Dividing Lines: A History of Segregation in Kansas City

Kansas City's neighborhoods were shaped as much by policy and prejudice as by the people who moved into them. On this driving tour, you'll find out how real estate covenants and redlining created the invisible line that still divides the city's Black and White communities. You'll also hear firsthand accounts from residents who lived through blockbusting and white flight.

The tour starts at Shawnee Mission East High School, in the affluent Prairie Village district developed by J.C. Nichols in the 1940s. You'll drive through Nichols' earlier Mission Hills development, past the fountains and statuary of Ward Parkway, and into the Country Club Plaza, modeled after Seville, Spain. Along the way, you'll learn how Nichols pioneered racially restrictive covenants that became the national blueprint for segregated housing.

You'll cross Troost Avenue, the street that still marks Kansas City's racial divide, and pass the house where Walt Disney once lived, then in an all-White neighborhood. You'll hear how blockbusting and redlining emptied out the 18th & Vine jazz district and led to the demolition of Municipal Stadium. The tour ends in Ivanhoe, a neighborhood once devastated by disinvestment and now rebuilt through community organizing.

On this 90-minute driving tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Hear attorney Sid Willens describe unwittingly profiting from blockbusting as neighborhoods turned racially mixed
• Drive the Paseo boulevard, a City Beautiful-era promenade that lost its prestige once the surrounding neighborhood integrated
• Learn how Bruce R. Watkins Drive, once Highway 71, displaced over 10,000 residents during its 50-year construction
• See the Power & Light District, built with subsidies the city's east side never received
• Visit Central Academy of Excellence, formerly Central High School, where new boundaries hardened Troost as a racial line
• Pass through Brookside's well-kept 1920s homes, built the same era as homes across Troost worth a fraction as much
• Hear how the Missouri v. Jenkins case poured millions into KC schools without reversing decades of white flight

By the time you reach Ivanhoe, you'll understand how decades of real estate policy drew Kansas City's racial lines, and how one neighborhood is working to erase them.