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Barbara Johnson’s east Kansas City neighborhood once had all she needed: homes filled with other kids and families, vibrant schools, churches, and places to shop, all within walking distance. It was her whole world.
“We had everything on this side of Troost, everything for Black folks to live,” Johnson said. “Our grocery stores — we had Milgram, Safeway — all of that was available to us.”
Johnson, who was born in Tennessee, moved to Kansas City with her family at 16. Racial covenants and other discriminatory housing practices dictated where they could live in the 1960s. Still, Johnson grew to love her neighborhood.
“We didn't even have to have any transportation,” she said. “I would actually take my children when they were little and walk them all the way up to Troost, where the movie show was — because we couldn't go to movies everywhere.”
When Johnson returned to Kansas City as an adult in 1978, after a decade overseas, many of the homes, stores and buildings less than a mile to the west were gone. Urban planners and government officials were preparing to build a 10-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 71 — known at the time as the South Midtown Freeway and known now as Bruce R. Watkins Drive — right through her neighborhood.
“All hell had broken loose,” Johnson said. “I saw complete devastation with my own eyes. I couldn’t believe it.”
The highway evokes a painful history and memories that go back decades for Johnson and many other residents who still live near it. The ribbon of road left a scar on several Black neighborhoods.
Its construction came at the expense of 2,000 homes and an estimated 25,000 people’s livelihoods, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“This town shook apart,” Johnson said.
But local leaders in recent years have started to reimagine a future that tackles some of the highway's sins. With a $5 million federal grant from former President Joe Biden’s administration, Kansas City’s “Reconnecting the East Side” project aims to work with residents and identify ways to make the highway safer.
“We see public safety challenges. We see environmental challenges. Children in this area suffer from higher asthma rates,” admitted Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas during a press conference last August. “And anybody who has ever tried to walk across the highway understands just how frustrating and challenging it is.”
“The goal is that we see, in more situations, people actually driving through our communities, to shop, to stop, to invest,” Lucas said.
That vision may be hard for some to imagine. Johnson, who has spent decades in her century-old home less than a mile from the nearest on-ramp, has seen her neighborhood undergo drastic and tragic transformation.
“It's hard for me to see because I was here when I was 16 years old, and now, to know all of this devastation,” she said. “Just all the homes — gone, gone, gone.”
Birth of the South Midtown Freeway
Ten years before the Johnson family settled in east Kansas City, officials published an extensive report proposing a 30-year expressway development plan. That 1951 report was the first time the city identified Highway 71, or the South Midtown Freeway.
“At that time, it was just a line on a map,” said Michael Wells, a senior librarian at the Missouri Valley Special Collections who developed an exhibit on Bruce R. Watkins Drive currently on view at the Kansas City Public Library.
“It wasn't very well defined. It wasn't saying it was going to go through certain communities or not. It was saying, basically, we just need to connect these suburbs where the population is moving to,” Wells said.
But that suburban dream taking shape in places like Grandview, Lee’s Summit, and Johnson County, Kansas, was primarily reserved for white families. Discriminatory practices like redlining, where mortgage lenders denied home loans to Black and other minority families, and restrictive covenants, which prohibited them from owning homes in certain neighborhoods, bound Kansas City’s Black families to neighborhoods east of Troost Avenue.
City officials were further galvanized to pursue a north-south expressway after then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into law in 1956. It called for a national interstate highway system of 41,000 miles and authorized $25 billion to pay for it.
For a while, city planners flirted with the idea of building an expressway through the Country Club Plaza area, and the Country Club Freeway was proposed in 1959 as a six-lane, high-speed highway running north to south.
But Plaza residents — who were predominantly white, wealthy, and had more political power — hated it. They spent the early 1960s opposing the idea through the Kansas City Betterment Association, a group that voiced their many concerns at public meetings.
Their opposition worked. By the time the Johnsons, faced with limited choices, settled in a home east of Troost Avenue, Missouri officials favored building the South Midtown Freeway further east. It would be two miles shorter and acquiring properties would be easier, they argued.
In 1965, the city abandoned the Country Club Freeway idea for an expressway running through the heart of many of Kansas City’s Black neighborhoods.
“Our confinement was very clear,” Johnson said.
The year Johnson left Kansas City, in 1968, riots and civil unrest broke out locally and nationally. Kansas City Public Schools was going through desegregation, and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
That same year, the state of Missouri received authorization to begin buying properties in the proposed route of the South Midtown Freeway. From Bannister Road to the downtown loop, about 2,000 thousand homes were marked for demolition. The human impact was even greater.
“When you lost all those homes, you also lost community,” Johnson said.
‘The freeway will probably come and take your house’
Dorothy Frazier grew up about three miles south of where Johnson lives, in an area just east of the highway’s proposed route, and has stayed close by ever since.
“I was born and raised between Montgall and Chestnut, on 55th Street,” Frazier said. “That neighborhood is my home area.”
Though the east half of Chestnut Avenue survived, Montgall was torn out for the highway, as was the Frazier family home that stood at 2708 E. 55th St.
“It was four of us kids then, and my mother raised us there,” she said. “Then I left and my next house was 5500 South Benton, which is right off the freeway now.”
Back then, Frazier said, a new highway was badly needed. As more people bought cars — including her dad — side streets grew more congested.
“People have more cars and people take different routes,” Frazier said. “If we didn't get the new freeway … I don't know what we would've done.”
When plans for the project were announced, Frazier said people in the neighborhood moved out fast, anticipating the highway would take their home.
“Once your neighbors start selling their properties and those houses are demolished, your house has no value at that point,” said Missouri Valley Special Collections manager Jeremy Drouin, who worked with Wells on the library exhibit.
“You're almost forced to sell at that point,” he said.
Frazier said the government paid her family for their home, but an adjacent lot owned by her mother was still under her name when construction on the freeway began.
“They told her that she had to take what she could get for her lot,” she said.
Speculators preyed on vulnerable families, too, offering lower compensation than what the state would have given, Wells said.
“There was a big problem, in addition to just the declining property values, of people just really getting ripped off for what their home was worth,” he said. “It's just a time where people didn't have as much access to information, so they didn't really fully understand what the intentions of the Highway Department were, or what the city was going to do.”
Frazier moved to her current home, on Chestnut Avenue near East Meyer Boulevard, when she was 24. It, too, ended up being right in front of the future Highway 71.
Living just a hair away from the proposed route, Frazier saw homes and properties get demolished for the project: an apartment building, housing for college students and ranch-style homes like hers.
“They said, ‘The freeway probably will come and take your house,’” she remembered.
‘A state of prolonged uncertainty’
Angered by the destruction, residents organized in neighborhood groups, churches and schools.
Freedom Inc. was one of the most influential resistance groups. It was founded in 1961 by Bruce R. Watkins, Kansas City’s first Black council member and one of the foremost opponents of the South Midtown Freeway.
Watkins led several protests against the highway and, by the 1960s, he wondered if the South Midtown Freeway was going to become “Kansas City's Berlin Wall” — a new dividing line in the metro.
“For years no one has given a damn about what happens to poor people,” Watkins told the Kansas City Times in 1976. “They just go in and take property and say to hell with it."
“In many instances the Highway Department has resegregated these people in relocating them. They have been placed in inferior properties and I think it is unfair. We have had for years total neglect of our community. We have been abused, misused, and mistreated,” he argued at a public meeting the same year.
Kevin Fox Gotham, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who studied Highway 71 and its effects on Black residents, said the local grassroots groups connected with national organizations like the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress for Racial Equity.
Fox Gotham said residents at the time saw their struggle reflected in the national fight against racism and discrimination.
Then, President Richard Nixon’s Legal Services Corporation Act provided another opening. It helped secure funding for attorneys to represent low-income people in the court system, and allowed Black residents in Kansas City to bring their opposition to the South Midtown Freeway into the courtroom.
“Civil rights organizations and legal aid can then network down to these local organizations and neighborhoods to then fight the freeway — not just in the churches, in the schools, and in meeting places at neighborhoods — but through the legal system,” Fox Gotham said. “The Legal Aid of Western Missouri was a major catalyst for the development lawsuit against the South Midtown Freeway, which was initiated on June 21, 1973.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court by the NAACP’S Legal Defense Fund and the Citizens Environmental Council, argued the project would harm predominantly Black neighborhoods, and violate residents’ civil rights. It called for better compliance with environmental laws and better compensation and assistance for residents who were forced to move.
As the lawsuit dragged on, though, work on the highway paused. Blocks that had already been cleared of homes years before sat empty and left many residents uneasy.
“Rodents and vermin are now a most difficult problem because of the removal of other buildings and I am finding this a health hazard,” read a letter to the Missouri Highway Commission from a resident whose home was one of the few left on their block.
“It has become quite dangerous in this area and my family and I are scared to death,” wrote another, who reported living in the only remaining house on the 5700 block of Montgall.
Barbara Johnson immediately noticed changes to her neighborhood, too, when she moved back to Oak Park in 1978.
“No more walking to schools, no more kids in the community knowing each other,” she said. “The community completely decimated.”
Thousands of residents and properties were left in a state of prolonged uncertainty, according to Wells.
“It's just so strange to think about a swath of Kansas City that was just basically left in a fairly devastated state for decades,” he said.
When the legal battle finally concluded in 1985, the court issued a consent decree requiring major changes to the South Midtown Freeway project. Designers were to reduce the number of lanes, add crossings for pedestrians, and include greenery and landscaping.
The decision effectively turned the freeway project into a parkway, an exceedingly rare outcome, according to Fox Gotham.
“There's only, at most, a few of those,” Fox Gotham said, “where you have a major highway that was then redesigned through a whole bunch of different kinds of conflict, struggles and antagonisms, legal infighting and so on.”
‘It’s gonna look like Ward Parkway’
Dorothy Frazier watched from her front door as construction picked up in the late 1980s — right across the street.
“And they said, ‘Oh, we're gonna get some trees. It's gonna look like Ward Parkway,’” Frazier said. “Bruce Watkins Drive was gonna look like Ward Parkway.”
The southernmost section of Highway 71, from Bannister Road to 75th Street, was completed in 1990. The next phase, from 75th Street to 63rd Street, would become the start of the parkway, with stoplights, bridges, landscaping and a lower speed limit.
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, a Kansas City Council member at the time, advocated for the stoplights, in the hope that the South Midtown Freeway wouldn’t become another highway that tore through Black communities.
“Congressman Cleaver saw the impact that I-70 had on those east side communities,” Drouin said. “There's no development there, it just cuts right through them. They did not want that for Bruce R. Watkins Drive.”
In 1986, at Cleaver’s suggestion, the Kansas City Council renamed the highway to Bruce R. Watkins Drive.
The last section of Highway 71, from 31st Street to the downtown loop, was completed in October 2001, 50 years after the City Plan Commission released its initial report.
Building the entire 10-mile stretch, including land acquisition, cost about $300 million.
These days, Frazier’s view from her front porch is a chain-link fence covered in overgrown bush honeysuckle. Right behind it, more than 85,000 cars, trucks and semis zip past every day.
Plastic bottles, broken glass, and bags of trash often litter the highway side of Chestnut Avenue, which Frazier says goes unmaintained for months at a time.
“Who wants to sit on their deck, like I sit on my front deck, and look at that trash?” Frazier said. “People come down the street, throw their bags out, throw the trash out. They stop over, use the bathroom.”
“It’s not a parkway,” she said.
Can the city reconnect east side neighborhoods?
Darlene Peterson Guest built her home in Town Fork Creek in 1995, and has some ideas for how the city can fulfill its goal of reconnecting neighborhoods broken apart by Highway 71.
“Pedestrian bridges are a great idea, I think, for people to get over the highway safely, if they're walking,” she said. “Having buses that can get you across the highway.”
Guest, who lives near Bruce R. Watkins Drive, is paying close attention to the city’s latest efforts.
“I'm hoping that they keep us in the loop, and that they actually listen to us,” Guest said.
“It's one thing to have a town hall meeting and let people vent and tell you everything, but then you go do what you want to do,” she said. “So I'm hoping when the end result happens, we can feel like we have been heard.”
Guest grew up near 49th Street and Bellefontaine Avenue, on the north end of the neighborhood and a few blocks from the highway. She remembers when she was young walking to a nearby library that was demolished for the highway.
In her memory, the construction of Bruce R. Watkins Drive was a drawn-out process that seemed like it would never come to fruition.
“I can remember friends of mine having to move,” she said. “Being young, (I) didn't really understand why. But people were moving and then homes were being torn down, kind of left blighted, and nothing was built there.”
Years later, Guest said, “I can see the impact of how it disconnects Town Fork Creek from what we call the rest of the world. Because the highway strips right down.”
Guest, a member of the Town Fork Creek Neighborhood Association, also hopes the city considers how to revitalize the Prospect Avenue corridor on the west side of the highway.
Fifth District at-large council member Darrell Curls, who represents portions of the area, has called it “the economic backbone of the African American community.”
“And it has been decimated since this project has been in place,” Curls said last year. “I'm hoping that you'll start seeing more businesses come back, you'll start seeing more homes being revitalized … you'll start seeing the safety aspect of this highway change.”
Sitting by the windows, coffee in hand, at a cafe along Troost Avenue, a mile and a half west of Highway 71, Guest said she wants something similar for Prospect: local spots for people in the neighborhood to eat, shop and socialize.
“Things get started or ideas get planted, and nothing ever happens,” she said. “I'm hoping and praying that the Prospect corridor idea can develop.”
The city is soliciting more suggestions at community meetings this year, and has neighborhood listening sessions scheduled throughout April and May.
Mayor Quinton Lucas told KCUR the city will conduct public engagement in the project’s first phase, going on now, and then use the feedback to build a proposal on how to make Highway 71 safer.
“We’ve got to do better,” Lucas said.
“There's a way that you can make it efficient ... and safe for people getting through, but also make it so we're truly investing — particularly on Prospect as our frontage road, making sure there's that business connection,” he said. “Something that's failed since this highway opened when I was, I think, a 17-year-old boy.”
The first community meeting took place on a sunny Saturday morning in March at Southeast High School.
Barbara Johnson was among the dozens of people in the school’s main hallway to learn more about plans for a highway that fundamentally transformed her life.
Like the framed mementos covering the walls of her home that trace the trajectory of her life — a president’s award recognizing contributions to the Ivanhoe neighborhood, images of Black activists and politicians, dozens of family photos — Johnson keeps strong her memories of the community that existed before the highway tore through.
When driving through the neighborhood, vacant lots remind her of homes that once stood, and the families that lived in them. Decrepit buildings were once vibrant schools, and liquor stores remind Johnson of the grocery stores she could walk to as a child.
She’ll never forget what the South Midtown Freeway did to her community, she said.
“Human beings absorb things in strange ways,” she said. “Because we felt like we were being devastated.”
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported by Celisa Calacal, and produced by Suzanne Hogan and Olivia Hewitt, with editing by Luke X. Martin.
