RACIALIZED ADVANTAGE
The Missouri Suburban School Districts
On January 7, 1969, more than fifteen hundred people crowded into the auditorium of Raytown High School to hear officials from several area districts and local politicians denounce a proposal to reorganize school systems throughout the state. “It was obvious,” reported the Kansas City Star, “that the crowd was violently opposed to the plan.” Among their complaints were the insensitivity and unresponsiveness of big-city bureaucrats and a fear of losing local control of their institutions. But race also loomed large as an issue, especially the prospect of school desegregation. “By and large,” a local banker stated, “the people who have moved here have moved away from an integrated neighborhood. They moved here for good schools and a segregated society.” The city’s mayor concurred, declaring that “there are people in Raytown who have moved here to keep their children from going to Central or Paseo.” To these men and others, the exclusion of black students from public schools in Raytown and adjacent districts was a critical feature of their community’s identity. They also saw it as key to the success of local institutions and crucial to preserving their status. In the wake of desegregation controversies and white flight, many believed these questions to be paramount, especially since their district bordered the Kansas City, Missouri, School District. The very suggestion of changing the local configuration of school systems made many of them hopping mad, and they were determined to oppose it vehemently.1
As noted in the previous chapter, many of the families “fleeing” the Kansas City public schools during the 1960s and ’70s made their way to suburban school districts, usually wholly or partly located within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City. Although most such districts began modestly, by the end of the 1960s they exhibited clear advantages over their larger urban neighbor. They were also predominantly white and middle class in composition, and as they expanded during the long postwar era, KCMPS mainly served less affluent racial and ethnic minority families. This, of course, was a familiar pattern of development in metropolitan America, but in Kansas City it was school districts rather than separately incorporated suburban communities that often shaped the course of events.2
What accounted for this sequence of changes? As elsewhere, the availability of new and better housing spurred the move to outlying areas, well removed from the urban core. Easy mortgage terms for whites, and extensive local highway construction—subsidized by the federal government—clearly helped as well. These developments meant that families with sufficient resources could enjoy an improved standard of living, especially for their children, within commuting distance to employment, shopping, recreation, and other activities. In this respect Kansas City also conformed to the national norm.3 Schools, of course, were a part of that, but so were race and social status. As suggested in the comments at the Raytown meeting, white families, many clearly motivated by bigotry, left the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Schools when African Americans started attending the institutions their children attended. Eventually thousands of white students departed, and some blacks as well.4 Suburban districts, consequently, grew significantly, while remaining overwhelmingly white.
The role of race in this process became clear in 1968, when a special commission created by the Missouri legislature investigated the possibility of redrawing district boundaries for greater efficiency and equity in public education. The resulting uproar highlighted many issues that local school leaders held dear, but race was unquestionably paramount in the minds of many suburban district residents. It was this development that prompted the meeting in Raytown, along with many others. Suburbanites made their dissatisfaction quite clear in letters to commissioners and in protests held in Jefferson City, the state capital. Similar reactions were evident during the 1970s and ’80s when comparable proposals appeared, calling for school district consolidation across the metro area. Residents of these areas viewed their district boundaries as a bulwark against the threat of incursion by residents of KCMPS, and African Americans in particular. For many the possibility of racial integration in their schools became a highly emotional issue.5
This chapter considers suburban school system development on the Missouri side of greater Kansas City. Focusing on the districts of Raytown, Hickman Mills, and North Kansas City, it seeks to illuminate some of the dynamics of their growth. In particular, it highlights mechanisms of exclusion that helped to keep the schools in these areas largely white and middle class in orientation. There is scant evidence of overt discrimination within the schools or by suburban educators, but there can be little doubt that African Americans felt unwelcome in these communities. While reform proposals at the state level stirred racial tensions in suburban districts, local recommendations for metro-wide integration produced similar responses. Localism and opportunity hoarding, it appears, took a particular form on the Missouri side of the state line, and the biggest controversies revolved largely around race.
Kansas City Suburban School Development: North, South, and East
As described in chapter 2, Kansas City grew by annexation during the 1950s, more than quadrupling its geographic footprint and adding substantially to its population base. This was a savvy move by forward-thinking civic leaders, but existing school district boundaries stayed in place. The result was a patchwork of self-described “suburban” education systems within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, arrayed around KCMPS. This was not considered a big problem initially, but eventually the lines defining the city’s various school systems became critically important. During the 1960s and ’70s they operated as barriers that permitted—or even encouraged—certain people to enter these spaces, while signaling to others that they were not welcome.6
The districts surrounding KCMPS grew rapidly during this period. Table 4.1 provides enrollment numbers for the two decades following the Brown decision for the region’s Missouri school systems. These are district (not town or city) figures, reflecting changes in the number of households and the size of families, both of which expanded at the time. The table compares enrollment numbers reported a few years after the height of the baby boom, and thus past their peak levels. Even so, suburban district growth outpaced the entire metropolitan area, which expanded by nearly 40 percent.7 As these figures suggest, almost all this development occurred outside the urban core represented by KCMPS.
A variety of factors contributed to the rapid expansion of these districts. On the leading edge of the baby boom, a wave of new parents moved to suburbs nationally, and there is evidence that Kansas City’s outlying districts attracted them too. Most newcomers to the region apparently chose to live in these areas rather than the urban core, unless they were African American. When combined with white out-migration from the city center, the result was rapid growth at the periphery represented by suburban school districts. In this respect Kansas City was quite similar to other large metropolitan areas, especially as changing technology, favorable government policies, and suburban conveniences made central city housing less attractive.8
TABLE 4.1 KC metropolitan Missouri districts: growth and resources, 1954–55 to 1974–75
Sources: One Hundred and Sixth Report of the Public Schools of the State of Missouri, School Year Ending June 30, 1955, pt. 2, section 4, table A: Enumeration and Enrollment, 1954–55; One Hundred and Twenty Sixth Report of the Public Schools of the State of Missouri, School Year Ending June 30, 1975, pt. 2, table A; and Kansas and Missouri Advisory Committees on Civil Rights, “Crisis and Opportunity: Education in Greater Kansas City,” unpublished report, 1977, 56 and 57.
Yet other factors influenced the development of particular communities. Expansion also reflected the maturity of local communities and their capacity for development. Slower-growing districts, such as Independence, Liberty, and Raytown, were located in areas that had long been settled. Independence tripled in population between 1950 and 1970, partly because of annexation, but about a quarter of the city was served by KCMPS. Many students leaving schools in Kansas City’s center moved east to attend institutions in the Van Horn High cluster rather than Independence district schools.9 The city of Raytown grew rapidly, too, but half its school district was located in bordering Kansas City neighborhoods that did not develop quite as quickly.10 North Kansas City realized much of its population growth through annexation of neighboring districts. The most dramatic expansion, on the other hand, occurred in districts located in the city’s southwest quadrant: Center and Hickman Mills, along with Grandview. This reflected the area’s booming growth following the war, when it became a focal point for manufacturing, retail investment, and new military installations. This was especially true after a US Air Force base opened there in 1955. Some families moving to these communities may have been attracted by the schools, but most were interested in reasonably priced new homes and proximity to jobs, shopping, and the other amenities of recently annexed parts of the city.11
If suburban districts differed in growth, there also was a good deal of variation in their revenues and the families they served. Calculated on a per-pupil basis, residents of Center and Grandview were the most generous supporters of their schools, reflecting higher incomes and commercial development that helped boost the local tax base (Center’s district revenues were nearly $6,000 per pupil in 2015 dollars). Table 4.2 provides statistics on median family income levels for each district in 1970, with the two largest Kansas systems included for comparison. While the students in wealthy Shawnee Mission clearly benefited from well-educated parents, other districts lacked its tax base or failed to reach consensus on school funding. Raytown did not have large-scale commercial or industrial development but enjoyed relatively high household income. Independence had limited assets on either count, as did Liberty, but residents of both worked in nearby plants. In Hickman Mills, a persistent opposition to school funding increases managed to defeat such proposals in levy elections, despite the district’s relatively high level of household income.12 Overall, the result was relatively modest financial support for the Missouri suburban schools, with only Center and Grandview spending more per capita than KCMPS.
TABLE 4.2 KC metropolitan school districts: economic, social, and demographic profiles, 1970
Source: “Crisis and Opportunity: Education in Greater Kansas City,” 29 and B-3.
* 1972–73 estimates
Funding differences of this sort may not have mattered much, however, if the students in these districts were generally homogeneous with respect to wealth or income, parental education, and minority status, all potentially significant factors affecting school success. As indicated in table 4.2, only the two urban core Kansas City districts served large numbers of minority families, most of them African American. KCMPS reported that a majority of its students were enrolled in the federally funded Free or Reduced Lunch Program (FRL), and similar numbers participated across the river in Kansas City, Kansas. This, of course, reflected levels of household income, which were 16 percent lower in KCMPS than in Liberty, the poorest of the suburban districts. Adult education levels, reflected here in the proportion of adults with high school diplomas, also were lowest in the urban core districts, with half or less attaining that level of education. The long history of discrimination that African Americans had faced in schools accounted for much of this difference. It was a combination of factors that did not bode well for the children in the city schools, whose needs for school resources were considerably higher than those of most of their suburban peers. Given these circumstances, it is little wonder that KCMPS students scored relatively low on standardized tests. Suburban students started each school year in a considerably stronger position to succeed.13
On the other hand, resources did seem to make a difference outside the urban core. Most suburban students may not have been poor, but their background characteristics and school funding did seem to have a bearing on learning outcomes, or at least those measured by standardized tests (reported in table 3.3). The Independence School District, for instance, registered relatively low adult education levels and modest median family income, likely reflecting the blue-collar industries where many of its residents worked.14 It also generated the least revenue per student of any district in the area. The same was true of nearby Liberty, although its revenue level was somewhat higher. It is hardly a surprise, in that case, that in Independence proportionately fewer students passed the 1978 Missouri basic skills test (by a small margin) than in any of the other suburban districts. At the other end of the scale was Center, with the highest levels of income and revenues among the Missouri districts, and second in adult education. As indicated in the previous chapter, it also had the highest passing rate on the basic skills test. In this respect it was followed closely by Raytown, another relatively high-income district, although one with adult education and revenues closer to the suburban average. Penurious Hickman Mills possessed fairly high income and attainment levels but chose to spend comparatively little on its schools. Less than two-thirds of its students passed the basic skills test in 1978. North Kansas City passing rates were about average for the suburban districts, as were its other characteristics, aside from revenues.
While it is likely that a range of factors affected the performance of suburban students, the differences between them were relatively minor, especially in light of the test-score chasm that separated each of them from KCMPS. Compared to the many problems that beset the city schools, especially by the later 1970s, suburban institutions doubtless appeared to be islands of tranquility and proficiency. But the fact that performance on a basic standardized test would parallel student characteristics so closely, even at a high level of aggregation, suggests that there may not have been much variability in the performance of these institutions. They all appear to have contributed to student success in similar ways. The lack of substantial distinctions in this respect, of course, fits the observation of James Coleman in his famous report of 1966, and of many other researchers hence, that schools contributed relatively little to differences in student achievement.15 If this was true in suburban Kansas City, it could be evidence that the chief resources these schools possessed were the students they served. School funding levels might have contributed as well, but may have reflected local attitudes and preparation for education as much as differences in institutional capacity.
As the foregoing suggests, the area’s Missouri suburban districts were hardly the same with respect to a variety of social and economic characteristics. But if there was one feature that they shared, it was their racial profile, particularly its whiteness, which differed very little. In this regard they also stood in sharp contrast to KCMPS, which became increasingly African American.16 The Missouri suburban districts also worked together, playing one another in sports leagues and sharing information through a local coordinating council that did not include KCMPS. Created in 1962 at a meeting held in Raytown High School, this organization was initially called the Greater Kansas City Suburban Association of Co-operative Schools, with representation from twelve districts.17 Its leaders clearly did not believe that they faced the same issues as their colleagues in the city system and felt that their districts had more in common with one another despite their differences. It is also telling that they referred to themselves as suburban districts, when so many of them, to one degree or another, were located within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City. They clearly wanted to avoid any confusion with the institutions of KCMPS.
Much of this perception, of course, concerned questions of race and poverty. Given the rapid growth of Kansas City’s black population, it is striking that so few African Americans found their way to these school systems. Some did, of course, as suggested in the previous chapter. But their numbers were small, at least until the 1980s.18 These districts also served a relatively modest population of poor students, as indicated by their FRL numbers, although there was more variability on that count than race. Still, the pattern suggests that the distribution of African American and poor children was hardly indiscriminate. Poverty and minority status, like wealth and adult education levels, clustered unevenly across the metropolitan landscape. This suggests a purposeful pattern of policy decisions and active exclusion rather than a natural or unintentional geo-spatial arrangement of status and individual choice. Local manifestations of this, of course, also differed from one setting to the next.
Raytown and South Kansas City: Contrasting Patterns of Racial Exclusion
The southern reaches of metropolitan Kansas City were relatively slow to develop in the early twentieth century. Mainly composed of farmland, the area lacked the industry, commercial development, and access to transportation that settlements closer to the region’s major rivers enjoyed. When annexation talk began to stir in the postwar years, consequently, communities immediately south of Kansas City and Independence were still unincorporated and thus vulnerable to appropriation. It was in response to this situation that local leaders established the tiny municipality of Raytown in 1950, counting little more than five hundred residents in three square miles.19 In the following decade Raytown expanded through a series of its own annexations, soon more than tripling in size and adding some fifteen thousand residents.20 Access to nearby freeways made commuting relatively easy. Ten years later its population had doubled, peaking at more than thirty-three thousand.21 Map 4.1 depicts the district’s boundaries and secondary schools, along with the neighboring Hickman Mills district and the rest of South Kansas City.
As was often the case in rural areas, the local school district pre-dated incorporation of the community, and in this instance it was among the first in the state to be consolidated. In 1903 seven rural districts joined together, becoming the second consolidated district in Missouri, following their neighbors immediately to the west by a year (later to become the Hickman Mills district).22 An advantage to consolidation was the ability to pool the resources and students of constituent districts to establish a secondary school. The addition of yet more rural schools in subsequent years contributed to the district’s growth and the size of its high school, which was accepting nonresident students from other rural schools by the start of the Second World War. It was shortly after the war’s end that the district began offering transportation to its schools, soon amassing a fleet of nearly fifty new buses to serve its expanding clientele.23
Growth came quickly in the 1950s. As indicated on the map, the Raytown School District (RSD) became one of the most expansive geographically in the region, comprising twenty-seven square miles and about twice as large as Raytown itself at the end of the decade.24 Enrollment records indicated that new students arrived from all parts of the country, and growth meant that classes sometimes had to be held in bus garages or even on buses while facilities were constructed.25 Public support for the schools was fervent, however, with seventeen bond issues approved by voters between 1946 and 1961. These funds helped to construct seven new schools, and a new wing added to Raytown High, permitting an enrollment of more than twelve hundred. Even so, overcrowding resulted in a second high school in 1961, Raytown South. Four years later the district enrolled more than fifteen thousand students, twelve times its 1945 number, and it added nearly two thousand more by the end of the decade. Falling birthrates eventually led to declines, as in other districts, but there could be little question that Raytown had become a significant component of the local educational scene.26
MAP 4.1 Districts and schools in Kansas City and South Kansas City, 1980
Despite its rapid expansion, former students and teachers in Raytown warmly recalled the intimacy and warmth of its small-town atmosphere. The city lacked a movie theater and other public forms of entertainment, so school events became important social outings for many families. The only shopping mall was a modest “thrift center” with a discount department store, a grocery, and a few other shops serving a local clientele.27 Athletic contests drew crowds, and graduation ceremonies and school plays were popular as well. Jeanne Harrison recalled teens organizing dances in the high school gym or the local YMCA, where movies occasionally were projected on a wall. She valued the community’s “closeness” and never recalled her parents locking the doors at night.
In 1962 the local newspaper proclaimed that “Raytown is a good place to live,” reporting that the city was “proud of the AAA school rating,” a sign of fiscal strength.28 Its modest downtown area featured a drug store and a dairy stand that served ice cream, but it offered few options for kids to congregate outside of school. There was little trouble with misbehaving youth as a result. A small man-made lake, featuring a sandy “beach” constructed with help from the Raytown High football team and run by Coach Ted Chitwood, was a destination during summer months. For the more adventuresome, Kansas City and its many attractions was a relatively short drive up Highway 50, along with the Blue Springs Mall. Later it was possible to motor south and west to the new Bannister Mall near Hickman Mills. But Raytown itself retained the feel of a closely knit, lower-middle-class bedroom community.29
With respect to social status and local norms, residents recalled Raytown being a blue-collar or working-class community, even though many residents held managerial or professional jobs.30 Most of the housing stock was relatively modest ranch homes or bungalows.31 One former administrator recalled the town having a “redneck” reputation and being viewed as something of a cultural backwater.32 Most adults were high schools graduates, but their numbers were proportionately lower than in districts to the west, including Shawnee Mission across the state line. Perhaps reflecting this, some thought the local high schools offered a “no frills” curriculum that favored the college bound but offered relatively few advanced courses. This apparently was fine with many parents, even as district expenditures on secondary education reportedly trailed national averages.33
The Raytown schools were probably better known for sports than academic excellence, in any case. Ted Chitwood at Raytown High and Bud Lathrop at Raytown South became legendary coaches in football and basketball respectively. It was the first district in the region to build a stadium that seated more than five thousand spectators.34 Games with such traditional rivals as neighboring Blue Springs or Lee’s Summit typically were highlights of the season. Competitive athletic teams also were maintained by elementary schools, feeding the high school programs. This added to the popularity of sporting events, helping to sustain support for the system as a whole.35
Given the high level of interest and involvement in the schools, the district became a vital source of local identity and a point of community pride. There was relatively little else, after all, for residents to share collectively. The reputation of the schools, moreover, was linked to local property values, which were rather high. But there was more to local support for the district than housing markets. Communal interest in schooling became a potent source of relationships and social bonding. Many adults, after all, came to know one another through children and youth and the institutions they attended. Involvement in school-related activities was a widespread norm, and public interest in the system remained robust throughout the period.36 This became especially evident when residents felt the schools coming under attack, and their response could be forceful indeed.
Continuity in leadership also contributed to the district’s success. The fact that it had one superintendent, Joe Herndon, ensured stability in the system for most of this period. Herndon provided a steady hand and inspired confidence in the schools.37 When he retired in 1974 after nearly thirty years, the district launched a new vocational center named for him. His apparently easygoing and personal style of leadership was well suited to the community’s intimate atmosphere.38 Herndon’s departure opened the door to new leaders to address the difficult process of downsizing during the 1970s, which did not entail the conflicts that it engendered elsewhere. It that respect, the trust and goodwill that Herndon had cultivated served the community well. Local support for the schools eventually wavered a bit, with failed bond and levy votes in the wake of declining enrollments, but school closings occurred without undue rancor or debate.39 Compared to nearby districts, Raytown was largely free of controversy.40
Hickman Mills, on the other hand, offered a telling contrast. That district (HMSD) struggled to find financial support in the community and suffered painful leadership disruptions, school board conflicts, and mismanagement scandals. Voters routinely failed to pass levy increases and bonding issues by the required two-thirds margin, and superintendents came and left recurrently.41 While the local community’s economic and social profile was quite similar to Raytown’s, it lacked a comparable sense of cohesiveness and shared purposes in supporting the schools. As historian Aaron Tyler Rife has argued, it “was in actuality a collection of neighborhoods that identified themselves with the school district.”42
When Perry Cookingham visited Hickman Mills in 1956 to propose annexation, residents found it difficult to rally around incorporation as an independent municipality, as Raytown had done.43 Entreaties from Grandview to the south made the prospect of joining Kansas City, with its lower taxes, more appealing.44 While residents were quite clear in refusing to join KCMPS, they lacked the sense of familiarity and sociability that sustained Raytown’s commitment to the schools. The area known as Hickman Mills, consequently, surrendered much of its identity to the collection of communities called South Kansas City.
Some of this may have been due to other differences that distinguished the two places; Hickman Mills was less a classic bedroom community than Raytown. Major investment in retail, manufacturing, and governmental facilities brought thousands of jobs to the area, and many of its residents worked there. Because there was no local government to exert control over residential development, moreover, rapid growth yielded a haphazard pattern of subdivision building rather than a coherent municipal plan. As a result there was a tendency for residents to identify more strongly with their immediate neighborhood and place of employment than the larger community. Such as it was, Hickman Mills took an identity from the school district and little else, and not everyone agreed that education was a priority. For instance, Carla Baker moved there in 1954 primarily for affordable housing and proximity to her husband’s workplace. For her, as for many other residents who arrived at the time, the schools were an afterthought.45 This reflected a set of priorities quite different from those of neighboring Raytown, or Shawnee Mission across the border. The school system was not a major source of local distinction or pride. In the end it appears that most HMSD residents were content with schools deemed good enough to sustain a broadly positive reputation—certainly better than KCMPS, but not enough to become known for their academic excellence or athletic prowess.
If there was one characteristic that residents of both RSD and HMSD shared, however, it was determination to keep poor and minority families away from their schools and communities. Raytown became particularly infamous in this regard, as its police department, led by Chief Marion Beeler, was notorious for hounding African Americans who happened to drive there.46 In 1962 a black family purchased a home just east of the city and had a Molotov cocktail thrown onto their property.47 This did not go unnoticed in Kansas City’s black community, which was likely one of the objects of such provocations. Manny Stevens echoed the sentiments of other African Americans when he proclaimed, “Hey, by Raytown, I’ll just drive around it. I won’t go through Raytown.”48 Patrick Elard recalled an especially vivid memory of racial incitement when stopping for food there: Oh, yeah, yeah, Raytown was bad. I used to have to drive through there on the old 50 Highway, and I would stop at some of those restaurants like Smacks and get some takeout or something. I remember one night I almost, I was called names. I had gone in for food for my family and all I could do was just eat crow and take ’cause my family was in the car.49
Racial tensions were aired publicly in 1972, when an incident between students from Raytown and Kansas City’s Central High at a state tournament basketball game in Marysville flared into a brawl. Central was banned from the following year’s tournaments as a result but was declared eligible after its students and administration expressed remorse for the affair. Raytown’s Superintendent Herndon, however, announced that his district would not permit its teams to play Central if scheduled to meet again in the tournament, citing concerns for student safety. This, of course, evoked images of black youth as unruly or violence-prone and a threat to whites, which did not sit well with Kansas City’s black community. As the Kansas City Call observed, Raytown’s students were never held responsible for their role in the 1972 fracas, and the district’s leaders were “poor sports” for their unwillingness to play after Central’s repentance.50 Other suburban districts also may have been loath to play city schools, but this incident underscored Raytown’s reputation as being particularly hostile to blacks.51 The district’s well-publicized reaction, moreover, suggested this was just fine with most of its constituents. If residents of Raytown wanted to maintain firm boundaries with Kansas City’s black community, this certainly helped to bolster them.52
For some Raytown residents, racial exclusion apparently was a source of pride. Sally Westbrook recalled being shaken when a local real estate agent proclaimed that “you don’t have to worry about blacks in this town” as she and her husband were house hunting. The comment was offered unabashedly as a positive quality of the community, suggesting it had been an effective selling point before. Other longtime residents reported hearing similar stories.53 Vigilance against unwanted intruders from the city extended to the schools, as the district posted observers at certain bus stops to report on youths from KCMPS seeking to attend RSD institutions.54 As Kansas City’s African American population edged southward, gradually approaching Raytown and other South Kansas City communities, awareness of these issues was inexorably heightened. As maps 2.6 and 3.3 indicate, by 1980 the southernmost extent of African American settlement had reached the northwest corner of RSD.55 This undoubtedly contributed to racialized white anxieties. Given its collective resolve to avoid or resist racial integration of any kind, Raytown became known as a bastion of bigotry in maintaining its generally white small-town identity.
Raytown’s reputation regarding race was similar in many respects to that of other blue-collar suburbs bordering on cities in the North that became known for hostility and aggression directed at African Americans. Like in Cicero, Illinois, or Warren, Michigan, that reputation proved quite effective in deterring black settlement, maintaining effective boundaries that defined exclusion largely in racial terms. As suggested by the January 1969 mass meeting at the high school, these sentiments apparently were widely shared, a point of collective identity. This was localism of a particularly virulent form, which can aptly be described as opportunity hoarding. Not all suburban communities or school districts in these circumstances were able to achieve this level of consensus around such issues, however.56
Many residents of Hickman Mills may have harbored sentiments comparable to their Raytown neighbors, but they lacked the resources and power of municipal sovereignty to prevent African Americans from settling in their vicinity. They did reject a proposal to merge with KCMPS in 1964, which the school board had proposed in a somewhat desperate quest for additional resources. Citing the dangers of “31,000 culturally deprived children” in Kansas City schools, the figure touted by KCMPS officials, opponents of the annexation proposal succeeded in defeating it.57 Area residents also mobilized for concerted action against low-income housing during the 1960s and 1970s, which was somewhat successful in maintaining the area’s middle-class appeal.58 But even the most prejudiced whites could do little to keep minority families from settling in the area, especially those with the means to buy homes or rent at market rates. Insufficient consensus existed for collective action on that score.
Because South Kansas City was served by the Kansas City Police Department, along with other city services, local residents also lacked institutional capacity to racially profile African Americans and others deemed less than desirable, as often was done in neighboring Raytown. Eventually, this restricted the ability of bigoted whites to deter African American home buyers in a systematic fashion, and middle-class blacks began to settle in the district. These families, of course, were seeking the same amenities that whites had pursued decades earlier, and some were associated with the military, which continued to be a major employer through most of the period.59 It was in this fashion that the suburban districts of South Kansas City began to be racially integrated. This included Raytown, which counted 78 African American and more than 170 other ethnic minority children in 1976, mostly in portions of the district proximate to KCMPS. Hickman Mills counted more than 200 black students at the time.60 It would be another decade, however, before the arrival of larger numbers of African Americans, including less affluent families, would begin to change the area’s identity more significantly.
North Kansas City: Growth by Annexation
The municipality of North Kansas City began as a planned industrial district in 1912. Located in Clay County, on the north and east banks of the Missouri River at the turn, it looked across the water to Kansas City, Kansas, on the west and Kansas City, Missouri, to the south. Factories, warehouses, and other businesses occupied much of its land, situated between two railroad lines, along with homes built expressly for the families of men who worked there. The river posed a formidable barrier to the daily movement of people, limiting the city’s growth and settlement of the surrounding countryside. Consequently, North Kansas City remained a relatively small factory town through much of the twentieth century, limiting its population to “better” workers, which generally meant whites. For most African Americans who found employment there, mainly as domestics or service workers, it was a “sundown town,” requiring them to leave at nightfall. By 1940 it boasted a residential population of 2,688, although a much larger number worked there every day.61
With a relatively small resident population and a tax base bolstered by industry, the North Kansas City School District (NKCSD) had a promising future when it was formed in 1913 from the merger of two elementary districts. It grew by fits and starts, but when it opened a new high school building in 1926, the district gained a resource unique in its immediate vicinity: a free-standing secondary institution with the capacity to offer a varied curriculum. Within a year the school added courses in home economics and business, and students from surrounding districts began attending. In little more than a decade, better than a third of the enrollment consisted of tuition-paying residents of surrounding districts. The high school, it turned out, became an inducement for local educators and students to look to NKCSD for expanded opportunities to learn.62
One obvious way for neighboring districts to take advantage of the benefits that the North Kansas City schools offered was to join them through annexation. Missouri law at the time made such mergers relatively simple, just requiring positive votes by the school boards involved.63 Beginning in the mid-1920s, NKCSD spurned a number of overtures to this effect, preferring to marshal the resources available within its original boundaries.64 Residents who attended the schools in this period recalled the small-town intimacy of the community and the busy social scene at “Northtown” high school.65 At the outset of the post-war era, however, the district began to undertake annexations with neighboring districts, quickly expanding its geographic footprint. Its well-regarded senior high school remained a powerful inducement to the smaller elementary districts surrounding it.66 Under the leadership of Superintendent H. W. Schooling, the district added four adjoining districts in 1949 and 1950, boosting enrollment and the number of schools significantly. By 1952 it counted some 5,000 students and nearly 150 teachers, more than a fourfold increase in two decades.67 But its growth was far from finished. The area’s industrial economy continued to advance in the postwar era, providing a firm foundation for the local public schools to develop as well.68
When Schooling left the district to take a faculty position at the University of Chicago in 1955, the North Kansas City schools enjoyed a good reputation. The Kansas City Star commended the departing superintendent for the district’s expansion, accomplished without controversy, and its progress academically.69 Schooling’s successor, R. B. Doolin, continued the system’s approach to growth through annexation, adding four adjoining districts in 1959, one in 1960, two in 1961, and another in 1963. Within that time frame the number of schools nearly tripled, and enrollment climbed to seventeen thousand. Like other districts at the time, NKCSD struggled to find classroom space for its surging population, teaching students in shifts at the high school and hiring scores of new teachers each year.70
Echoing local pride reminiscent of Raytown, in 1962 a Northland newspaper declared that “North Kansas City is a good place to live.” It also noted that the local school system “did not hesitate to take in surrounding rural districts, which were having great difficulty in providing for themselves.”71 This may have reflected a bit of hubris, but it also represented a distinctive approach to expansion. In this manner the district quickly extended its boundaries north to rural Smithville and east to Liberty. Map 4.2 documents the timing of these annexations. As a consequence of these developments, a second senior high school, Oak Park, opened about eight miles to the north of the first in 1965, and a third, Winnetonka, was erected five miles to the east in 1971. Each was carefully planned, both with respect to future educational needs and architectural and landscape design.72 Popular support for the system remained high, and elections for levy increases and bond issues during this period were consistently successful. The district’s enrollment peaked at more than twenty-two thousand students a few years later and declined slightly thereafter.73 The era of growth by annexation ended, and the postwar baby-boom generation finally passed through all the schools, as it did in other districts.
Following Doolin’s retirement in 1977, his successor, Raymond Waier, dealt with the difficult problem of closing and consolidating schools, a process fraught with potential pitfalls. There was evidence of friction between different parts of NKCSD following Oak Park’s opening, as the newer school quickly established a local reputation for innovation and progressivism. Closer to Liberty and the working-class community of Claycomo, Winnetonka High offered yet another source of internecine rivalry in the 1970s.74 Waier, however, managed to overcome such potential discord and led the district through a sweeping reorganization in 1980 that accomplished the tasks of downsizing and consolidation without much controversy. Bitterness lingered over some of the school closings, particularly Northgate Middle School, but NKCSD emerged a leaner, more efficient school system. Enrollments declined until the mid-1980s, after which they began to climb again with the area’s continued development.75
MAP 4.2 Fifty years of annexations in North Kansas City, 1913–1963
At the height of its expansion, NKCSD stood as the largest of the area’s Missouri “suburban” school districts, spanning more than seventy square miles and serving a population of nearly ninety thousand. While most residents saw it as broadly middle class, there was a good deal of diversity in social status as well. The district included relatively wealthy areas such as Briarcliff in the northwest, working-class neighborhoods in the older industrial quarter to the south, and a mixture of middle-class and blue-collar communities to the east.76 As table 4.1 indicates, a bit more than 6 percent of its students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, slightly less than Hickman Mills and Grandview, and its educational expenditures were among the lowest in the region. Judging from proficiency scores at the time, it was academically typical of metropolitan Missouri suburban districts, which could be considered quite good in light of its relatively low per-student spending. By 1980 it was not an especially wealthy district on a per capita basis, which was hardly a surprise, given its size. But the very low numbers of African American and other minority students that it served was right in line with other local suburban systems.77
By and large, African Americans did not consider the large segment of metropolitan Kansas City north of the river to be hospitable. They generally were not welcomed in the planned industrial city of North Kansas City, and very few ventured into the largely rural and small-town communities that surrounded it. Clay County had a history of hostility to blacks, expressed most violently in a 1925 lynching by a mob in nearby Excelsior Springs.78 An angry throng also killed an African American inmate at the local jail in St. Joseph in 1933, less than fifty miles north of the county line, before burning his body in effigy.79 Generations of blacks had lived in the city of Liberty, but their numbers were small, and they wielded little influence in the larger community. That part of the county had long exhibited southern sympathies, reportedly flying a Confederate flag over the local courthouse five decades after the Civil War.80 As in Independence to the south, black children there historically attended a separate elementary school, extending through much of the 1950s, and were bused to Kansas City for high school.81 North Kansas City counted just a few black students in the early years and sent them all across the river to KCMPS rather than allowing them to attend local district schools. As longtime educator Gary Littlefield noted, many whites in the district harbored a deep-seated animosity toward blacks, even if it was rarely expressed in public.82 Other area residents agreed, suggesting that a substantial portion of the area’s white population had left KCMPS during the 1950s and ’60s because of racial change in city neighborhoods.83
This situation was clearly acknowledged in the comments of blacks who shared impressions of growing up in the area. For Manny Stevens, it was similar to suburbs to the south with respect to racial attitudes. “Well, along the same line into Raytown,” he observed, “to be aware, it’s, you know, it was not a written rule but you kind of, you just kind of sensed you weren’t welcome.”84 Echoing the concerns of others, Marvin Daniels worried about natural barriers: “You know, you had to cross that river. And the transportation of that made a big difference.” He added that there was a clear sense of being cut off from the black community and perhaps the difficulty of flight from peril. Susan Hilliard worked in North Kansas City for a time but found it forbidding. “I don’t remember anybody sitting at break with me, really odd. It was the worst place in the world to work. I was just desperate for a job.” She left after finding employment in downtown Kansas City, describing the experience as “not the best six weeks of my life.”85 Patrick Elard agreed with these sentiments, adding a qualification: “So North Kansas City was not seen as a pleasant place you’d want to be. You probably didn’t want to be driving over there too much because you could get stopped for little or nothing. In fact, I guess, I think that it’s been seen basically as kind of a hostile place until, oh, we had some people that were working for TWA who moved up there, and they seemed to do all right.”86
Cookingham and other leaders in Kansas City, however, made grand plans for development in the Northland, most of which took considerably longer to bear fruit than initially imagined.87 Locating a new airport there in 1956, some fifteen miles from downtown Kansas City, was intended to spur settlement, but the pace of growth was slow. The airport eventually stimulated some economic activity, especially after new terminals were completed in 1972, but there was little industrial investment or office development through much of the period. Consequently, the Northland became a patchwork of subdivisions with relatively little in common to bind them together. The municipality of Gladstone, surrounded by Kansas City’s annexations, offered a modest sense of community for its residents but not the larger area. A bedroom community similar to Raytown in some respects, hastily incorporated to avoid Kansas City’s reach, it lacked a separate school district to provide a more distinctive identity.88
As the sprawling North Kansas City school system grew by annexation, in that case it lost much of the intimacy and easy familiarity that had characterized its early years. In this respect it was similar to Hickman Mills on the city’s south side, but considerably larger. The North Kansas City schools also did not experience a comparable influx of African American residents, probably owing to the physical and social barriers that many blacks perceived.89 The area also did not have a ready stock of older homes that real estate agents could offer to lower-income families, which represented the largest number of black households. Many would have had trouble securing mortgages for homes in that part of the city in any case.90 Altogether, the Northland was not seen as a welcoming part of the city to most African Americans, and few were willing to venture so far from the city’s traditionally segregated neighborhoods to try it out.
Given these circumstances, it is little wonder that NKCSD enrolled so few minority students, just 1 percent. In 1976 the district counted just sixty African Americans, less than a third of 1 percent of its student population. This was proportionally the lowest number of all the districts that directly served municipal Kansas City. In absolute numbers it was less than Raytown or Center, both considerably smaller systems. Like Raytown, NKCSD schools enrolled larger numbers of Hispanic and other minority group students, about 350 altogether. This was less than 2 percent of the district total, but it made the low number of African Americans especially striking. If indeed black employees at the airport lived in the district, as Elard suggested, their children may have accounted for a large proportion of its entire African American population. This was compelling evidence of the power of racial exclusion that operated in Kansas City’s Northland. Residents of NKCSD might not have been as resolute or frank about their views as many in Raytown or elsewhere on the south side, but they were just as effective in keeping African Americans out of their schools.
Controversy over Race and Resources: The Spainhower Commission
Like many other states during the postwar era, Missouri faced the challenge of consolidating school districts to realize greater efficiency and improved educational opportunity, especially in rural areas where small schools with relatively meager resources predominated. While certain suburban districts such as North Kansas City were able to grow through annexation, large school systems were unusual outside of the state’s principal metropolitan areas. Recognition of this problem led to the formation of the Missouri School Reorganization Commission in 1967, led by James Spainhower, chair of the Missouri Assembly’s Education Committee. Given a budget of $125,000 (over $800,000 in 2015 dollars), Spainhower’s commission set about studying the issue and making recommendations. A report released in the following year suggested reorganizing Missouri’s school districts into 133 local units, nested within twenty regional school districts of generally equal enrollment size.91 This obviously would have been a radical change from existing arrangements, and generally speaking it was not well received. Local school leaders and their communities across the state responded sharply to the very idea of surrendering any control over their institutions. In many respects it was a direct challenge to the principle of localism, and it did not sit well with most districts and their constituents.92
The commission recommended two metropolitan-wide school districts, one each for greater Kansas City and St. Louis, combining city schools with surrounding suburban districts to create more equitably financed institutions. These “urban” regional districts also would have opened the possibility for greater racial integration. This, of course, immediately raised red flags.93 As one commission member pointed out regarding the public reaction, “The predominate interest is on the integration question.”94
In June 1969 the commission published another report stemming from its work on metropolitan schools, titled Equal Treatment to Equals: A New Structure for Public Schools in the Kansas City and St. Louis Metropolitan Areas. While the report failed to address the history of segregation in either of the state’s major metropolitan areas, it did call for mixing students from urban and suburban schools. In doing so, it made a straightforward plea for educational equity, arguing that Missouri’s two metropolitan areas needed region-wide remedies to address the problems of urban education. It suggested that the suburbs and cities had a “common destiny” and called for solutions driven by “communal self-interest.”95 The principal conclusion was that economic inequality contributed to specific urban problems and that public finance equity was needed, a theme in other studies at the time.96 It was a position very much in line with the thinking of urban sociologists and planners, who had long called for integrating urban and suburban institutions to provide more coherent governance and policy options in metropolitan settings. The response of residents in suburban school districts, however, was a different question altogether.
The commission’s report proved to be a potent provocation for its staunchest critics. Missouri’s suburban communities did not want school integration, and they certainly did not want to share their tax wealth with other school districts. Race quickly became a focal point of resistance to the plan. Correspondence regarding the idea of large consolidated districts reflected this, much of it written in response to a Missouri Assembly bill that Spainhower introduced to initiate discussion of the commission’s proposals. While most opponents did not make explicitly racial statements in their letters and petitions, there could be little doubt about their intent. They typically employed proxies for such ideas, such as opposition to busing and the dangers of urban schools, which signaled racially charged sentiments. As one letter stated, “You can [not] push onto the people in a few years what has been going on for a hundred years,” suggesting that busing had made the Kansas City schools worse.97 Another Kansas City area couple was more direct, expressing doubt that Spainhower would want his son “bussed into a slum district of Kansas City or St. Louis.”98 Other writers made it clear that they had moved to the suburbs for the express purpose of avoiding the Kansas City schools. As one noted, “¾ of our adults work in K.C. and by each one’s personal choice desire to raise our children away from K.C.”99 But some did put intimations aside and openly opposed integration, as in a letter from another Kansas City suburb: “It seems to us that this country is losing the democracy on which it was founded. . . . Why should all citizens be made to suffer and pay for the troubles of a few? You are really just trying to force integration down people’s throats, as well as trying to expose our children to conditions which can endanger their lives.”100
In addition to letters, eight communities in greater the Kansas City area submitted petitions to either the commission, Spainhower himself, or the legislature, and another Kansas City suburb sent a resolution. The statements in most such documents expressed general opposition to reorganization, but two petitions went further, asserting clearly that they did not want to be a party to solving “urban” problems. Representing thirteen residents of the Raytown, Center, and Grandview districts, one stated that “we have fought the Kansas City School system for years to keep our school system separate from theirs. Now we are not having any say in the matter.”101 Writing from a nearby rural district, yet another group elaborated a bit more: “This is a good way for St. Louis and Kansas City to attempt to solve their problems at the expense of the rest of rural Missouri. We do not have a solution to their problems, but we do know this plan is designed for the two large cities of Missouri, and we do not like it.”102
Opposition in metro Kansas City was stronger than in St. Louis, as reflected in the January meeting at Raytown High. One observer there noted that a “unanimous feeling was expressed on the part of the crowd that this bill and everything about it is a piece of shoddy, misrepresented and dangerous work.”103 In many respects Raytown became an epicenter of opposition, as reported in the Kansas City Star, and race was a major factor indeed. Raytown school records indicated that a large number of students had transferred from Central High in Kansas City during the 1950s, and others had come from Paseo and Southeast High more recently. While most residents reportedly felt a firm determination to preserve the community’s small-town sensibility and to retain local control of schooling, they also acknowledged that concerns about race were widespread.104 Raytown sent busloads of people to the state capitol building to testify and demonstrate against the commission’s recommendations. One commissioner later noted that hostility to the very idea of district reorganization was especially virulent there.105 As Spainhower himself observed, many people “moved to Raytown for the purpose of getting away from the problems of the Kansas City School District and were quite upset with the possibility of being exposed once again to [those] problems.”106
Not all the correspondence responding to this question was negative, however, and supportive letters even were sent by residents of Raytown. Mrs. Margie McCoy, for instance, argued that “especially we in the suburbs cannot turn our backs on the problems of the city. For us not to work out a fair plan for all schools is impractical and shortsighted.”107 Similar letters were written by residents of other suburbs. Not surprisingly, the strongest endorsements of the Spainhower recommendations came from Kansas City. KCMPS board member Homer Wadsworth was forthright in his support for the commission’s ideas: “We cannot have equality of opportunity in education unless we have a relatively equal investment per child in educational plant and program. This we do not have and as a consequence the rich districts get richer and the poor districts get poorer.”108
While many others in the urban core shared this view, and KCMPS superintendent Hazlett cautiously endorsed the commission’s plans, the vast majority of suburban correspondence was decidedly hostile.109 Most such letters, petitions, and other accounts made it clear that many suburbanites had abandoned the cities to avoid integration. Moreover they felt justified in resisting change because of the perceived problems and hazards of the big cities.110 It was these residents who responded most vehemently to the Spainhower Commission’s recommendations. They were happy with the homogeneity of their communities and paying taxes for their own schools. From their perspective it was the rural and urban districts that clearly had problems demanding to be solved. They did not need or want state interference in their own institutions. They had no interest in racial diversity and certainly did not want to share their financial resources with city schools.
At the same time that racial animosity animated much of the opposition to the Spainhower Commission, many suburbanites also expressed a proprietary view of their schools. They saw these institutions as part and parcel of the local community, an investment that should be preserved. A mother writing from North Kansas City reflected this sentiment: “We taxpayers and concerned parents bought our homes in this community only after carefully considering the nearby schools, school district, teaching staff and their qualifications. Our children should be allowed to attend their . . . neighborhood schools.”111
Statements such as this suggested that educational assets were a critical aspect of the decision to move for many suburbanites. Such amenities, of course, were seemingly threatened by the idea of admitting potentially low-performing or morally suspect students.112 These suburbanites believed their institutions to be superior to those in the city or in rural areas and were determined to maintain that advantage, along with local property values.113 In the opinion of many, school problems elsewhere stemmed from corrupt or incompetent management, or irresponsible residents, especially in the cities. A suburban superintendent from Cass County opined that unequal funding for urban schools was not the problem: “We . . . find it difficult to believe that our tax money could have been spent for such a recommendation! It is pointed out that the ‘poor’ central cities have been left in bad condition due to the flight to the suburbs, [but they are better funded than our district]. . . . Some reorganization was to be expected, but if our lawmakers pass this into law, then God pity us! Surely you do not expect this to receive serious consideration.”114
Another suburban Kansas City letter writer was even more explicit in locating the blame for the problems of city schools, suggesting forcefully that local institutions deserved the advantages they enjoyed. “This bill . . . is hypocrisy in its highest form. . . . to force the people who care enough to educate their children, by working long, hard hours to pay higher taxes so other able bodied men and women can shirk their responsibility, or the money to go into the pocket of a so-called 12 man advisory board, elected by the people of the big city, you say that is fair.”115
Suburbanites also opposed funding equalization in order to protect their schools, which they viewed as having earned a better reputation than urban institutions. Like the opponents of racial integration, they blamed the urban schools and big-city residents for existing problems, rejecting the notion that there was a viable metropolitan or statewide solution to social inequality and related school questions. They were principally concerned with maintaining the status quo, with little acknowledgment that their own actions contributed to a larger process of social change. The immediate response was to secure the existing boundaries that district lines represented. They believed the advantages represented by local school systems depended on these barriers, and they were determined to defend them from any and all threats.
The Specter of Metropolitan Coordination
Spainhower’s bill failed to even find a second sponsor in the Missouri legislature and thus died ignominiously, but the idea of a metro-wide educational system did not disappear entirely. By the later 1970s there were two additional attempts to involve the suburban districts in plans to address the problems of KCMPS schools. Somewhat coincidentally, they occurred within months of one another in 1977. The first was a proposal to create two large districts that would embrace public school systems on either side of the state line. The second was a lawsuit to enjoin surrounding school systems to participate in metropolitan desegregation plans, launched by the KCMPS board (and eventually leading to Jenkins). Not surprisingly, the leaders of suburban districts greeted both with open hostility, reflecting viewpoints quite similar to those expressed nearly a decade earlier.
The Kansas and Missouri advisory committees of the US Commission on Civil Rights offered the first proposal. It called for voluntary cooperation of some nineteen districts in an effort to foster wider participation in school desegregation across the metropolitan area. The committees’ report did, however, include the threat of “legal proceeding” if voluntary action was not forthcoming on its recommendations. Declaring that “remedies for racial isolation probably require some movement of pupils,” it offered a straightforward analysis of the problem facing public education at the time. “Racial isolation and lack of exposure to the multiracial and multicultural characteristics of the area are problems for both cities and suburbs. The Central city districts are segregated, of themselves. But as districts they are also segregated by comparison with the suburbs around them. Real contact, in light of existing demographic patterns, requires multidistrict involvement.”116
Following soon after this report, the KCMPS lawsuit was announced in May 1977, the first in the country to feature an urban district suing its suburban neighbors to establish a metropolitan solution to school segregation. It also named political figures on both side of the state line and several federal agencies as defendants. This was the first step in the case that eventually resulted in the Jenkins v. Missouri school desegregation decision, which would come seven years later. That decision, of course, did not require the suburban districts to participate in the ultimate plan to integrate KCMPS schools.117 But the original suit offered an opportunity to gauge how suburban educators in both states would react to the idea of interdistrict cooperation for desegregation.
Predictably, suburban school leaders did not welcome either of these developments, and they were certainly not prepared to accept the logic of the advisory committees’ recommendations. Garland Smith, a school board member from Bonner Springs in Kansas, predicted that such measures would result in “chaos,” adding that “nothing can be forced along this issue and make any real gains.” On the other side of the metropolitan area, Lee’s Summit board president Robert J. Gourley stressed the importance of “keeping the autonomy of the local school districts.” In nearby Independence, board president Carlton Milby declared that he “would oppose any change that would reduce the influence of our patrons over the educational policies of this district.” For his part, James L. Robinson Jr., president of the Raytown board, worried that local levy elections would fail because of fears about funding being used for desegregation. In short, local control was considered paramount everywhere, and vehement opposition to the possibility of racially integrated schools was likely to make metro-wide school desegregation impossible.118
Perhaps the most telling response to the report and recommendations, however, came from North Kansas City. In February, board president Bob Raines announced that a letter would be sent home with all students declaring that the district “has no intention of voluntarily participating in any plan which would dissipate the resources of the district or reduce the quality of education in the schools by any proposal which would alter our obligations to our patrons and students.” In particular he stressed that NKCSD has “never been involved” and “[has] no plans for the future to be a party to the Bi-State Advisory Committee.” This, of course, suggested that area residents had expressed concern about the possibility of NKCSD’s involvement in metropolitan desegregation plans, enough that the board felt it necessary to communicate directly with every family in the district. Raines also worried that an upcoming vote to increase district operating funds might be jeopardized by fears about school integration.119 If suburban school leaders across the metropolitan area were clear about their opposition to the idea of interdistrict cooperation for desegregation, it was partly because they dreaded the response of their constituents. In particular, if they could not reassure residents that the districts were going to continue excluding African Americans and other students from the central cities, their school systems could lose popular support.
As before with the Spainhower report, educators and activists in Kansas City’s urban core were supportive of the advisory committees’ report. James Lyndon, KCMPS board president, described it as “uplifting.” Julia Hill, president of the local NAACP chapter, was “happy to see that someone is interested in obeying the law,” declaring that “at least someone is trying to do something voluntarily instead of waiting for the courts to force them.”120 On the other hand, suburban districts on either side of the state line expressed no interest in voluntary cooperation. However compelling the arguments arrayed in favor of a wider approach to achieving desegregation may have been, these districts remained resolutely committed to maintaining the status quo.
With respect to the lawsuit launched by KCMPS against the suburban districts, there was a fixed resolve to fight it across the board on the part of area superintendents. As in responses to the advisory committees’ report, they stressed the importance of following the wishes of their constituents. Robert Atkin of Raytown emphasized that his district would oppose it “because [doing so] reflects the desires of the community.” Other district leaders expressed similar sentiments. Most declined to comment because of the impending litigation, but their responses were generally consistent with those offered weeks earlier regarding the advisory committees’ report. From their point of view, there was no reason to consider assisting the city schools. Their constituents had little sympathy for the plight of urban students and were opposed to permitting them access to local institutions. In the years since the Spainhower episode, little seemed to have changed. Suburban antipathy to the city and its residents continued unabated.
Purposeful Racial Exclusion
The unwillingness of suburban residents to participate in metropolitan efforts to desegregate schools represented a classic expression of localism, especially with respect to their repeatedly expressed preferences for home rule in decision making. This, of course, reflected a time-honored principle in American education, embodied in its tradition of autonomous school districts extending back to the nineteenth century. But it also epitomized a highly discriminatory form of opportunity hoarding, specifically with regard to racial exclusion. Suburban residents who sought to prevent school integration were trying to preserve the advantages that their predominantly white and middle-class schools afforded them, at the expense of children and youth who did not have access to comparable opportunities. Many saw students from the city, and African Americans in particular, as threats. And this included members of the growing black middle class.
The prevailing white racial frame in many of these communities depicted African American students as sources of contamination, regardless of their economic status, who could diminish the advantages of local institutions. Thus, when school district leaders declared their resolve not to weaken the quality of education, it signaled opposition to racial integration for their constituents, and to Kansas City’s black community. Statements about honoring the wishes of local residents likely played a similar role. Such declarations often reflected a form of “dog whistle politics,” employing coded terms to express a commitment to racist exclusion and discrimination that could be deemed unseemly if stated plainly. But there could be little doubt about their effect. These words helped to mobilize a solid wall of racialized opposition to the very suggestion of integrated schooling.
Opportunity hoarding in the suburbs, of course, meant a restriction of opportunities elsewhere, particularly in the urban core. This was a classic pattern played out in metropolitan areas across the country. Race was a principal question, and metropolitan Kansas City suburbanites expressed little concern for African American students, even if their districts also were within the city limits. A metro-wide desegregation plan could well have spread the city’s black students across the region’s schools so that overly large concentrations of them might have been avoided. This would have posed little danger to quality of education in any of the participating districts and likely would have helped to improve schools in the central city. Something akin to this had proved quite workable within KCMPS during the 1960s, and worked elsewhere in the country, particularly in the South.121
But suburban intransigence made such a plan unfeasible, virtually guaranteeing that urban-suburban inequity would continue to plague metropolitan education for decades to come. Active exclusion was abetted by natural barriers such as the Missouri River and inaccessibility in the case of North Kansas City, and antagonistic confrontation and policing authority in Raytown and doubtless elsewhere too. But it was mainly due to widespread opposition to integrated schooling among white residents of these districts, signaled in a variety of publicly accessible forms. For their part, African Americans were well aware of these sentiments, and it affected their decisions about where to live and send their children to school. As a result, school district boundaries became one of the region’s principal racially defined geo-spatial dividing lines in this period.122
As noted earlier, so-called suburban districts on the Missouri side of the metropolitan area were hardly the same. They differed in size, in resources, and in the social and economic status of the families they served. If there was one attribute they shared, however, it was a commitment to the perceived virtues of localism, proximate control of resources and institutions, and the segregation of African Americans. As the Spainhower letters and subsequent statements of school leaders suggested, there was a strong sense of common interest in maintaining this dimension of inequality. In Raytown this bond was strong enough to mobilize considerable effort in opposing proposals to change existing forms of district organization. That community’s robust commitment to the schools may have represented a distinctive form of social capital, shared values and interests that proved quite effective in drawing and defending racial boundaries. One sign of this was local norms that found expression in opposition to integration. It became especially forceful when residents felt threatened, as the response to Spainhower’s proposals clearly illustrated. This was probably the area’s most active and unambiguous reflection of opportunity hoarding at the time.123 There could be little doubt, on the other hand, that many other suburbanites would have responded just as readily if they felt sufficiently apprehensive. Few questions brought putative suburbanites together as vehemently as did race.
The ongoing crisis in urban schooling was historically rooted in this period, a legacy of the responses that James Spainhower and the advisory committees’ report engendered. Districts such as Raytown and North Kansas City may have enabled their residents to experience a fulfilling and productive childhood and education, but they also contributed to the problems encountered by children growing up in concentrated poverty in KCMPS. That was the injustice inherent in the racial advantage enjoyed by the area’s Missouri suburban school districts across the long postwar era. And to a large extent, it continues to be evident today.124