Kansas City Bears Racial Scars of Interstate System Bruce R. Watkins Drive One Example of Uprooting Minority Communities

Political power, civic influence, and blatant racism shaped the construction of the federal highway system crisscrossing the U.S. today.

Kansas City was an extraordinarily adept player in the post-WW II effort.

As a result, interstates slice and encircle the metropolitan area, U.S. 71 Highway runs along the east side of town, and many other connecting arterial roadways snake through the community.

The routes facilitate commerce, allow access to jobs and recreation, and provide many other benefits to the greater Kansas City region.

Less recognized are the disproportionate negative impacts.

“It’s astonishing that whole swaths of vibrant Black and Latino neighborhoods were simply wiped out,” Mayor Quinton Lucas said.

Beginning in the 1950s, highways severed African American and Mexican American neighborhoods while predominantly white neighborhoods remained intact. The pattern played out nationwide.

U.S. 71 began as an idea in Kansas City’s 1947 master plan and didn’t conclude until the last section opened in 2001. 

By then, construction had displaced 10,000 Eastside families and cut off walkable, easy access to the thriving businesses — many Black-owned — lining Prospect Avenue.

But now, Kansas City has joined other municipalities nationwide in attempting to make amends for the damages wrought by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

The city has secured $6 million in federal funds to begin environmental and traffic studies aimed at addressing safety and pollution concerns in Kansas City’s East and Westside neighborhoods. 

Two websites offer historical backgrounding and timelines for projects, one for the Westside and another for the Eastside.

Federal officials notified the city earlier this month that they had, at least temporarily, shuttered a U.S. Department of Transportation institute that assisted such efforts. But the city is continuing work with money it has already drawn down.

At 40, Lucas didn’t grow up during the era when most of the area’s highways were constructed. The blatant disregard for the highway’s harmful impacts is “just so clearly racist.”

A new documentary, “Land of Opportunity: The Road of Resistance,” explores Black Kansas City’s challenges to the construction of Bruce R. Watkins Drive, the 10.2-mile stretch of U.S. 71 that connects south Kansas City from 85th Street to downtown.

The film, by Nico Giles Wiggins, will be featured as part of Kansas City PBS’ Reel Black Film Fest on Saturday, an event that includes multiple panel discussions.

Lucas has family on his mother’s side forced to move for the roadway.

“Once the neighborhood itself was decimated, Lucas said, “you saw further instability that continues through east Kansas City to this day.”

“Race, Real Estate, And Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2010” documents how the real estate industry and federal housing policy contributed to racial residential segregation.

“Beyond any doubt, the mass suburbanization of whites and the ghettoization of blacks has been one of the most profound population shifts in the twentieth century,” author Kevin Fox Gotham wrote.

Former Kansas City Mayor Pro-Tem Alvin Brooks told Gotham that urban renewal became a synonym for Black removal “and it broke the back of Black stable neighborhoods.”

Now 92, Brooks said Bruce R. Watkins Drive displaced some residents for a second time. Interstate 70 had relocated them about 15 years prior, Brooks said.

He attended the first community meeting, held at Paseo Baptist Church. There was a group of officials from the state, all white men. And the affected residents, who were all Black.

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Information was conflicting, Brooks said. 

Some people advised homeowners not to make improvements because the homes would soon be demolished. Others advised keeping properties stable and in good shape.

“It was just displacement,” Brooks said. “Right down the middle of the Black community.”

Legal action

A coalition of advocacy groups filed a 1973 federal lawsuit decrying the racial and economic inequities in the highway’s planning and implementation. The suit ended with a 1985 federal consent decree allowing construction but with some concessions.

One provision called for the roadway to be “something less than a freeway and more than a parkway.” The decree ordered the installation of traffic lights to slow down drivers.

The consent decree means that substantial changes to the roadway would need court approval, said City Engineer Nicolas H. Bosonetto.

Recent studies have found U.S. 71 to be among the most dangerous roads in the region. One issue: Pedestrians trying to cross multiple lanes of traffic.

A road safety audit along U.S. 71 will be conducted in March. A planning and environmental linkages study is also planned.

Kansas City’s suburbanization following WW II mirrored other major metropolitan areas. But the complicated nature of highways locally is striking, said Bosonetto, who has worked on reconnecting projects in Lowell, Massachusetts.  

“Kansas City, compared to other cities, really built to an extreme,” he said.  

Federal funding

In August 2022, Kansas City secured a $5 million Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) grant for the Eastside reconnecting project.

On Feb. 11, federal officials notified the city that a stop-work order had been issued for the Reconnecting Communities Institute within the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The term equity is within the title of one grant funding the institute, possibly triggering the new administration’s opposition to funding that relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Bosonetto said the city already has the federal funds in hand and will continue moving forward.

Noise disrupts sleep for those who live near major highways. Fewer hours of rest can shorten life spans, which the city has already documented around U.S. 71. 

Air and light pollution are also factors, Bosonetto said.

Trucks’ metal brake pads create a dust of heavy metals. Increased rates of asthma and other health issues can result.

The city did not rezone the area around U.S. 71 once it was completed, so commercial development did not materialize.

“So basically, the community got all the impacts and none of the benefits of these interstates,” Bosonetto said. “The benefits really came to the suburbs.” 

Lending an ear

 Listening to residents is an important part of the reconnecting projects.

A late January meeting at the Guadalupe Centers drew about 80 people.

Cris Medina, who led the Centers for decades, remembers that area churches were among those who argued against the plans to construct parts of Interstates 35 and 670 through the Westside.

The churches spoke on behalf of their parishioners, realizing that the area’s social fabric would be undercut if people were forced to move away. It happened anyway.

The Castro family first settled on the Westside in 1905.

By 1935, the family’s inter-generational imprint was so profound that they were profiled in The Kansas City Times.

The newspaper wrote of five generations, the oldest being Susan Castro Gautreaux Souder’s great-great-grandmother, who was 105 at the time.

In the mid-1960s, her parents lost their house through eminent domain. Concrete supports for Interstate 35 replaced the home site at about 27th and Jarboe streets.

Her parents were devastated.

“It felt like a sense of not being wanted,” Castro Gautreaux Souder said.

Other Mexican American families were also displaced, so Westside homes for sale were difficult to find. Her family eventually found a home to purchase at about 59th and Troost Avenue.

“We were pulled away from our family,” Castro Gautreaux Souder said. “We definitely felt a sense of loss.”

In March 2023, the city obtained $1 million in federal funding for the Westside reconnecting project.

Improvements are planned for Beardsley Road, described in city plans as a “dark, hazardous two-lane road.” Changes will help connect the Westside to businesses and housing developing in the West Bottoms. 

Other city plans include improvements to Southwest Boulevard.

Eastside Watchdog

Lisa Ray, president of the Town Fork Creek Neighborhood, said the Eastside still struggles against wealthier and more empowered players.

She monitors development proposals, some that she believes might not be in the community’s best interest.

“I feel gentrification is creeping down my back,” Ray said. “I’m just trying to make sure that people can save their property, so they can pass it down to family and not see it go into blight.”

Ray remembers when U.S. 71 was built. It was an era when Black entrepreneurs lived near their Prospect Avenue businesses.

Some homeowners held out against the city back then, Ray said, waiting before accepting an offer through eminent domain. The strategy sometimes backfired, lessening what they ultimately were paid, she said.

“The plans were being made,” Ray said. “Years before we found out about it.”

Route Altered

For Wiggins, the documentarian behind the “Land of Opportunity,” it’s important that Kansas Citians understand that the community fiercely fought the efforts.

“The piece is focused on the resistance of a community to structural racism,” Wiggins said.

At one point, planners proposed a north-south route that followed the old trolley tracks near Brookside Boulevard. 

Wealthier white residents pushed back, seemingly leveraging their social capital at City Hall to push the roadway farther east.

Wiggins’ film highlights the prosperous Black community that surrounded Paseo Baptist Church and the social justice efforts of the founding minister, the Rev. D.A. Holmes.

“It’s not just about making the land around the freeway more accessible, ” Wiggins said. “But it is about ensuring that the people who have endured through the structural racism have access to a healthier life.”