Some of My Best Friends Are Black (52 page)

Any book on the strange story of integration has to start by consulting
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
, by C. Vann Woodward, which I did. The history of Birmingham and Vestavia Hills was drawn largely from
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
, by Diane McWhorter; “
Demagoguery in Birmingham and the Building of Vestavia
,” by Glenn T. Eskew; and
Vestavia Hills: A Place Apart
, by Marvin Yeomans Whiting. Major source reference for the history of school desegregation include
Simple Justice: The History of
Brown v. Board of Education
and Black America’s Struggle for Equality
, by Richard Kluger;
Bring Us Together: The Nixon Team and the Civil Rights Retreat
, by Leon E. Panetta and Peter Gall;
Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation
, by Stuart Buck; and “
Brown v. Board of Education
, Fifty Years Later,” a collection of essays edited by Kevin Gaines and published in the
Journal of American History
, June 2004. Statistics on racial makeup of schools were taken from reports compiled by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the National Center for Education Statistics: Common Core of Data, and the Alabama State Department of Education.

I would not have found my way to Kansas City, Missouri, without the recommendation of Johnson County native Chris Suellentrop, who introduced
me to an author named Whitney Terrell—nephew by marriage to one Miller Nichols, son of J. C. Nichols. Like me, Whitney woke up one day and went digging into his own family history with race and real estate, and his novel,
The King of Kings County
, tells the story of Kansas City’s blockbusting and suburbanization in the way that only a novel can: fictionalized, but brutally truthful. A generous KC tour guide, Whitney pointed me in the direction of 49/63 and all the thoughtful, helpful people I met there: Ed and Mary Hood, Pat Jesaitis, Gene and Maureen Hardy, Dave Bergman, Joe Beckerman, Father Jim Bluemeyer, Father Luke Byrne, Father Norman Roetert, Albert Brooks, Helen Palmer, Jason Peters, Josh Hamm and Dave Meingold, Calvin Williford, Ruth Austin, Beth Brubaker, Renee Neades, Father Paisus Altschul. Special thanks are also due to the Johnson County NAACP, Ruth Schecter, and the helpful and patient staff of the Western Archives at UMKC. And, of course, Krista and Brian Massilonis, for throwing a great Super Bowl party where I got to meet lots of white people.

The history and mechanics of blockbusting were wonderfully laid out for me in
Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000
, by Kevin Fox Gotham, and in
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
, by Kevin M. Cruse. The racial geography of Kansas City, past and present, was drawn from
Take Up the Black Man’s Burden: Kansas City’s African American Communities, 1865–1939
, by Charles E. Coulter;
A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900–1960
; and “Troost Avenue: A Study in Community Building,” by Father Paisus Altschul. The history of J. C. Nichols, suburbanization, racial covenants, and real estate in general was informed by
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
, by Kenneth T. Jackson;
J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities
, by William S. Worley; and
The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man, His Company, and His Legacy, 1880–1994
, by Robert Pearson and Brad Pearson. All facts and information cited on the history of 49/63 were drawn from the 49/63 Archives in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection housed at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
, by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, was very helpful for
illustrating the bungled history of federal housing policy, as was
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
, by Thomas Sugrue.

Richard Milhous Nixon was an asshole, but he was a complicated asshole, and I would not have fully understood his role in all this, particularly with regard to affirmative action and the workplace, without the thoughtful advice of Tim Naftali, Director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. I owe a great debt to my many colleagues from Ogilvy & Mather who, on the condition of remaining anonymous, agreed to share with me the secret inner workings of the old boys’ network. Roy Eaton and Byron Lewis both deserve enormous gratitude for the trailblazing work that they’ve done and continue to do. I’d like to thank Vann Graves for becoming not only a great source but a great friend, and Geoffrey Taylor Edwards, for jumping in with both feet and trusting his story to a guy he’d only ever met on the telephone—advertising is making friends, after all. For giving me greater insight into Madison Avenue as a whole, I should mention the voluble Sanford Moore, Allen Rosenshine, Angela Ciccolo, Cyrus Mehri, Mark Bendick, Roger Clegg, Nancy Hill, Singleton Beato, Adrianne Smith, Carol Watson, Rebecca Williams, Rachel Donovan, Robert Shaffron, Angela Johnson Meadows, Orville Dale, Neal Arthur, Jimmy Smith, Keith Cartwright, Porsha Monroe, Kristen Clark, and the great Harry Webber, for telling me to piss off.

For the current state of race relations on Madison Avenue, one need look no further than the daily news digests of the industry trades,
Advertising Week
and
AdAge
, both of which contained volumes of wonderful, quotable information. Statistics on current minority employment in advertising were drawn from the study “Research Perspectives on Race and Employment in the Advertising Industry,” by Mark Bendick, Jr., and Mary Lou Egan. Information on the history of advertising agencies, white and black, was drawn from
The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators
, by Stephen Fox, and
Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry
, by Jason Chambers. Additional information on black agencies came from the archives of
Black Enterprise
and
American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and the End of White America
, by Leon E. Wynter. The strange, sad, and cynical saga of Richard
Nixon, race, and affirmative action was drawn from
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
, by Rick Perlstein;
Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in an Era of Limits
, by Kevin L. Yuill;
Nixon Reconsidered
, by Joan Hoff; “Black Power—Nixon Style: The Nixon Administration and Minority Business Enterprise,” by Dean Kotlowski, published in
Business History Review
, 1998; and “The National Response to Richard M. Nixon’s Black Capitalism Initiative: The Success of Domestic Detente,” Robert E. Weems and Lewis A. Randolph, published in the
Journal of Black Studies
, 2001.

I would like to light a candle for Father Paul Patin, who served as pastor at Lafayette’s St. Mary’s Church in my youth, and who married my brother and his wife in 1999. But before all that, from 1977 to 1979, Father Patin was Pastor No. 5 in the integration saga of St. Charles Borromeo in Grand Coteau, and he helped me open the doors to a truly remarkable story without which this book would not be anything close to what it is. Thanks are due to everyone who made the Miracle of Grand Coteau possible: Father Charlie Thibodeaux, Father David Knight, Darrell Burleigh, Father Warren Broussard, Father Dave Andrus, Julia Richard, Sister Alice Mills, Sister Betty Renard, Charles James, Andre Douget, Father James Lambert, and, of course, Wallace Belson.

The story of Grand Coteau could not have been told without
Grand Coteau: The Holy Land of South Louisiana
, by Trent Angers;
For the Greater Honor and Glory of God: St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church
, by Bonnie Taylor Barry; and the parish archives housed at the Diocese of Lafayette. The broader history of race and the church relied on a number of sources, mostly
The History of Black Catholics in the United States
, by Cyprian Davis, and
Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism
, 1947–1956, by R. Bentley Anderson. The bizarre facts of
Plessy v. Ferguson
were drawn from
We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson
, by Keith Weldon Medley. “The Strange Career of Jesus Christ” was very well documented by the essays “Jim Crow Comes to Church,” by Dolores Egger Labbe, published in the
American Catholic Tradition
in 1978; “A Canonical Investigation of Racial Parishes and Its Application to the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, 1918–1978,” by Herbert J. May; and “One Church or Two? Contemporary and Historical Views of Race Relations in One Catholic Diocese,” by
Rhonda D. Evans, Craig J. Forsyth, and Stephanie Bernard. Additionally, much information and overall texture of the civil rights and post–civil rights eras can be gleaned from the archives of
Ebony
and
Time
magazines, both of which are online. No understanding of the integration dilemma can be complete without a thorough reading of
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
, by Harold Cruse. And, last, the book I kept handy and referenced most of all was
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
, which ought to be required reading for all.

As always, I wouldn’t be here without the agent of all agents, Peter McGuigan—who loans me his house at considerable risk to his own safety and welfare—and everyone else at Foundry Literary + Media: Yfat Riess Gendell, Stephanie Abou, Matt Wise, Hannah Gordon, among others. At Viking, I owe an eternal debt to Wendy Wolf and Kevin Doughten, who went to bat for this book when nobody wanted it, and whose Herculean patience allowed it to actually get finished and not be terrible. Additional thanks are due to Liz Parker, Maggie Riggs, Paul Buckley, Andrew Duncan, Andrew Luo, Sonya Cheuse, Carolyn Coleburn, and everyone else who made this possible.

I must give thanks for my old boys’ network: Lane Greene, Brett McCallon, Jay Forman, Dan Hoffheins, and Brendan Greeley, who plowed through the early, overlong, often indecipherable drafts of this book and gave invaluable advice. I also owe many phone calls and visits to my family, Mom and Dad, Mason and Jenni, and Gus and Lena, for being too absent for too long.

And, finally, I give thanks and love to my beautiful wife, Danielle, who met me in the final stretches of this sprawling, unending endeavor and married me anyway, making me happier than I ever knew was possible.