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Difficult from the Start: Implementing the BrownDecision in the Kansas City, Missouri Public SchoolsPeter William MoranPublished online: 11 Aug 2010.

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Difficult from the Start: Implementing the Brown Decisionin the Kansas City, Missouri Public Schools

Peter William Moran

This article explores the history of school desegregation in Kansas City, Missouri. It examines the development of theschool district’s initial 1955 desegregation plan based on neighborhood schools, and the impact of that plan. Extensiveanalysis is devoted to the plan’s shortcomings, particularly the provisions allowing students to transfer between schoolsand the manner in which massive demographic change in the city undermined school desegregation. Finally, the articleexplores the origins of busing for school desegregation in Kansas City during the early 1960s, the modifications madeto the busing plan following protests by the city’s civil rights organizations, and the subsequent court decisions thatgave shape to the city’s magnet schools desegregation plan.

As the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’smonumental 1954 decision in Brown v. Board ofEducation approaches, it seems reasonable to ex-

pect that there will be a revitalized interest in the historyof school integration in this country. For those whosecuriosity is sufficiently piqued, there is a large bodyof literature on the subject. Within the literature, sev-eral of the most prominent works on school desegrega-tion focus closely on the evolution of the constitutionaland legal standards (for example, Armor, 1995; Graglia,1976; Irons, 2002; Kluger, 1976; Orfield & Eaton, 1996;Wilkinson, 1979). These studies typically place their in-terpretation in the context of school systems in the DeepSouth, which actively resisted integration (Bass, 1981;Freyer, 1984; Peltason, 1961; Smith, 1965). Such an ap-proach accurately demonstrates how meaningful inte-gration was long delayed in a large part of the countryand, furthermore, clearly illustrates the progression ofsterner measures used by the courts and the federal gov-ernment in order to compel southern districts to deseg-regate. However, this perspective also tends to minimizethe fact that integration had begun in several cities andstates during the mid-1950s, shortly after the Court’s 1954Brown decision. Along with Washington, DC, St. Louis,Baltimore, and other school districts in the border states,Kansas City, Missouri, was among the first major citiesto desegregate its schools.

Address correspondence to Peter Moran, College of Education,Dept. 3374, 1000 E. University Ave., Laramie WY 82071. E-mail:moranpw@uwyo.edu

Kansas City implemented its initial desegregationplan in September 1955, and the city’s school officialswere widely praised for their prompt compliance withthe Supreme Court’s order to desegregate (Billington,1964; Marshall, 1956; The Tension of Change, 1955).Kansas City school officials deserve to be recognized forthe speed with which an integration plan was imple-mented; however, the plan was far from perfect and in-cluded some provisions that clearly mitigated the extentof racial mixing in the schools. This article analyzes theprocess by which the school district’s original desegre-gation plan was formulated, the projections of the extentof integration made by school officials based on the plan,and the flaws in the plan that seriously limited the scopeof desegregation in Kansas City’s schools. Moreover, thearticle discusses how the initial plan foreshadowed prob-lems related to maintaining stable integration in the city’sschools that would plague the school district for the next40 years. Finally, the article examines the first attemptsin Kansas City to use busing as a component of its de-segregation plan during the early 1960s.

DESEGREGATION PLANS BEFOREBROWN II (1955)

In 1954, the Kansas City school public school systemwas comprised of 92 schools, 16 of which were segre-gated black schools (Kansas City, Missouri, School Dis-trict [KCMSD], 1985). The school district was organizedas a system of neighborhood schools with two overlap-ping sets of attendance zones; one set of attendance zonelines applied to white children, while the other applied

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to black children. In this arrangement, white students at-tended the white school nearest their home, and blackchildren attended the nearest segregated black school.Just three days after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decisionin Brown v. Board of Education, the Kansas City schoolboard instructed the superintendent and the district’s re-search department to begin developing plans for inte-gration (KCMSD, 1954a). Although several civil rightsand neighborhood organizations offered to assist theschool district with the process of developing an inte-gration plan, the school board determined that the dis-trict’s central administration possessed the expertise nec-essary to develop the most equitable plan for Kansas City(KCMSD, 1954b, 1954c).

Through a series of preliminary discussions, districtadministrators concluded that the simplest method ofconverting to integrated schools would be to retain theneighborhood schools concept while dissolving the dualattendance zone format and adopting a single set of at-tendance zone boundaries that would apply to whiteand black children alike (KCMSD, 1954d). The task offormulating the new attendance zones fell to the schooldistrict’s research department, a small group of statisti-cians and former building principals. As was true for allbut a handful of posts in the district’s central administra-tion, the research department was comprised entirely ofwhite males. Over the course of the next several months,the researchers collected data about city demographicpatterns and the capacities of the district’s schools. Thedepartment’s goals in reworking the attendance zoneswere that each school would operate at 85% of its ca-pacity, and ideally each school would be within walkingdistance for its students. Moreover, the researchers hadto be conscious of the staffing and resources availableat each school. For instance, some elementary schoolsserved kindergarten through sixth grade, others went ashigh as eighth grade, still others had combination roomsserving different grade levels (KCMSD Research Depart-ment, 1954). The research department’s task was sim-plified to some extent by the city’s demography. In the1950s, residential segregation in Kansas City was rela-tively rigid1 and large sections of the city had few or noblack residents (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1952). There-fore, in these white neighborhoods, desegregation wouldhave no impact and the attendance zones in these ar-eas did not require alteration. Thus, the great bulk ofthe research department’s work focused on 27 elemen-tary schools and 8 secondary schools where the racialcomposition of the school was likely to change throughdesegregation (KCMSD Research Department, 1954).

Using color-coded dots, members of the research de-partment plotted the residences of some 25,000 studentson large section maps of the city. Different colored dotswere used to signify the race and grade level of eachstudent. By the time they were finished, the maps wereboth colorful and rather confusing. The researchers then

set about counting and recounting thousands of dots,and penciling in new boundaries for schools that oftenrequired further revision once the adjacent schools wereconsidered. Nevertheless, by March 1955, the new atten-dance zones and the policy for the transition to integratedschooling were completed and unanimously approvedby the six members of the district’s school board, all ofwhom were upper-class Whites from the affluent south-western section of the city, an area whose schools re-mained exclusively white under the desegregation plan(KCMSD, 1955a, 1955b). Most of the transition policy lan-guage was devoted simply to defining attendance zones.One section of the plan, however, reaffirmed the schooldistrict’s long-standing policy of permitting transfers be-tween schools. Throughout its history, the school districthad liberally granted student transfers and no one inthe district’s administration saw any reason to departfrom that precedent in 1955 (KCMSD, 1955a). The trans-fer policy would, however, become the primary vehicleby which the white population eluded integration.

LETTER OF THE LAW = TOKENINTEGRATION

On September 7, 1955, Kansas City’s public schoolsopened on an integrated basis for the first time, and oneweek later, Superintendent James Hazlett presented thefirst report on desegregation. The transition to integratedschools, Hazlett said, had been smooth and effective. Heproudly announced that 33 of the district’s 78 elementaryschools and 11 of 14 secondary schools had integratedenrollments. Two high schools, 1 junior high, and 40 ele-mentary schools remained exclusively white, while 5 ele-mentary schools were 100% black (Hazlett, 1955). On thesurface, Hazlett’s statistics were impressive—black andwhite students were studying together in almost half ofthe district’s schools. On closer examination, however,much of what Hazlett described might be better charac-terized as “token integration.’’ Ten predominantly whiteschools and five predominantly black schools enrolledfewer than a dozen students of the other race. Indeed,six schools enrolled just a single student of the otherrace. Of Kansas City’s 92 schools, 65 remained 90% ormore white and 13 others remained 90% or more black.Indeed, fully 70% of the district’s 11,625 black studentsattended schools that were more than 90% black. More-over, about 3,300 of those students, or 28%, were enrolledin schools that remained exclusively black (Hazlett, 1955;KCMSD, 1985).

In short, Kansas City’s schools remained largely seg-regated. Indeed, Kansas City is a classic example of howa school district in compliance with the letter of theSupreme Court’s order to desegregate could, in prac-tice, implement a plan that produced little meaningfulintegration. It is important to remember that the legal

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standards established in the 1954 Brown decision and the1955 Brown implementation decree simply required thata district dissolve its former system of segregation andprovide for the assignment of students without regard torace (Brown, 1954, 1955). The Supreme Court’s vague 1955mandate read, in part, that school districts must make“a prompt and reasonable start’’ in dismantling their seg-regated school systems, and ordered districts “to admit[black students] to public schools on a racially nondis-criminatory basis with all deliberate speed’’(Brown, 1955,pp. 300–301). Acknowledging that local circumstancesvaried widely among states and locales operating seg-regated schools, the Court did not clarify its standardsfor desegregation beyond requiring the dissolution ofsegregated school systems, and would not order schooldistricts to take additional affirmative steps toward in-tegration for another decade. Thus, Kansas City’s neigh-borhood schools system, although it clearly did not pro-duce a great deal of integration, was fully in compliancewith the Supreme Court rulings.

NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS INRESIDENTIALLY SEGREGATED AREAS =SEGREGATED SCHOOLS

Above all, the plan demonstrated the limitations of aneighborhood schools concept in a city with segregatedresidential areas. The residential patterns in Kansas Cityassured that regardless of how the attendance zones weredrawn, schools in several areas of the city would retaintheir exclusive racial quality. The overwhelming major-ity of the city’s black population was concentrated in alarge central neighborhood east and south of the down-town area, and, as Map 1 illustrates, the geographicallydetermined attendance zones had very little impact onthe racial composition of the schools that served thisarea. In 1955, roughly 70% of the district’s 8,400 blackelementary students attended the nine formerly blackschools that served the central black neighborhood. Fourof the elementary schools (Attucks, Phillips, Booker T.Washington, and Yates) that remained 100% black in 1955were located in the heart of this neighborhood (Hazlett,1955; KCMSD, 1985). Not only did the new attendancezones have no impact on this area in 1955, the racial com-position of these schools remained unchanged for thenext 20 years. Attucks and Yates remained 99–100% blackuntil the mid-1970s; Phillips enrolled its first white stu-dent in 1974; and only four white students ever enrolledat Booker T. Washington before the school was closed in1976 (KCMSD, 1985).

Due to the rigid patterns of residential segregationin Kansas City, meaningful integration occurred only inthose schools where the attendance zones crossed lines ofresidential segregation. District officials understood thisin 1955 and had not envisioned integrated enrollments

at all of the city’s schools. Indeed, the research depart-ment predicted integrated student bodies at only 40 ofthe district’s 92 schools. Based on data indicating a stu-dent’s place of residence, the research department madeprojections of the anticipated racial composition for ev-ery school in the district (KCMSD Research Department,1955). For many of the district’s schools, these projec-tions were extremely accurate; however, in other sectionsof the city, the research department’s projections werefar afield due to two factors—the changing residencesof many students and the impact of the transfer policy.Nowhere were these factors more apparent than in theprojections for the formerly segregated black schools.

According to the research department’s plotting ofstudent residences, significant numbers of white stu-dents lived closer to schools that previously had beensegregated for Blacks than to the nearest white school.Thus, when the attendance zones were redrawn, hun-dreds of Whites were assigned to formerly black schools.The projections indicated that seven of the former segre-gated black schools were expected to draw enrollmentsof 10% or more white. However, when school openedin September 1955, only one of those schools, Garrison,enrolled more than 10% white. At each of the other sixschools, the anticipated white student enrollment nevermaterialized. It appears that the white population at-tached a stigma to assignments in former segregatedblack schools and either moved away or sought trans-fers to other schools with higher percentages of whitestudents. For example, 154 white students lived in theattendance zone for Sumner School, a former segregatedblack school, but when school opened, only 6 Whites en-rolled. Similarly, 74 Whites were assigned to Carver, butjust 2 enrolled; 132 white students lived in the Wheatleyzone, but only 29 attended there in September 1955. Fi-nally, almost 300 white students lived in the zone servedby the two formerly segregated black secondary schools(Lincoln High School, and R. T. Coles Junior HighSchool); however, when school opened only 2 Whitesenrolled at Lincoln and 4 at Coles. Of the roughly 850white students assigned by virtue of their residence toformer segregated black schools, only 12% actually en-rolled in those schools. Nearly 750 white students eithermoved or transferred from those placements (KCMSDDept. of Pupil Services, 1956; KCMSD Research Depart-ment, 1955). It seems likely that many of these whitefamilies initially took advantage of the transfer policyand perhaps moved from the area at some later date.

The stigma did not apply exclusively to the formerlysegregated black schools. It was also apparent in schoolsthat had remained for white use during the segregatedperiod, but were located in areas bordering on the ex-panding black residential area. Greenwood and Yeagerare two examples of this phenomenon. The research de-partment projected that the enrollments at both Green-wood and Yeager would be about 60% black. Greenwood

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opened in 1955 with a student body that was 78% black;almost 80 white students had moved or transferred. Ayear later Greenwood was 94% black. A similar situ-ation existed at Yeager. In 1955, 73% of the school’sstudents were black—93 Whites had moved or trans-ferred since the research department’s residence count.Two years later, Yeager was 90% black (KCMSD, 1985).The rapid turnover at these schools, as well as the sit-uation at the formerly segregated black schools, appearto demonstrate a strong reluctance on the part of Whitesto send their children to schools that they considered tobe “black schools.’’Moreover, developments at these pre-dominantly black schools illustrate the inability of the re-search department to account for the racial preferencesof a substantial number of white residents in the pro-jections for enrollments at particular schools. In makingtheir projections, the research department tended merelyto count students, without consideration of the racial his-tory of the schools. It is clear that large numbers of Whitesdid not perceive these schools from a neutral perspective.Schools that were projected to have enrollments of 50% ormore black students were the same schools from whichthe largest numbers of white students sought transfers.

Hundreds of black students also secured transfersfrom the schools to which they were assigned in the de-segregation plan. The pattern for Blacks, however, is con-siderably different from that of their white counterparts.The great majority of transfers approved for black stu-dents were from one predominantly black school to a dif-ferent predominantly black school. Fewer than 50 blackstudents sought transfers from majority white schools tomajority black schools (KCMSD Dept. of Pupil Services,1956; KCMSD Research Dept., 1955). Similarly, fewerthan 50 black students sought transfers from predomi-nantly black schools to majority white schools. Whereasa substantial percentage of the transfers granted to whitestudents circumvented desegregation, the vast majorityof black transfers neither advanced nor inhibited inte-gration. The option of seeking a transfer was available to,and utilized by hundreds of students of both races, butthose transfers that undermined desegregation tended tobe granted overwhelmingly to white students. It appearsthat black students were much more likely to accept as-signment to a meaningfully integrated school.

LIMITING THE IMPACT OF INTEGRATION:THE TRANSFER POLICY

The residential patterns of the city coupled with theliberal transfer policy ensured that the district’s desegre-gation plan based on a neighborhood schools conceptwould have limited impact. Although school officialsplainly indicated that avoiding integration was not a jus-tifiable reason for requesting a transfer, it is abundantlyclear that a substantial number of Whites utilized the

transfer policy to elude integration (KCMSD Departmentof Pupil Services, 1956). The transfer request form was asimple single sheet, and since the district had made pub-lic the acceptable grounds for requesting a transfer, manyKansas Citians were familiar with the reasons that wouldassure favorable action on their application. Accordingto the written records, school officials had not anticipatedthat the transfer policy would be used to elude integra-tion. In all of the discussions concerning the transfer pol-icy, the primary concern expressed by school administra-tors was that it should be applied in an equitable manner,providing white and black applicants alike an equal op-portunity to secure transfers to those schools that theywanted their children to attend. At no point in the writ-ten record did anyone suggest that transfers could beused to evade integration. Nevertheless, it seems highlyunlikely that school administrators would not have con-sidered that possibility, given their years of experienceworking in the district, their familiarity with the city’sdemographic patterns, and their sense of the broad spec-trum of racial attitudes that prevailed among the city’sresidents. Indeed, it seems quite plausible that the trans-fer policy was a tacit gesture to parents that provided analternative to having their children attend an integratedschool, an option that thousands of parents quietly exer-cised. Furthermore, when it became patently clear thattransferring was the vehicle of choice for avoiding inte-gration, school officials stubbornly refused to modify thepolicy.

The district continued to grant transfers liberally un-til finally adopting stricter criteria in the mid-1970s, anddid so then only because the United States Departmentof Health, Education and Welfare threatened to termi-nate the district’s federal funding if the policy were notreformed. The revised policy prohibited students fromtransferring from a school in which they were amongthe minority race to one in which they would be partof the majority race (Borthwick & Keeler, 1981; KCMSD,1977). In other words, after the policy was revised, trans-fers could only be approved if they promoted integration.Nevertheless, it is important to note that the change wasmade grudgingly and did little to reverse two decades ofhaving approved thousands of transfers that had plainlyinhibited desegregation.

Aside from the use of the transfer policy to avoid in-tegration, another part of the district’s initial integrationplan brought unexpected results. On the city’s west side,an optional zone was created for students living in theDouglass and Lowell attendance area (KCMSD, 1955a).Prior to desegregation, Frederick Douglass School servedthe majority of the black elementary school populationon the west side, enrolling almost 400 students. Twoblocks away stood Lowell Elementary, which served thesurrounding white population prior to integration. Forthe 1955 school year, district officials drew a single atten-dance zone around the Douglass and Lowell area (see

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Map 1Racial composition of elementary schools, Kansas City, Missouri, 1955.

Map 1) and gave students within that zone the option ofchoosing to attend either school.

Douglass and Lowell were part of an experiment ofsorts for additional combinations in the future. The fa-cilities at the two schools were comparable, and theresearch department, again assuming no opposition to

integration, concluded that each would draw roughlyparallel mixes of white and black students. Given theracial composition of the area, the researchers predictedthat each school would be approximately 36% black(KCMSD Research Department, 1955). During the firsttwo years, the option plan could scarcely have been more

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disappointing. Both races demonstrated a clear prefer-ence for the schools that they had attended prior to de-segregation. In 1955, Douglass enrolled just 1 white stu-dent, and only 13 black children chose to attend Lowell(KCMSD Research Department, 1955). The two schoolsremained highly segregated the following year, withDouglass 99% black and Lowell 99% white (KCMSD,1985). In 1957, the school district abandoned the op-tional zone and closed Lowell, leaving Douglass Schoolto serve the entire area. Given the rather dubious re-sults of this brief experiment with “freedom of choice’’in the Douglass-Lowell area, school officials shied awayfrom adopting other schemes for organizing schools andmanipulating attendance zones until the late 1960s andearly 1970s. Retrenchment in the neighborhood schoolsconcept embodied in the original plan characterized thedistrict for more than a decade, and precluded school of-ficials from responding in an effective manner to anotherunforeseen consequence of school integration.

SHIFTING RESIDENTIAL PATTERNS

Massive demographic shifts in the late 1950s and1960s produced another set of serious problems foradministrators seeking stable integration in the pub-lic schools. As indicated in Map 1, in the early 1950s,Linwood Boulevard stood as a stark line dividing thecentral black neighborhood to the north and the exclu-sively white residential areas to the south, but by the late1950s that line began to dissolve (U.S. Bureau of the Cen-sus, 1952, 1962). To the south of Linwood Boulevard, theprocess of residential transition from white occupancyto black occupancy steadily accelerated in the years fol-lowing desegregation and eventually assumed dimen-sions that bordered on panic. During the 1950s, the blackpopulation south of Linwood Boulevard grew by almost25,000 residents and rendered impossible the goal ofmanaging stable integrated schools in the area. The paceof residential transition and its impact on the school sys-tem is perhaps best illustrated by examining develop-ments at Ladd Elementary School.

As late as 1955, Linwood Boulevard remained a rigidline of residential segregation. The boulevard served asthe boundary separating the attendance zones for D.A.Holmes Elementary to the north and Ladd to the south(see Map 1). Based on its study of student residences,the research department projected that Holmes wouldbe 84% black, while Ladd was expected to remain exclu-sively white. However, in 1955 the process of residentialtransition began in earnest south of Linwood Boulevard.Ladd’s enrollment in September 1955 was 5% black andit increased rapidly over the next four years. In 1956,Ladd’s enrollment was 29% black; the following year itrose to 59%, then to 81% in 1958, to 97% in 1959, and to99% in 1960 (KCMSD, 1985). As Maps 2 and 3 illustrate,Ladd was the first, but not the only school south of the

central black neighborhood to undergo such a rapid andnear total transformation. In 1956, Horace Mann Schoolenrolled its first black students, 13 in all. Five years later,there were 982 black students at Mann, comprising 92%of the school’s enrollment (KCMSD, 1985).

As the black population continued to expand to thesouth, the pattern of residential turnover repeated itselfwith equal rapidity in one neighborhood after another.Within 11 years of the decision to desegregate, about 81/4square miles to the south of the central black neighbor-hood had been transformed from exclusively white tomajority black. Moreover, the schools that served neigh-borhoods undergoing residential transition tended topass through a similar cycle from segregated, to brieflyintegrated, and then resegregated (see Maps 2 and 3).By 1966, 14 schools south of Linwood Boulevard weremajority black, 9 of which were more than 85% black. Ofthese 14 schools, 7 had enrolled no black students in 1955(KCMSD, 1985).

The transformation of the neighborhoods and schoolssouth of Linwood Boulevard raises one final pointregarding the transfer policy. Substantial numbers ofWhites applied for transfers when they perceived thatthe school their children attended was becoming a ma-jority black school. The best example of this trend isLadd School. In 1960, Ladd’s enrollment was 99% black;of more than 1,600 students, only 17 were white. Yet,the 1960 census indicated that the Ladd area was onlyabout 75% black. According to the census results, nearly200 white elementary school age children still resided inthe area (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1962). Although theschool district’s transfer records for 1960 are incomplete,it appears that the great majority of Whites living in theLadd attendance zone used the transfer policy in order toavoid placing their children in a school that was majorityblack.

Busing to Relieve Overcrowding

Demographic change and neighborhoods shiftingfrom white to black occupancy generated one additionalproblem for school officials in Kansas City. As the blackpopulation grew in the neighborhoods south of LinwoodBoulevard, the age structure of the neighborhoodschanged as well, and the schools serving those areas grewincreasingly crowded. Census data indicate that a sub-stantial part of the black population moving out of thecentral black neighborhood into the previously all-whiteresidential areas south of Linwood was comprised ofyoung families with elementary school-age children. Themedian age for the black migrant group was just 23, 10years younger than the median age for the city as a whole(U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1962). As these young blackfamilies moved in they replaced white residents, manyof whom did not have elementary school age children.Inevitably then, the age structure in these neighborhoods

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Map 2Racial composition of elementary schools, Kansas City, Missouri, 1960.

became younger and the schools serving areas undergo-ing this type of residential transition swelled above theircapacities. Again, the case of Ladd Elementary is illus-trative. As Ladd grew increasingly resegregated duringthe period 1955–1960, the school also grew increasinglyovercrowded. Despite alterations to its attendance zone,

by 1960 the enrollment at Ladd was nearly 700 studentsabove its capacity (KCMSD, 1985). That year, school offi-cials began busing students to relieve the crowding atLadd; 240 fifth- and sixth-grade students were trans-ported to Humboldt Elementary (Ladd Students, 1960).From those beginnings, the school district’s commitment

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Map 3Racial composition of elementary schools, Kansas City, Missouri, 1965.

to busing grew dramatically. More schools serving ar-eas undergoing residential transition and resegregationwere added each year. By 1964, more than 1,200 stu-dents were being bused from seven different schools.Because these seven schools were, by 1964, nearly com-pletely resegregated, virtually all of the children riding

the buses were black (KCMSD, 1985; Map Out Plan,1964).

The notion of busing students to relieve crowding wasnot controversial in itself, but the busing program im-plemented in Kansas City evoked memories of segrega-tion for many residents. Kansas City’s busing plan was

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unusual in that it removed entire classes of students fromovercrowded buildings and placed them in schools hav-ing vacant classrooms. The students retained the sameteacher and the same classmates and mixed with otherstudents at the receiving schools only during recess,lunch, assemblies, and other all-school functions. Be-cause the busing plan transported black students almostexclusively, and because most of the receiving schoolswere predominantly White, this de facto quarantine ar-rangement at the receiving sites did nothing to advancemeaningful integration and was arguably in violation ofthe law (KCMSD, 1963).

School officials defended the plan arguing that bus-ing full classes of students required fewer buses, travel-ing shorter distances, and made optimum use of avail-able classroom space. This rationale did not, however,satisfy the city’s major civil rights organizations, allof which objected strenuously to the busing scheme.In 1964, Kansas City’s chapters of the Urban League,Congress of Racial Equality, and the National Associa-tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),banded together to form a coalition called the Citizen’sCoordinating Committee and presented their grievancesto the school board. The Coordinating Committee’s pri-mary objective was the integration of the bused studentsat the receiving schools. More generally, the Commit-tee also supported increased integration throughout thedistrict (KCMSD, 1964a). Initially, the school board re-fused to consider any modification of the busing plan forthe 1964–1965 school year, but quickly reversed its posi-tion when the Coordinating Committee threatened liti-gation and brought in June Shagaloff, a negotiator fromNAACP’s national offices (KCMSD, 1964b).

Seeking to avoid a legal challenge to the busing plan,Superintendent Hazlett proposed what he termed the“principle of wide distribution.’’ The bused studentswould be integrated into classes at the receiving sites,but there would be more schools involved. He recom-mended that the 41 classes of black students on the busesbe spread among 22 receiving schools (KCMSD, 1964c).In this way Hazlett hoped that the number of blackstudents introduced at any one school would be smallenough that white students would not request transfers.Although the reasoning behind the busing solution washardly reminiscent of nine years earlier when KansasCity school officials considered themselves to be in thevanguard of school integration, the revised plan did in-tegrate a larger number of schools and met with the ap-proval of the Citizens’ Coordinating Committee.

School officials in Kansas City had succeeded in re-solving the busing controversy without litigation, butstill confronted serious problems. On one hand, manywhite residents objected to Hazlett’s principle of widedistribution, specifically, and were concerned with therapid pace of demographic change in the city’s neigh-borhoods and schools, generally. By the mid-1960s, sub-

stantial numbers of white residents were fleeing the cityfor the suburbs or removing their children from the pub-lic schools and enrolling them in the city’s private andparochial schools. In 1965, the Kansas City public schoolsystem was losing more than 1,300 white students eachyear, and by 1969, the annual figure had risen to nearly2,300 (KCMSD, 1985). On the other hand, leaders inthe black community continued to press the school dis-trict for more meaningful and stable integration in theschools. The school board’s dilemma by the mid-1960swas quite clear: attempt to formulate policies that wouldretain as much of the white population as possible, whileavoiding litigation initiated by members of the blackcommunity. It was a precarious balancing act that fre-quently pleased no one and ultimately resulted in pro-tracted litigation in the mid-1970s.

Jenkins v. Missouri: The MagnetSchool Solution

Busing remained a constant fixture in Kansas City’sdesegregation plan throughout the 1970s. The revisedbusing plan implemented in 1977, however, also gaverise to a lawsuit challenging whether the district hadever truly desegregated its schools (KCMSD, 1977). Thesuit initiated in 1977 ultimately resulted in findings thatthe school district and the state of Missouri had failedto eradicate vestiges of the former segregated systemin Kansas City. Citing the transfer policy, the significantnumber of schools that remained one-race, and the seg-regated busing program of the early 1960s, Federal Dis-trict Court Judge Russell Clark ruled that Kansas Cityhad never thoroughly dismantled the former dual sys-tem (Jenkins v. Missouri, 1984). The remedy fashioned bythe court to address the lingering vestiges of segrega-tion stood in stark contrast to the simplicity of KansasCity’s original desegregation plan based on neighbor-hood schools, and underscored the innovative directionsin which desegregation plans had evolved since 1954.Determined to create equal educational opportunitiesfor all of the district’s students, Judge Clark approved aunique plan that converted the great majority of KansasCity’s public schools to magnet schools, and ordered amassive program of capital improvements in which vir-tually every school in the district was either extensivelyrenovated or completely rebuilt in order to support oneof the various magnet themes (Jenkins v. Missouri, 1986,1987). All told, the expense of Clark’s desegregation planexceeded $2 billion and the monitoring of the plan wouldkeep the school district under strict judicial supervisionfor the next two decades.

SUMMARY

Kansas City presents an interesting snapshot of theearly history of school integration following the Brown

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IMPLEMENTING BROWN IN KANSAS CITY, MO 287

decision. On one hand, the school district was widelyrecognized as a leader for its speedy compliance withthe standards initially set forth by the Supreme Court.Given the vague mandate articulated in the Court’s1954 and 1955 decisions, the initial desegregation planwas indeed a model of compliance. The neighborhoodschools plan, however, was not well suited for a citycharacterized by relatively rigid residential segregation.In practice, the plan produced considerably less mix-ing of the races in schools than had been projected bythe research department. The negligible impact of thedesegregation plan was clearly linked to the decisionto retain the transfer policy. Transfers stymied integra-tion by providing parents with an avenue that could beaccessed in order to avoid sending a child to an inte-grated school, and thousands of Whites used the trans-fer policy for just that purpose. Transfers were mostfrequently used by white parents when their childrenwere assigned to a formerly segregated black school,a school located in a largely black neighborhood, or aschool that they perceived was rapidly becoming ma-jority black. The fluid demographics that characterizedKansas City in the 1950s and 1960s further frustrated thecreation of a stable, integrated school system. Populationchange produced cycles of segregation, brief (but highlyunstable) integration, and then resegregation in numer-ous neighborhoods and schools to the south of the largeblack central neighborhood. Faced with massive demo-graphic change, school officials consistently reaffirmedthe neighborhood schools plan and expanded the busingprogram as a stop-gap measure to deal with overcrowd-ing. Neither approach was particularly effective in pro-moting desegregation, and both testify to two decades ofdisinterest on the part of school officials to experimentwith other approaches to desegregation.

Reluctance on the part of the district’s administrationto reassess and revise the original plan was perhaps theirmost egregious shortcoming. Kansas City’s 1955 plan re-mained largely intact until well into the 1970s, as didthe transfer policy and the controversial busing plan.By that time, however, the legal standards defining sat-isfactorily integrated school systems had evolved wellbeyond the levels achieved in the district. Kansas Citywas no longer in compliance with the most recent le-gal mandates by the 1970s (Adams v. Richardson [1973];Adams v. Weinberger [1975]; Green v. County School Board[1968]; Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg [1971]). Beginningin 1977, the school district found itself embroiled in oneof the more lengthy and costly desegregation lawsuits inthe nation’s history.

The magnet schools plan effectively brought an endto neighborhood schooling in Kansas City, and usheredin a new period of experimentation with school organi-zation for purposes of desegregation. Judge Clark hadessentially created the nation’s first school district com-prised almost exclusively of magnet schools, each of

which drew in students, black and white, from all cornersof the city. It was the sort of radical departure from tra-ditional school organizational models that school plan-ners a few decades earlier, given their dogged allegianceto neighborhood schools, would have found inconceiv-able. More importantly, the manner in which the magnetschools plan completely refashioned the school districtmarked the first time that the Kansas City schools trulyembraced the mandate from Brown to provide all stu-dents with equal educational opportunities.

NOTE

1. Using the 1950 census tract report, Kansas City’s indexof dissimilarity was .79, meaning 79% of the city’s white orblack residents would need to move to different neighborhoodsin order for the racial composition of each neighborhood toequal the racial composition for the entire city. Kansas Citygrew increasingly segregated in subsequent decades. The fig-ure for the 1960 census was .83, and was .875 in 1970 (http://trinity.aas.duke.edu/∼jvigdor/segregation/index.html).

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Peter William Moran is an assistant professor of ElementaryEducation at the University of Wyoming. He teaches humani-ties methods course for undergraduate students and graduatecourses in curriculum and the history of education in America.

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