Dissecting the Troost Divide and Racial Segregation in Kansas City

A long overdue conversation about systemic racism has ignited across the nation, perpetuated from the pain of witnessing on camera the killing of George Floyd. What followed were protests and genuine cries for change in our city. 

Inequality etched our landscape after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Systems put into place nationwide trickled into Kansas City, forever transforming the community into segregation. Into the 1890s, the city wasn’t as racially divided as you’d think. There were several factors that changed this, and one of note recently due to the call to rename J.C. Nichols Parkway was his use of racial covenants in the growing suburbs. 

Country Club District sign off of Brookside Blvd.

J.C. Nichols was the king in Kansas City of residential development, and his vision of the first outdoor shopping mall, the Country Club Plaza, was mimicked across the nation due to its ingenuity (to read more about its creation, click here!)

J.C. Nichols and other real estate developers such as Fletcher Cowherd and the Kroh Brothers of Leawood used covenants as a tool to create a white paradise outside the confines of the urban core.

These racial restrictions weren’t solely the idea of one man in one city but were common practices supported by the federal government across the nation. Residential segregation, according to Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, is “an unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.”

Deed from the Greenway Fields Neighborhood, developed by J.C. Nichols in Brookside. Image courtesy of homeowner.

What drove segregation in Kansas City included blockbusting, racial covenants, real estate practices (including the federal government’s lending programs that refused to insure mortgages in African American neighborhoods), and the Kansas City Public Schools.

It was the Kansas City School Board that created what we know as the “Troost Wall” or “Troost Divide” in our city.  It’s time to focus on the  lesser-discussed failure of the School Board to desegregate the schools- a failure that has left our city with lasting scars still yet to fully heal.

*********

Students at Lincoln School.
Courtesy Black Archives of Mid-America

After the Civil War, the African American population in Kansas City was scattered between many neighborhoods. Hell’s Half Acre, a neighborhood in the West Bottoms, was one area chosen for Black settlement due to its location near the railroads and stockyards. The neighborhood consisted of people from many different ethnic backgrounds. 

Church Hill, in between 8th and 12th St. between Holmes and Troost was originally “the core of Kansas City’s Black community.” Located inside this area was a subdivision called Perry Place where Kersey Coates (1823-1887) only sold to African Americans until 1870. Coates was a Quaker from Pennsylvania who developed Union Hill and founded the Board of Trade. The Coates House Hotel (built in 1886) at 10th and Broadway still bears his name. His allocation of land for African Americans allowed for the creation of several churches and the area’s first Black school.

Benoist Troost (1786-1859)

In 1867, the first school for African Americans on the Missouri side opened. It was called Lincoln School, and it was originally located inside a church in the heart of the city at 10th and McGee. Segregated schools were actually required in the Missouri constitution- it was a criminal offense to have integrated schools. For almost 40 years, Lincoln School was the only place for people of color to get an education.

The railroads and stockyards had people from all over flocking to Kansas City for work. At the same time, thousands of African Americans fled the South due to mounting racial tensions. Many chose to settle in Wyandotte Co. in the Quindaro neighborhood. In Kansas City, Mo., the Black population by 1885 had quadrupled. 

When Kansas City was at its peak of growth in the 1880s, city planners and leaders thought residential development was moving to the east. This can be seen by looking at the early Parks and Boulevard maps. The grandest of all the boulevards, The Paseo, began construction in 1893 and hosted some of the most beautiful residences of the day.

Even before The Paseo was constructed, another neighborhood had been coined one of the richest in the city and featured some of the most beautiful mansions of its time-  and they fell right on Troost Ave. between 24th St. and Linwood Blvd.

A drawing of the Porter Plantation appeared in the Kansas
City Times.

In 1834, Tennessee-born Rev. James Porter (1786-1851), the first Methodist preacher in Kansas City, patented 365 acres at what would become Troost Ave. and employed at least forty slaves on his plantation.

By 1886, the Porter family began to sell off lots. Porter’s own granddaughter tore down the original plantation house and built a mansion on what would be coined “Millionaire’s Row.” What once was the Porter Plantation now encompasses many of Kansas City neighborhoods including Longfellow Heights, Mount Hope, and Beacon Hill. 

Troost Ave. had been named for Kansas City’s first doctor, Benoist Troost (1786-1859), and when the streetcar made it to Troost Ave. in 1889, residents could see tremendous value for selling off their large lots.

Up until 1912, Troost was considered the place to be seen until the commercial real estate market overwhelmed the street. Within twenty years, Troost Ave. became a center of commercial development and the mansions then disappeared.

L.V. Harkness's mansion at 3115 Troost Ave., built around 1888. The house was sold in 1920 and became a hotel,
offices and shops and was later demolished for more retail space.
Courtesy Missouri Valley Special Collections, KCPL.

What was once a plantation turned into a street of commercial distinction. Within a few decades, that street would become the dividing line of Kansas City.

The African-American population in 1880.
Published in "Kansas City and How It Grew."
Click image for larger view.

The Church Hill neighborhood near Quality Hill became limited in housing options due to commercial expansion, thus the residents in this area sought different housing outside of it. In 1900, African Americans were distributed throughout the city, but three main neighborhoods were settled more heavily. Belvidere centered around land north of Independence Ave. on the east and west side of Troost. Hick’s Hollow was just east of Belvidere and west of Prospect, and the Bowery was just east of Troost and west of Prospect.

The population boom in the 1880s caused overdevelopment of inexpensive, affordable housing on Kansas City’s east side. The financial crisis of 1890 created even more housing inventory. James Shortridge, author of Kansas City and How it Grew, stated, “With exclusionary laws still in the future, location [of Blacks] remained primarily a matter of affordability.” This along with good access to public transportation may have been the driving force behind the east side’s growing Black population. 

Mirroring the Quality Hill neighborhood on the west side of town, well-to-do African Americans began to move from the West Bottoms and into an area just east of The Paseo near 24th St. This neighborhood quickly became known as “Negro Quality Hill.”

African American neighborhoods in 1910. Each dot
represents "eight Negro families." From Shortridge's book
"Kansas City and How it Grew." Click for full view.

Lincoln School opened the area’s first Black high school at 19th and Tracy in 1890, and its creation likely fueled even more settlement on the east side. Slowly but surely, Black churches started to relocate to this area as well. By the 1920s, the area also boasted the scene of late-night entertainment in the 18th and Vine neighborhood, a place still iconic for its culture and music traditions.

Early Civil Rights activist W.E.B. DuBois strongly believed in the importance of education and stated, “Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.” The growing African American population in Kansas City was stimulated by this desire to educate the next generation.

In 1900, the Black population was evenly distributed throughout  Jackson, Cass and Platte Counties, but if you wanted to have access to education, you had to travel to Kansas City. This created pressure for parents to either move to the area or make their children travel long distances to school. 

According to Kevin Fox Gotham, professor of sociology at Tulane University and author of Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development, between World War I and 1954, “Only six of 61 African American settlements in Jackson, Clay, and Platte Counties provided elementary schools for African American children.” In fact, until 1954, Lincoln was the only African American secondary school in all three counties.

Because of the systems in place, families who decided to relocate to Kansas City lived in racially segregated places where children went to racially segregated schools. 

Cir. 1890 photo of Lincoln School (right) and Lincoln High (left). Lincoln
School was on the northwest corner of 11th and Campbell.
Courtesy Missouri Valley Special Collections, KCPL.

As the city grew in size and the motor car created mobility, the suburbs became desirable and catered to the notion of “white flight.” The creation of Attucks School at 19th and Woodland in 1907 gave even more educational opportunities to the Black community in the area.

Racial covenants in new neighborhoods prohibited Blacks from living within them. In other well-established white neighborhoods in the city that bordered on areas with an African American population, HOA’s conveniently added covenants to restrict Blacks from moving into their space.

Kansas City's African-American population in 1940
published in James Shortridge's book "Kansas City and How It Grew"
Click image for larger view.

As the divide became more pronounced along Troost Ave., whites living east of the division moved out of the area and further segregated the school system and neighborhoods. Real estate “blockbusters” such as Bob Wood profited from white flight by buying a home and selling it to minorities. As part of a chain reaction, whites in the neighborhood would sell their homes to people like Bob Wood below market value “on the implied threat of future devaluation during minority integration of previously segregated neighborhoods.” 

Within a short period of time, African Americans were pigeonholed to the east side of Kansas City. James Shortridge explained, “Restrictive covenants in new subdivisions didn’t cause the overcrowding on the east side directly. Instead, they initiated a chain reaction.”

According to NPR, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) “furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African American neighborhoods- a policy known as redlining.”

These “security maps” created by the New Deal agency called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), “recruited mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers in nearly 250 cities to create maps that color-coded credit worthiness and risk on neighborhood and metropolitan levels.” In addition, the FHA was subsidizing builders who would ensure that no homes would be sold to Blacks.  According to Richard Rothstein, these practices created nationwide ghettos “surrounded by white suburbs.”

By 1920, 75% of the population on the east side was African American. The lines were beginning to be drawn. 

That redline wouldn't be stopped by the Supreme Court.

This chart shows the racial breakdown of the area's Black
population 1900-1954 first published by Kevin Fox Gotham.

Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 ruled that segregation of schools was unconstitutional, but it didn’t stop Kansas City from continuing their practice of segregation. The state left it up to the school districts to decide whether it even happened.  The Kansas City School District (KCSD) started to quickly decline when all public schools were ordered to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”

In response to the Supreme Court decision, the Kansas City School Board took pen to paper and redrew the boundaries to ensure schools stayed segregated. Tanner Colby, author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black, wrote, “Starting in 1955, the city announced that school enrollment would be based on neighborhood attendance zones- neighborhoods that just happened to be all white or all Black.” With the move of the boundaries, there was significant gerrymandering that quickly coded one neighborhood or another- depending on where it fell along Troost.

The “attendance zones” drawn by the School Board redlined the community along Troost Ave.

According to Kevin Fox Gotham, “Into the 1970s, the School Board made frequent shifts in attendance areas of its schools, typically removing white areas from the western-most portions of its racially transitional zones and attaching them to all-white zones further west.” 

The division at Troost Ave. coupled with blockbusting evoked a mass exodus of white families to communities outside of the Kansas City district and into areas such as Johnson County, South Kansas City and Raytown.  Suburban areas began to grow at alarming speeds and became a haven for post-war families. 

From a pamphlet warning residents about blockbusting

The decision to desegregate schools accelerated Johnson County, Ks. growth as families looked for alternatives. The population of Johnson Co., Ks. more than doubled between 1950 and 1960. The creation of subdivisions sprinkled with small, convenient shopping centers in locations such as Raytown, Ruskin Heights, Hickman Mills, and Grandview supplied white suburbanites other places to settle down. White flight from the Kansas City School District had begun.

While whites moved out, the all-white Kansas City school board over the next two decades constantly shifted attendance boundaries. Between 1954 and 1973, the four high schools east of Troost changed from three all-white schools and one all-Black (Lincoln) to a 97% Black enrollment in all four schools.

Dr. Derald Davis, Assistant Superintendent of Equity, Inclusion and Innovation with KCPS stated, “The legacy of racism and classism in Kansas City, Missouri has left a permanent stain in the culture, traditions, and policies of our city.” 

In 1954, Central High School was 100% white. Six years later, the school was 90% Black. Paseo High School was 100% white in 1954, and by 1970, Paseo was 99% Black. Schools west of Troost remained to have a high population of whites while schools east of it were overcrowded and underfunded. James Shortridge explained, “The city grew by nearly 220 square miles throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but the school district stayed the same size.” 

Snapshots of the yearbook photos from Central High School (L-R)- 1954, 1957, and 1960.
The change in demographics due to the attendance boundary shifts at Troost is easily visible.

In the 1960s, Central High School was bursting at the seams, and the School District set out to shift the boundary lines once again. On June 27, 1963, the Kansas City Times reported the Board’s findings on what to do with overpopulation on the east side. They stated, “The board recognizes that the discussion of solving overcrowded conditions at Central High School is occurring at a time when racial tensions are increasing across the country. The Kansas City schools have a respectable record of integration.”

They shifted the attendance boundaries once again, and this further reinforced neighborhood segregation despite their denial of a problem. In 1969, the School Board asked for a tax increase to support public schools, but it didn’t pass. According to Kevin Fox Gotham, “Nineteen additional proposals for school support would appear on the ballot for the next two decades, but none of them passed.”

After World War II, many soldiers returned home, got married, and started a family. Affordable housing wasn’t the only concern for these young couples- they wanted to ensure the place where they called home also had quality schools. Builders threw up housing as quickly as possible. In Ruskin Heights south of the city, the first tract housing development was built. Grandview saw substantial growth due to its location near Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base. Raytown offered affordable housing and newly-built schools. 

James Shortridge, author of Kansas City and How it Grew explains, “These schools [in the suburbs] were established as alternatives to the troubled Kansas City system, and minority students were scarce before the late 1980s.” As the suburbs exploded in the 1950s and 1960s, Kansas City’s schools were facing serious problems. As the district was forced to integrate, there was a white exodus to the suburbs. 

Schools in Kansas City were in disrepair. Quality teachers left for suburban districts, and within a short amount of time, test scores began to fall.

Kansas City continued to be one of the most segregated (and underfunded) school systems in the nation into the 1970s with its line falling at Troost. “Once a thriving commercial artery, Troost turned into the frontline of a long and bitter turf war in which both armies retreated and turned their backs on it,” Tanner Colby explained.

Troost was an endless dividing line between Black and white schools, neighborhoods, wealth, and development opportunities that began with the School District’s decision to segregate through attendance zones. 

Blockbusting story published in the Sunday Evening Post

In the 1970s, Kansas City remained to be one of the most segregated school systems in the nation. The school district was under scrutiny by the NAACP and other organizations because of the startling segregation that still existed within the schools. 

In 1973, a lawsuit was filed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) demanding desegregation in the high schools. The school board responded by adopting an integration plan that affected only 17 of the district’s 98 schools. The district bused about 700 of the district’s 65,000 students. To no surprise, the plan failed. 

In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) launched a federal investigation and found that the school district was illegally segregating schools by continuously moving the attendance boundaries- with the line falling at Troost Ave. 

A drawing in the May 15, 1977 Kansas City Star
noting the busing controversy

HEW used money to force change on the school district- if KCPS didn’t solve this inherent segregation within the schools, they would lose federal funding. The school district tried to bus students to ensure schools were at least 30% African-American, but the plan was unsuccessful.

Kevin Fox Gotham, author of Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development wrote, “In 1977, eight out of ten African-American children in the district attended schools that were 90% Black while the majority of white students attended schools that were more than 90% white.”

Part of the problem of integrating schools was the declining number of white students within the district. White families had moved at alarming speeds to the suburbs.

Anomalies in the heart of the communities built by J.C. Nichols such as the Country Club District can still be seen. The people living in these neighborhoods- predominately white- pay taxes into KCPS but choose to send their students to five conveniently located private schools: Barstow, Notre Dame de Sion, Pembroke Hill, Rockhurst, and St. Teresa’s.

Out of solutions within its boundaries, the Kansas City School District filed a lawsuit in 1977 on behalf of its students against the state of Kansas, Missouri, and the eighteen suburban districts in the metropolitan area. The KCSD alleged it was the joint responsibility of the states and the suburban districts to be part of the solution to desegregate public schools in Kansas City. In that same year, the school district hired their first Black superintendent, Robert R. Wheeler.

Headline in the Kansas City Times May 5, 1977

In 1957, Missouri House Bill 171 barred school district boundaries from automatically growing when Kansas City annexed land. Through annexations, Kansas City grew by nearly 220 square miles throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but the school district remained the same size. White flight from the urban core crippled the number of white students as families left for outlying Kansas City communities such as Hickman Mills, Raytown, Independence, Grandview, and Ruskin Heights. KCSD thought a viable plan for desegregation of schools was to merge these schools and create one large metropolitan district. 

Central High School
Courtesy Missouri Valley Special Collections, KCPL

The state of Kansas was eventually dismissed from the lawsuit, but the battle continued in court for eight years.  By 1981, 72.6% of Kansas City’s students were non-white. While the KCSD alleged racial discrimination was at play in the decisions of suburban districts against merging, the U.S. District Court of Western Missouri ruled in 1984 that there were not signs of overt or intentional discrimination. 

In 1985, Federal Judge Russell G. Clark ruled against the idea of a metropolitan school district, noting that the suburban districts “were not responsible for Kansas City’s problem.” It was ordered that the KCSD come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the funds to pay for it. Desegregation, it appeared, fell onto the state of Missouri and the school district- a district with a 73% minority population. James Shortridge wrote, “One federal judge who became involved with the issue said that he had never seen a prison in such bad shape as the Kansas City schools of the 1980s.”

The problem was there weren’t that many white students, and it’s hard to integrate schools when there is no one to integrate with. 

The hope in the 1980s was to build one of the best school districts in the nation. Fifteen brand-new buildings were constructed while 54 old ones were remodeled. They created nearly five dozen magnet schools which concentrated on subjects such as computer science, foreign languages, and classical Greek athletics.  James Shortridge explains, “If the quality of instruction was high, the buildings modern, and the programs innovative, students from all over the region would want to attend."

Because the plan would cost a lot to execute and schools were already in disrepair, the court ordered that property taxes be raised and the state needed to fund the rest. Thus, an extra $200 million dollars per year was funneled into the district’s budget.

Money clearly was no object. Schools featured amenities such as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, a robotics lab, a film studio, theaters, a mock court, and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability. Central High School had computers for every student.

At one point, 44% of the entire state budget for education was going to just nine percent of the state’s students in St. Louis and Kansas City. The state was spending more on desegregation than it was spending on prisons, courts, the highway patrol, and the state fire marshal combined.

The hope with all of these new facilities and advancements was to attract 5,000 to 10,000 white students back to the district, but the plan failed. The largest number of white students ever enrolled was 1,500 - and most returned to their old schools after one year. Test scores continued to fall.

Lack of student performance was likely the main reason for the failure of KCSD in the 1980s and 1990s. James Shortridge points to the quality of instruction as a serious issue. Shortridge wrote, “It is a sad story, but Kansas City people sacrificed quality of education to the shorter-term goals of integration and job retention.”

The Troost Wall or Troost Divide can be clearly seen in this racial map.

By the 1990s, over $2 billion dollars had been invested into the school system. Even with the extra funding, the city remained deeply divided racially, economically and geographically as ever.

As Kansas City schools fought to revitalize with funding, many middle-class Black families left the district for bordering communities. Communities such as Raytown had openly used racial profiling in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s, Black families moved into the area seeking better opportunities.

Students at Ruskin High School in 1968

Ironically, many of the white community members in Raytown resisting this change had much in common with them. A generation before, white flight had moved this group to the suburbs, and African-Americans were doing the same in the name of opportunity- especially as it pertained to schools. 

By 1980, Raytown’s western and northern sections were 25% Black. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Hickman Mills school district was booming with a population of 13,000. In 1968, there were only two non-white students in the district. By 1990, Hickman Mills and Ruskin Heights was 37% African-American- the highest outside of KCPS. As more Black families moved in, whites left for schools in other districts. Aging housing stock in the neighborhoods and a shift in demographics had housing prices dropping. By 2011, the Hickman Mills school district had shrunk to less than half its size in the 1960s.

31st and Troost in 1954 versus today

In the past two decades, Kansas City, according to an Urban League report, has moved to being a district of “education choice” due to the addition of charter schools in the last twenty years. The 2019 report proclaims KCPS “is more segregated today than in the 1990s” and found that charter schools aren’t opening in neighborhoods that need better schools; rather, charter schools tend to exist and thrive in middle-class neighborhoods.

Even though the district is still predominantly Black and is now 25% Latino, families are leaving the city for educational opportunities in other districts. The Urban League Report states, “Hickman Mills had become predominantly African-American . . . and Raytown- once an epicenter of racial exclusion - served a sizable Black population.” 

There have been extensive efforts to erase the line of Black versus white- rich versus poor- that you can still see along Troost Ave. Before white flight virtually crippled the once-thriving commercial shopping district along 31st and Troost, the area was an epicenter for shopping. Ten years ago, the area was crippled with crime, dilapidated buildings, and basic neglect of a historic area so many left behind as they packed their bags for the suburbs.

Today, Midtown Redevelopment Partners are transforming several of these buildings into offices and retail. The old Tycor Building will boast even further culture being cultivated in the blossoming neighborhood by housing the Midwest American Indian Museum of the Plains.

Troost Ave. also saw a needed boost with the launch of Troost Market Collective, a non-profit set on creating opportunities for creative entrepreneurs in the neighborhood. Starting in 2018, they launched Troostapalooza, a free, family-friendly event between 30th and 31st on Troost Ave. that drew community members far and wide.

Images from Troostapalooza, courtesy troostapalooza.com

People do care about the future of Troost Ave. and are working to unpack the systemic problems that created the division between east and west - a division that, without a doubt, still exists.

The systemic problems within Kansas City schools started with the invisible line drawn at Troost Ave. in the 1950s. This continued into the 1980s, and it could be argued that it still- at least in racial makeup and housing prices- exists today. Tanner Colby, author of Some of My Best Friends are Black, wrote, “Still today, nearly every zip code, every census tract, every voting ward - and for a long time, every school district- all split along Troost.”

This redline isn’t unique to Kansas City. “Most every city in America has a Troost,” Tanner Colby stated. Kansas City’s systemic problem has continued to exist after so many attempts to solve it. Consolidation efforts failed, remodeling the schools, and extensive funding didn’t draw white students back to the district. Today, with a population of 10% white within the district, desegregation of the schools is next to impossible.

In our current climate, fingers are pointing toward figures such as J.C. Nichols as the fundamental reason Kansas City’s cultural geography is the way it is today. In truth, there were many factors that led to racial segregation, and one of the most predominate is the red line that still can be seen along Troost Ave. 

James Shortridge wrote of the Troost Divide, “Its persistence more than a generation later as a major cultural divide is evidence that Kansas City never dealt successfully with segregated schools” and this “explains much of the community’s cultural geography.”

Dr. Derald Davis, Assistant Superintendent of Equity, Inclusion and Innovation with Kansas City Public Schools commented, “Now is the time to dismantle systems of racism that have kept some neighborhoods, and many schools, under-resourced and disenfranchised for decades.” 

This problem has persisted since the 1950s and still desperately needs a solution.

* * *

This piece was written by Diane Euston with contributing historian Tim Reidy. Reidy is an Archivist and Kansas City History Instructor at Rockhurst High School and works as an independent researcher. He wrote Crossroads of America: A Thematic History of Kansas City ,an electronic textbook for use in his History of Kansas City courses. He holds an MEd. in Secondary Social Studies from the University of  Notre Dame and a BA in History and American Studies from the University of Kansas.

Recommended Reading:

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

Kansas City and How It Grew by James R. Shortridge

Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development by Kevin Fox Gotham

Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby

Do you love Kansas City history and my writing? You have to check out my podcast with 610 Sports. Along with radio personality Bob Fescoe, we discuss the history of our city! It's completely free. Click HERE! A new episode is put up around the 15th of the month.

Don't want to miss any of my writing? Search The New Santa Fe Trailer on Facebook and LIKE my page so you don't miss any of these fascinating stories!