Author Says Togetherness, Mutuality is the Way Forward for U.S.

It’s been a little over 45 years since the first meeting of the 49/63 Neighborhood Coalition, a group of homeowners and stakeholders on either side of Troost Avenue who originally got together in the interest of preserving homes and stemming the loss of homeowners in the area.

New York Times bestselling author Tanner Colby recounts the period in his book Some of My Best Friends Are Black, a narrative social history of racial integration in the United States. On Monday, Rockhurst University invited Colby back to Kansas City for a conversation on the past, present and future of that process of integration with longtime Kansas City Star columnist Lewis Diuguid.

The author, who is also co-host of Slate magazine’s About Race podcast, answered questions from Diuguid and from a capacity audience in Pedro Arrupe, S.J., Hall about his work — how he approached it, what he learned from Kansas City and what he could share about healing the racial divide.

Colby said he realized in the lead up to the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 that despite his enthusiasm for the soon-to-be president, he felt he himeself had few meaningful connections to African-Americans. Following that thought process brought him to four components of contemporary American life through which he wanted to explore the history and legacy of racial integration: real estate, the workplace, education and church.

Colby said he visited cities in Alabama and Louisiana where he once lived and New York City to build the chapters on education, church, and the workplace. But he ended up in Kansas City for one month in 2009 studying the history of housing after a tip from a friend.

“I had a friend who grew up in Overland Park, who said if you want to understand real estate segregation, you have to go to Kansas City, Missouri,” Colby said.

That section of the book focuses on discriminatory housing practices like red-lining, block-busting and racial covenants that were once widespread. And Colby pointed to the 49/63 Neighborhood Coalition, formed by neighbors and members of the University’s Jesuit community to fight the destructive effects of those practice, as an example of a way to move the process of racial integration forward.

“The way that the 49/63 group here and the surrounding neighborhood, they way they tackled it and dealt with it was an amazing template for what could have been and should have been, but wasn’t,” he said.

Throughout his comments, Colby emphasized the need for people of all different races to find common ground and work toward solutions in their own communities together.

“Racism is about power, that’s the main thing to remember,” he said. “We always focus on the antipathy between everyday black people and white people. Which is really what people in power want us to do, because the whole point of racism is to divide us from each other.”