This past summer, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, many Kansas Citians brought to attention the namesakes of certain monuments in Kansas City. One of the names mentioned quite a bit was JC Nichols. If you’re not from Kansas City, you likely don’t know who JC Nichols is or why he’s so important to Kansas City’s history, especially Kansas City’s history of racism.
JC Nichols was a property developer in the early to mid 20th century. He is well-known for the development of the Country Club Plaza and Ward Parkway areas, as well as other affluent areas in Kansas City. They were meant to enrich the lives of the residents in the surrounding neighborhoods. These shopping centers and neighborhoods that he developed are no doubt beautiful with curving roads and lots of greenery.
Through his development of certain areas in Kansas City, he created racially restrictive covenants (also known as deed restrictions) to ensure that the properties he’d develop would keep white ownership keeping the areas white. Some of the deeds explicitly said that black people and other non-white groups of people were not allowed to own or reside in the residences. Some of them instead (or in addition to) had ridiculous building and maintenance requirements that would require those who owned or resided in the residence to have a certain level of income since it was assumed that only white people were able to accumulate wealth.
This was nothing new in the U.S., but he was the first to ever use homeowner associations to ensure that they were continually enforcing them, since covenants required renewal and that would cost money. This system of segregation was replicated throughout the rest of the country, and it still persists in Kansas City today. Troost Avenue in Kansas City is one of the most well-defined racial division lines in Kansas City. Residences on the East side of Troost are mostly black and brown, with lower socioeconomic situations, while residences to the West of Troost are mostly white, with higher socioeconomic situations. JC Nichols is again at fault for this.
I grew up on the East side of Troost in a school district where white flight most obviously happened. White flight is a term used to describe when white people leave an area out of the fear of black and brown people who are moving into that area. Prior to the 1980s, my school district was one of the top in Missouri. If you’ve heard of Ruskin High School since then, you know that that’s no longer the case. I remember when I was in high school, walking through the hallways during passing periods, our walls were lined with trophies and pictures of white faces from that time period. The amount of trophies and the demographic of the school are not the only changes that have occurred since then. The amount of funding the school gets is very different compared to back then too.
Just as JC Nichols intended, property values are influenced by the amount of white people who live in those residences. Because the neighborhoods in my school district are mostly black and brown, our properties aren’t worth much. Property values determine how much of our taxes are taken to fund the schools in our area, which isn’t fair. Kansas City supposedly didn’t resist desegregating when Brown v. Board of Education happened, but it did redraw some of the school district lines to keep white students and black students separate.
With all of this in mind, is it really any surprise that people were calling for these monuments to be renamed? This is an ugly history and it’s important that we not only make it right through renaming the fountain, the road and any other things that were named after those in the Nichols family, but also through doing the work to bridge this divide that has been widened even more since then. This means first acknowledging the horrible things that were done and then creating as well as funding programs to combat the negative effects we still see today.