The black and white images on the nineteen inch Motorola TV were disturbing yet mesmerizing in their abject cruelty. Alabama State Troopers, clad in combat gear, urged snarling German shepherds into a crowd of Black demonstrators. Attempting to escape the sharp incisors of the canines, dozens of people who were peacefully marching to end Jim Crow laws, retreated in fear. Some fell to the ground only to be clubbed by the police officers.
Two months later, with those horrific images of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, still weighing heavily on my mind, I graduated from North Kansas City High School, in North Kansas City, Missouri.
In 1965 NKCHS was exactly like every other large school of higher learning. Besides the big red brick buildings with the smelly gymnasium, there were sports teams for boys and girls, every kind of club imaginable, honor societies and proms. There was nothing really out of the ordinary about the class of '65, except for one glaring omission, there wasn't one Black student. Not a one. Out of a senior class of over 1,000 white seventeen and eighteen-year-olds there could have been an exchange student from Japan, but I'm not really sure.
When I mention that unusual set of segregated circumstances to some of my Black friends, they ask, "Where did all the Black people go?"
It was the early decades of the last century, during the mass migration from rural poverty to a better life in Kansas City, the city fathers planted the Blacks in the fertile floodplains south of the Missouri River. There were a lot of poor whites living in the inner-city, too.
When my parents, along with me and my sister, first arrived in K. C. we lived at Eleventh and Troost. Up through the third grade, I attended Hawthorne Elementary School which being in the inner-city was fully integrated. By the time I was ten-years-old we moved North of the river and like good consumers Mom and Dad went in debt, got a new car and a new house. All part of the American Dream, right? Funny thing though, looking around our lily white neighborhood in North Kansas City, it seemed like Black people had been ghettoized.
Lewis Diuguid, an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star from 1977 to 2016 once said, "Racism is resistant to change. Racism doesn't take a day off. It is constant and mutates to change over time."
In the early 1950's white racism was glaringly evident on a sign situated at the north end of the Armour Swift Burlington Bridge that led directly into North Kansas City. 'No Negros allowed on the street after dark'. I'm not sure if that hand painted directive was ever upheld by the authorities, or was just a one-time empty stab at Negros in general. But how could a Black person own a house in a part of town that didn't allow people of color to be seen outside after dark? The person who put up the sign, what was he really afraid of? It certainly wasn't Negros on the street after dark because 'whitey' owned most of the guns. I think he was afraid of a change of heart. I think the poor soul who wrote those 8 words was sick at heart, a racist whose sign was his way to prove his white supremacy.
Redlining, the primary reason there wasn't a Black face in the 1965 NKCHS yearbook. For the greater part of the last century there was a detailed list of requirements for home builders and buyers. Among them: 'Ownership by Negroes Prohibited'. No lots or homes would be conveyed to, used, owned nor occupied by Negroes as owners or tenants. Homes and apartments were off limits for tens of thousands of Black people. Why did the design of neighborhoods, from Armour Hills to Prairie Village, all include covenants with racist clauses?
We moved to the suburbs of North Kansas City in 1955. By the time I started Eastgate Junior High, the first family of color moved into our neighborhood. They weren't Black, they were brown people from Mexico. There were some on our street who looked at these newcomers and complained, "There goes the neighborhood." But not my mother. My mom took it upon herself to be a one woman welcoming committee. My white family and the brown-skinned immigrants eventually became close friends, which was a good thing because that's when I first had the chance to taste guacamole.
It was sometime later that I realized my mother didn't have a racist bone in her body. When asked about her colorblindness when it came to other people, Mom remarked that she didn't think progress for those of color comes at the expense of white people, a dollar more in a Black person's pocket doesn't mean there's a dollar less in hers.
Wait for Me - 2016 (24”X36”)