LA INTERACCIÓN ENTRE LOS MAPAS CONCEPTUALES Y EL TEATRO COMO ESTRATEGIA DE APRENDIZAJE EN LA DOCENCIA

(Numbers in bold=# black persons living in tract. Elementary school locations written in red.)

The outline in bold demarcates the district boundaries for Hickman Mills, with the smaller divisions being the census tracts from 1980. The shading of each tract on the map above demonstrates the percentage of black persons within each tract, with the north central and southeast tracts having the highest concentrations of African American families. The Loma Vista neighborhood, the tract with 362 black people, was 16% black, and Kirkside and Crossgates neighborhoods in the southeast had 929 black people and were 31.5% black.151

150 _{U.S. Census of the Population, 1980. Census map and shading courtesy of Social Explorer.} 151 _{U.S. Census of the Population, 1980.}

When comparing map 1 with the metropolitan maps in the appendix, one can see that Hickman Mills was on the southern end of what was a fifty-year slow southern migration. Some areas were skipped over and did not have a significant black population, most likely due to the highway system that made areas like Kirkside very accessible to and from Kansas City. The neighborhood change is also reflected in the makeup of elementary students attending the schools within the district, as table 4 demonstrates.

Table 4: Black Student Enrollment in Hickman Mills Elementary Schools, 1968-1982152

1968 1970 1972 1974

School # Enrolled Percent # Enrolled Percent # Enrolled Percent # Enrolled Percent

Dobbs 5 1 9 1 20 2 17 3 Burke 2 0 3 0 9 1 34 5 Ingels 1 0 2 0 27 3 98 15 Johnson 2 0 4 0 8 1 6 1 Symington 0 0 5 1 8 1 9 61 Santa Fe - - 2 0 13 3 57 9 Truman 3 0 3 0 13 2 27 4 Warford 0 0 4 0 13 2 45 7 Westridge 0 0 3 0 11 2 6 1 1976 1978 1980 1982

School # Enrolled Percent # Enrolled Percent # Enrolled Percent # Enrolled Percent

Dobbs 28 4 41 7 34 6 61 9 Burke 42 7 67 12 88 17 102 17 Ingels 137 21 224 36 270 44 299 45 Johnson 19 3 29 5 26 4 - - Symington 11 2 7 1 15 3 33 5 Santa Fe 61 10 97 18 112 20 120 19 Truman 28 5 48 8 57 9 54 8 Warford 60 9 78 13 79 13 88 13 Westridge 23 6 27 8 47 10 - -

Ingels and Santa Fe elementary schools had the highest number and percentage of black students through the 1970s and 80s because they were situated in the neighborhoods where black families were growing the fastest. This does raise a question of why African American families settled in Kirkside and Crossgates in larger numbers than in Ruskin Heights or Ruskin Hills, one for which

152 _{Percent Black Enrollment of Elementary Schools In Hickman Mills C-1, 1968-1982, Clerk U.S. District Court,} Exhibit 1865A, Case No. 77-0420-CV-W-4, Arthur Benson Papers, Box KC 250, Folder 17, State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center, University of Missouri-Kansas City University Archives, Kansas City, MO.

I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer, other than the black community spread in the southland by loose kinship ties. As families purchased houses in Kirkside, they encouraged friends and acquaintances to move close by, often for mutual support.153 Another explanation is that the concentration of black families in the southeast area of Hickman Mills in the 1970s and 80s shows the early white flight from the district that would intensify throughout the district, particularly in Ruskin Heights and Ruskin Hills in the late 1990s through the present day.154 Moving South, Redux

As discussed earlier in this chapter, when the school leadership fought against the Spainhower Plan and then the metropolitan desegregation suit, they claimed that racial integration should be solved in a “natural” way, like what was happening in Hickman Mills itself. Thus, there was no need for “forced integration.” While migration towards South Kansas City was most definitely not “natural” because of color lines and housing discrimination, when African Americans settled in Hickman Mills in more significant numbers white residents felt the move was urbanization at its worst. Eventually, black presence in South Kansas City made the community no longer a suburb, but instead urban in the minds of Ruskinites, so many left.

By the 1970s and 80s, this quality was more pronounced even if Hickman Mills was much more developed and urbanized than it had been in the 1950s. Highways 470, 435, and 71 made travel to and from Hickman Mills extraordinarily easy. Shopping was booming in the 1980s with the growth of Truman’s Corners, a new Wal-Mart, and an extensive shopping mall near Bannister Road and Highway 71.155 Housing was affordable and the schools were seen as

153 _{Jacobs, Martin, and Solum interviews with author.}

154 _{This is a likely argument, as similar patterns have been found in other black middle class communities. See Bruce} D. Haynes, Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

155 _{James R. Shortridge, Kansas City and How It Grew, 1822-2011 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,} 2012), 153; “Open New Wal-Mart,” Jackson County Advocate, vol. 90, no. 19, June 19, 1980, 1, 3; “Bannister Mall opens doors,” 10-A.

better than Kansas City’s, if not as good as other suburbs. Hickman Mills was inviting in many ways, but even so, some black residents interviewed expressed their own trepidation at moving southward.

Stories of Daniel Mass and Alicia Solum exemplify the patterns inherent in black migration to Hickman Mills, as their families came for affordable houses and quieter

neighborhoods, but encountered opposition and a hostile environment. Daniel Mass, who moved into the Kirkside neighborhood in 1975 from central Kansas City, shared that he grew up

learning to avoid going west of Troost and south of 39th.156 Mass added, “My father told me

‘watch your own back when going south.’ South Kansas City was not a safe place to be in the early 1970s.”157 This was in particular a reference to Raytown, which had a reputation for harassing black residents or passersby.158 Mass recalled not having any significant problems moving into the community and not meeting outright racism, but he did feel cautious about living in the area at first. When asked why he moved to Hickman Mills if concerned with white attitudes, Mass replied:

I got a great house and a yard, for what I was paying for an apartment in the city—it was a no-brainer. I came out the same way they [whites] did earlier, I came for the house, the space, and the quiet.159

Mass moved into Kirkside with his wife, sent his two daughters to Ingels, then Smith-Hale Junior High and then to Hickman Mills High School. He also saw his neighborhood and school district change from predominantly white to predominantly black in two decades. “It was not a problem at first, some of us got along. But with HUD and section 8 housing, especially after the

156 _{Daniel Mass, interview with author, August 14, 2012.} 157 _Ibid.

158 _{Shortridge, Kansas City, 153; Mass, interview with author; Solum, interview with author.} 159 _{Mass, interview with author.}

90s, things got uglier.”160 Mass explained that the proliferation of section 8 housing brought property values down, and introduced housing speculation to the Ruskin and Kirkside neighborhoods.161 The rise of section 8 housing in Hickman Mills and the white flight that followed will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.

Alicia Solum moved into Ruskin Heights from central Kansas City a little later than Daniel Mass, taking her two children to a suburban home after getting out of a bad marriage. She also returned to college in 1983. “It was a tough time, and I thought that moving south would be better for my kids, which in a way it was, but our neighbors didn’t always make it easy.”162 Some months after moving in, Alicia’s house was vandalized—somebody pelted a wall with eggs and painted “get out, nigger.”163 The culprit was never discovered. In recalling the event, Alicia pointed out that there were neighbors who became friends, and not everyone was openly hostile, but the attack still occurred and Alicia still wonders if one of her neighbors knew who was responsible and wasn’t sharing.164 Like Daniel, Alicia stayed in Hickman Mills, even as many of her neighbors left in the late 1990s.165 She has since become a respected member of the community and is involved in school and residential organizations.

While black families started coming to Hickman Mills in the 1960s in small numbers, African-American presence grew slowly but steadily in the 1970s and 1980s, then sharply increased in the 1990s. Chapter five explores how the southland changed demographically from a predominantly white area to a primarily black one. A secondary transformation occurred during the 1990s as whites decided to leave Hickman Mills as a reputation of poverty and crime took hold, even if that reputation was not necessarily deserved. Because of this, the community

160 _Ibid.

161 _Ibid.

162 _{Solum, interview with author.} 163 _Ibid.

164 _Ibid. 165 _Ibid.

became known throughout the metropolitan area as an extension of the Kansas City core, and not as a suburb of the city. The schools also began to experience a tarnished reputation because of violent events that occurred in 1990, which prompted outsiders to think of the area as poor, violent, and black. Like other areas of the United States, middle-class black families moved to the suburbs of Kansas City to enjoy the good life their white counterparts sought twenty to thirty years earlier, only to find that their very presence led others to see the neighborhoods as urban, simply because they became black.166

166 _{Haynes, Red Lines, Black Spaces, 188-189; Emily Strauss, “The Making of the American School Crisis:} Compton, California and the Death of the Suburban Dream” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2006), 212-13.