Jesaitis says. “We found a couple. We had one guy from Chicago, this other black woman, Gene Hardy. When we had meetings on individual blocks, you’d get black families there, but that was a very slow process. And then they’d never come to the monthly planning meetings or really participate.

“As the president, when a black family moved in, I’d go knock on their door to talk to them, welcome them, but my impression of it was that there was too much fear, too much ‘I don’t know if I believe this guy.’ We were just getting started, and they couldn’t see enough concrete evidence that we were with them, not trying to keep them out. There seemed to be a lot of mistrust.” It was more than mistrust.

“49/63 was called racist,” says Alvin Brooks.

Alvin Brooks joined the Kansas City Police Department as a patrolman in the early 1950s, one of only a handful of blacks on the force. Today, his career in public service is now entering its seventh decade, and he shows no sign of slowing down. Brooks has been elected to the city council,
served for a period as mayor pro tem, and was most recently appointed to the police department’s board of commissioners. In the late 1960s, Brooks was serving as director of Kansas City’s Department of Human Relations—a vague title that translates roughly to “The Guy Who Handles the Racial Stuff.” Not too long after Pat Jesaitis started knocking on doors, Brooks started hearing talk about a group of white people calling themselves 49/63.

“I attended some of the meetings,” Brooks recalls, “and you’d hear some very strange, but very familiar, voices from the whites. There was this whole plan of restricting how people could move in. You’d hear about ‘stabilizing the community.’ Stabilizing? What does that mean? It means keeping it as it is. Blacks had started to come in, and this group was worried about being overrun by blacks, so they were suspect. Integration? All of a sudden white folks
wanted
us to do this? There were some who heard these things and questioned why. Why now? We’d been duped before.”

The 49/63 Coalition wasn’t the only group of well-meaning white folks left standing at the integration altar. At the height of the fair housing movement in Chicago, a group called Home Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) sent direct-response mailers to some eight hundred black organizations, advertising housing opportunities for black families in the suburbs. It received zero replies. In Los Angeles in the mid-seventies, community leaders in the sprawl of the San Fernando Valley thought they’d evade the government’s school desegregation dragnet by making their own racial balance, reaching out and encouraging upwardly mobile blacks to move to the area. Through the San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council, a $92,000 public awareness campaign was launched across local black radio and newspapers, urging city residents, “Move on into the Valley!” The council fielded only a hundred queries from black families. Of those, seven bought homes.

For black America, the right to live wherever they wanted was a moral imperative. The reality of trying to exercise that right had bred a mistrust that bordered on fatalism. For years, blacks who set foot in certain working-class white neighborhoods were often beaten or harassed.
Those who tried to buy had bricks hurled through their windows, their front porches burned. Blacks who made it out to middle-class suburbia endured a more refined and WASPy version of the same—indignant housewives with picket signs and a steady drumbeat of neighborly reminders that “maybe you’d just be more comfortable someplace else.” As early as 1926, the publisher of the
Kansas City Call
had written, “It is time wasted to try to prove to whites that they should not refuse to live as neighbors to Negroes.”
*

Alvin Brooks has spent almost his entire life policing the residential color line of Kansas City’s turf war. As a cop in the 1950s, the color line determined where he and other black cops could patrol: first the black neighborhood, then only low-end pockets of immigrants, never the middle-class whites. In 1960, he and his wife rode the first wave of blockbusting, buying a house not far from Walt Disney’s boyhood home. Only the fifth black family on the block, they were able to finance a mortgage without going through a bank. “I was a cop at the time making $560 a month,” he says. “My white counterparts could qualify, and although my credit was good and I had a steady job, if I had gone to a bank we would have had trouble. I would have had to put a lot of money down. We were lucky.” Many of his neighbors weren’t. Once optimistic about buying their stake in the American Dream, black home owners quickly grew frustrated as the blockbusting con played itself out. “Realtors were pretty slick. Black families were paying higher interest rates, getting sold these balloon mortgages. People got took. Integration wasn’t kind to those who it was supposed to be kind to.”

Once Alvin Brooks overcame his initial doubts about 49/63, he came to see it as a good working model for other neighborhood groups in the city. But he also had a front-row seat to see the ways in which “integration” failed to be kind, as the government simultaneously did too much and not enough. Brooks watched as the north end of Eighteenth and Vine was plowed under to make way for the Wayne Miner Homes, five vertical towers of ultramodern public housing. Billed as the salvation of the
urban poor, it turned into a vertical slum instead. Brooks was there when HUD opened up the money spigot of housing vouchers for low-income families while providing no safeguards against the systemic discrimination in how they were used—in effect further subsidizing residential segregation. “A few blacks ventured out into white neighborhoods with those Section 8 vouchers,” he says, “and they were fought. So most of it went back into the black community. Absentee landlords would fix up the house to Section 8 qualifications and rent it out because they knew it was good income. HUD was as guilty of perpetuating segregation as anyone.”

Well before the 1960s stumbled to a close, faith in Martin Luther King’s idealistic, integrationist crusade had waned. Black frustration boiled over in the urban riots of Watts and Newark and Detroit. That frustration found a symbol and a voice when the young Stokely Carmichael raised his fist and issued a rallying cry of “Black Power!” during a Mississippi march in the summer of 1966. Integration, Carmichael and his coauthor Charles Hamilton wrote in their seminal
Black Power
manifesto, was simply an “insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.” It was a kind of cultural genocide, forcing blacks to assimilate—to “give up their identity” and “deny their heritage” in a servile, slavish imitation of white society—and all for naught as well. The white establishment, immune to appeals of conscience, was eternally racist, entirely dependent on exploiting the black underclass, and would never accept blacks as equals. “Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks,” went
Black Power
’s central thesis, comparing blacks to Jews and Italians, groups that had thrived in America through ethnic loyalty and solidarity. “Black people must lead and run their own organizations… consolidate behind their own, so that they can bargain from a position of strength.”