A City Divided: the Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960.

By Sherry Lamb Schirmer. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2002. Pp. [x], 261. $34.95, ISBN 0-8262-1391-X.)

Sherry Lamb Schirmer's study of racially divided Kansas City, Missouri, is a must-read for every serious scholar of African American or urban history. It is a good companion piece to Kenneth L. Kusmer's 1978 study of Cleveland, Ohio, and Gilbert Osofsky's 1966 study of Harlem. In her well-written, well-argued narrative, Schirmer carefully traces the development of white Kansas Citians' perceptions of race. Beginning with an examination of segregated housing practices, she explains how white community leaders extended racial discrimination throughout the city during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet a small but vibrant black middle class emerged, and Schirmer depends largely on their voices for her analysis. Few (if any) whites wrote about the city's racial problems, but African American editor Chester Arthur Franklin of the Kansas City Call, a zealous and careful chronicler of the city's racial injustices, filled this void.

African American voters courted both the Republican Party and Tom Pendergast's Democratic Party machine, but neither offered relief from the problems of the ghetto--crime, white sexual abuse of black women, police brutality, or poverty. However, political leaders were not the only villains in Kansas City. Rejecting the "redneck thesis" that shifts blame onto "lower-class whites" (p. 63), Schirmer accuses businessmen, union officials, and other influential whites of creating the city's nasty racial policies, and she suggests that ordinary whites might have accepted integration had such elites not helped to sustain and encourage a "myth" of widespread, grassroots white bigotry (p. 147) resentful of even the most casual contact with blacks.

This study is enthralling, but it is not without problems. Schirmer's argument about "mythical white bigots" is not convincing. While coming of age in the upper South during the 1950s and 1960s, I experienced many blue-collar whites who expressed racial intolerance far more freely than did the upper-middle class. I would also ask if it is possible to write a comprehensive community study of Kansas City, Missouri, without including nearby Kansas City, Kansas? Except for a single story involving discrimination at a defense plant during World War II, this twin city plays no part in Schirmer's study. As segregated housing patterns developed, did either blacks or whites move to the other Kansas City? Additionally, Schirmer's focus on white attitudes tends to create too many African American victims and too few heroes. There were positive developments in the African American community prior to World War II that must have won the approval and support of at least a few well-meaning whites. Schirmer's analysis of the Jazz Age in Kansas City is limited to demonstrating that whites held negative views of everything black--but surely at least a few whites recognized the merits of the exciting new music. Nonetheless, Schirmer has written a fine book, and it deserves your attention.

THEODORE C. DELANEY

Washington and Lee University