![]() It is true that Nichols was of a new generation of developers who were the first to take deed restrictions to new levels of detail. Nichols did not create a blueprint for racial restrictions. In 1870, he opened the development up to anyone.Įdward Bouton, who started his noted real estate career in Kansas City working on Janssen Place, and ended it by developing the iconic Roland Park neighborhood in Baltimore, was trying to insert racial restrictions in Roland Park by the mid-1890s, when JC Nichols was still a teenager. For thirteen years he built Perry Place into a neighborhood exclusively for blacks. It was called Perry Place, just east of where City Hall and the Jackson County courthouse are located downtown. As a committed abolitionist, however, Coates felt compelled to also build a neighborhood for the city’s black residents. ![]() The price of his houses made them effectively restricted to whites. Kansas City’s own Kersey Coates, who came here in 1854 from Pennsylvania, developed the Quality Hill neighborhood in 1857 as an exclusively white neighborhood, but his deed restrictions were more interested in requiring all houses be built of brick than that all residents be of a single race. Interestingly, most of them first came from the famously abolitionist northeastern US, places like Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Maryland. In their early iterations, racial restrictions started appearing after the Civil War, most particularly with the new Jim Crow laws originating in the late 19 th century. #1 – Kansas City was not the first place to have racial restrictions, and J.C. But if you find yourself in a casual conversation about any of this, there are only two things to understand and share: ![]() There is plenty of documentation on this subjection so if you want some sources, let me know. Nichols created the blueprint for racial restrictions,” I decided to do what little I could to set the record straight by writing this post. So when, in the course of the Kraske show, I heard it said that “J.C. That’s a powerful authoritative voice that has a lot of audiences, spreading a completely wrong depiction of Kansas City’s role. But when some months ago I attended a constitutional law lecture from the dean of the Berkley Law School, a leading member of the UMKC Law School faculty, serving as moderator, told the gathering that, in fact, racial restrictions were invented in Kansas City. Nichols.Īs one who has written a book on the subject of the Nichols Company’s Country Club District and makes regular appearances to groups of all kinds on the subject, I’m familiar with the fact that this misconception is out there. Specifically, they laid the blame to just one person, J.C. These committee members, who included a UMKC professor, not once but twice labeled Kansas City as the home of deed restrictions designed to keep blacks from residing in artificially created whites-only neighborhoods. Two of the members of the committee referred to Kansas City’s “unique” burden in considering reparations, meaning its legacy of discriminatory housing. I doubt I’ll ever get the word out enough to dispel all the misconceptions, but here goes. Like every city in America, Kansas City has a lot to account for.īut there is one thing Kansas City does NOT have to account for, and when I heard it referenced several times in the on-air discussion, I was moved to write this piece. It seems impossible to do, and particularly impossible to do so that everyone feels fairly compensated, individually or as a community. Steve’s guests were members of Kansas City’s reparations committee who, over the next year, are going to begin the process of actually addressing how reparations can best be made. I found the May 2 nd conversation particularly fascinating. I listen to Steve Kraske’s Up to Date on KCUR almost every day.
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