Fast forward to life in Kansas City in the wake of the Great Society campaigns, and we see that real estate moghuls certainly continued to write the implementation of HUD housing and demolishing slums and encouraging whites to move to the suburbs. Local blacks and poor in Kansas City were not consulted.
NOTE: Only in the 1950s and 1960s did Kansas Counties across the Missouri line also finally allow integrated schools and housing. (Johnson County in Kansas tried to be minority free through segregation laws and housing manipulations until the late 1950s.)
Only in the 1980s did first the federal government and then the state of Missouri step in to try and end the segregation of schools in metro Kansas City proper. Meanwhile, Kansas City schools went down in quality as monies for education were absent after the era of Urban Renewal had chased the growing middle classes to the suburbs. Currently, the Kansas City, Missouri public schools have been non-certified by the State of Missouri for nearly 30 years. Anti-Black and racist mentalities still infect Kansas City as it does the entire American society.
However, to some degree Kansas City has changed from what the late Roy Wilkins, a 20th Century executive director of the NAACP, described Kansas City as: "A Jim Crow Town that nearly ate my hear out as the years went by".schools, hospitals, churches, theaters, and just about everything else were as anything was in Memphis. In its feelings for race, Kansas City might as well have been Gulfport, Mississippi."
In contrast, since 1991, Kansas City has had a string of 4 white mayors since 1991. Coalitions have arisen to fight racism. Neighborhoods are slowly beginning to feel a renaissance. Blacks and poor have been demanding fairness in the courts and fairer treatment from the police.
However, like most USA cities, Kansas City has a long way to go.
RACISM IN KANSAS CITY: A Short History introduces the undercovered side of Midwest history in an easy-to-read fashion, and along with hundreds of endnotes, which make it both easy to use in schools and college. Read this short history and then join me in demanding that it be taught in all Kansas and Missouri schools. The continued segregation of peoples and society in Kansas City is bad for our health and for all our people.[1]
NOTES
[1] See: A Segregated Kansas City is Not Good for Our Health
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