You can see it on a map, but if you’re driving, you might not know it’s the border between Missouri and Kansas.
State Line Road, a major thoroughfare, runs north-south through Greater Kansas City. Drive northbound, and you’re in Missouri. Drive southbound, and you’re in Kansas.
On both sides, affluence abounds. Sharp-edged hedges dot lawns and fountains cascade in the roads’ roundabouts. The Missouri side has two of the area’s top private schools. The Kansas side has several country clubs with five-figure initiation fees.
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George Floyd’s murder prompted Americans to reexamine their communities – and themselves. In Kansas City, Missouri, residents still confront a wall of racial separation. Despite drawbacks, they haven’t given up on progress.
Now drive 2 miles east from State Line Road to Troost Avenue. Here you will find greater Kansas City’s real dividing line.
Known locally as the “Troost Wall,” the differences on either side are impossible to miss. Color-
coded Census maps of the neighborhood look like someone took a marker and drew a strict social border – a border that separates two different realities.
East of Troost, neighborhoods are almost 90% Black, with average incomes between $30,000 and $50,000.
West of Troost, on the way to State Line Road, neighborhoods are more than 80% white, with incomes more than double those on the east side.
“There is this separation that started based on skin tone, and it all snowballs,” says Chris Goode, who grew up east of the divide and now owns Ruby Jean’s Juicery on Troost.
Five years ago, after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, there were hopes that new bridges were starting to be built along this long-standing racial divide.
That murder sparked waves of protests in Kansas City and surrounding areas, as it did in cities across the United States. It also prompted residents to reexamine their communities – and themselves.
In the weeks and months that followed, there were signs of progress, many on both sides of Troost believed. Amid a summer of peaceful protests, white patrons would stick their heads into Alan Kneeland’s restaurant, across the street from Mr. Goode’s juicery, just to confirm the restaurant had a Black owner before ordering. They were making an effort to show solidarity and wider community support.
Buzzy LeCluyse, pastor at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church in north Kansas City, remembers that summer vividly. “I just became committed to talking about, ‘How do we not have this happen again?’” she says.
Ms. LeCluyse and about two dozen other parishioners of Pine Ridge started reading books on racism and white privilege, and then met on Zoom to discuss them during the pandemic. They called themselves the Deep Listening Group.
“I grew up in Kansas City, and as a kid you always heard, ‘You don’t go east of Troost,’” says Ms. LeCluyse’s husband, Joe, a retired administrator of higher education. After the book club took a local library’s audio driving tour, which traced the history of Kansas City’s policies of systematic segregation, Mr. LeCluyse says he’s “tuned into seeing things I might have passed over before.”
Such local efforts to see the world differently were part of a larger moment of national reckoning.
Juneteenth became a federal holiday. The Mississippi state Legislature removed the Confederate battle flag’s stars and bars from its state flag, and NASCAR banned it from races. Richmond, Virginia, removed Confederate generals’ statues from Monument Avenue, and public schools across the country changed their names. Major production companies such as Paramount, Netflix, and Disney deleted episodes and films that included blackface. Fortune 500 companies launched diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) committees to reflect on organizational practices. And in the nation’s capital, a two-block area near the White House was designated Black Lives Matter Plaza, its name painted prominently on the street in giant yellow letters.
Five years after the murder of Mr. Floyd, however, many of those efforts toward recognition and solidarity have dissipated. With the pendulum of public opinion now swinging in the opposite direction, critics of the racial justice movement say it overreached and left the country more racially divided and in more turmoil than before. But the legacy of the past five years is complicated. Cities, towns, and streets across America have changed in ways both better and worse in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death.
Here in Kansas City, people are grappling with what it all meant. The words “Black Lives Matter” had been painted prominently on Troost, right in front of Mr. Goode’s juicery. Five years later, the outlines of these words are almost imperceptible.
“I had this bloody wind at my back when George Floyd was murdered, and it created momentum,” he says. “But the guilt has worn off; the momentum has gone away. Back to reality we go.”
Still, even if people have to squint now to make out the progress, that doesn’t mean it was all for naught. If “the weight of the last few years were honest,” says Mr. Goode, the only grocery store on Troost wouldn’t have empty shelves. “But if evil can perpetuate itself, so, too, can the fight against it.”
Kansas City’s history of built-in racial separation
The Troost Wall, of course, didn’t happen by accident.
Kansas City remains one of the most segregated cities in America because of land use policies implemented in the middle of the 20th century.
Racially restrictive neighborhood covenants prohibiting Black or Jewish American buyers, for example, were pioneered in the 1940s by the celebrated local real estate developer J.C. Nichols.
Nichols’ ideas about subdivisions, zoning, and neighborhood associations would for decades influence other areas of development across the U.S. – defining the American suburb. He worked alongside the practice of redlining, which zoned Black residential areas outside those that qualified for federally guaranteed housing loans.
Nichols’ zoning ideas shaped the emerging communities around Kansas City, and the housing divide today is in many ways coded in the region’s underpinnings. It remains a determining factor in many other aspects of Kansas Citians’ lives: what schools children attend, the accessibility of local transportation and healthy food, the amount of crime, and job opportunities.
Prairie Village, Kansas, a bucolic suburb west of State Line Road, was one of Nichols’ crowning achievements. Today, its lack of diversity has been “an unspoken issue in an otherwise world-class community,” says Mayor Eric Mikkelson, who is all too aware of the different reality on the other side of Troost, just a few miles east.
“And it wasn’t because we had racist policies. It was because of our past – but no one wanted to talk about that,” he says. “The George Floyd summer was the catalyst to talk about that and do things about it.”
Zoning and housing associations in the ’40s kept the streets pristine and the homeowners white. Families buying homes in Prairie Village would have to agree to deed restrictions that mandated hedge heights, set minimum home prices, and prohibited sales to Jewish or Black Americans. These restrictions were affirmed two decades prior by the Supreme Court.
Although the Supreme Court later ruled in 1948 that racially restrictive covenants couldn’t be enforced, that didn’t remedy the situation, says Richard Rothstein, author of the book “The Color of Law.”
“You can trace a lot of the inequality that we still have in this country today to the unconstitutional housing policies that the government created in the 20th century,” says Mr. Rothstein. The Kansas City area is an apt example, but these practices were “true in every metropolitan area.”
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Administration, for example, a government program to make homeownership more affordable, gave high ratings to mortgage applications for homes with restrictive deeds while refusing to insure redlined Black neighborhoods.
And as Prairie Village homes appreciated, these white homeowners built generational wealth. Today, the median price for a Prairie Village home is more than half a million dollars according to Realtor.com.
So when peaceful protesters weaved through these same neighborhood streets five years ago after Mr. Floyd’s murder, Mr. Mikkelson remembers thinking it was “a transformative moment” for Prairie Village. Older people watched the march from their front porch. Young children wrote messages of love with sidewalk chalk.
“It was healing to see so many people come out,” says George Williams, a mental health professional and former Prairie Village resident who helped organize the march with local churches. “Seeing the nation kind of change – it felt like there was this real openness.”
In Kansas City, Mr. Goode was able to successfully lead an effort to remove Nichols’ name from a prominent parkway and local park fountain. The change was part of a growing effort around the country to remove names of those who had contributed to the structural underpinnings of segregated communities from schools, streets, and monuments.
Mr. Goode also tried to rename Troost – which was named after one of Kansas City’s slaveholding founders – to Truth Avenue. That effort has stalled.
The backlash to George Floyd’s legacy
If the faded “Black Lives Matter” text on Troost is a quiet metaphor, the recently bulldozed Black Lives Matter Plaza in downtown Washington is a bullhorn.
The seeds of the backlash began germinating almost immediately following the protests over Mr. Floyd’s death because of the looting and arson that ensued in several cities, and the reluctance of many leaders, primarily Democrats, to criticize the rioting in places like Portland, Oregon.
That summer also brought calls to “defund the police” – an idea that was never popular among a majority of Americans. Even in July 2020, during the height of the George Floyd protests, almost three-fourths of Americans, including most Black Americans, didn’t think police should be defunded.
But a lot of the pushback emerged more gradually, from white Americans who came to question the wisdom of society doubling down on questions of racial identity – or who were upset by suggestions that they benefited from a racist system, even if they themselves were struggling to make ends meet.
Mr. Williams remembers some church members getting “really offended” when reading the book “White Fragility.” Maybe, he wonders, this is why the movement seems to have “swung back with a vengeance.” Maybe progressives “hit people over the head with it.” Maybe making others feel guilty did more harm than good.
“Whereas in the 1960s it was physical violence, in the 2020s it was emotional violence through shame and guilt. It made some really strong enemies,” says Mr. Williams. “People said, ‘I know how bad I feel, and I want to protect my kids from this.’”
Where those on the left saw inclusive language as a means of respect for marginalized communities, the right saw a fight about semantics with rigid policing of language that could get even unintentional violators “canceled.” In June 2020, some 67% of those surveyed told Pew Research Center that they supported the Black Lives Matter movement, but that number fell 16 points by April 2023. The backlash to George Floyd protests and their impact on many Americans arguably helped Donald Trump retake the presidency in 2024. He campaigned on rolling back DEI efforts in the government, and the day he was inaugurated in January he signed an executive order doing just that.
For many Americans who voted for Mr. Trump in November, progress had become about political correctness that suddenly made “everything about race,” as one Prairie Village conservative, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from her community, told the Monitor.
“We’re getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military, and it’s already out, and it’s out of our society,” said President Trump in his congressional address earlier this year to applause. “We don’t want it. Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad.”
Since 2023, some 134 bills have been introduced across the country targeting DEI efforts in education and the workforce according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, with at least 19 becoming law. Although Missouri has had more than a dozen bills introduced, none has passed, leading the governor to sign an executive order in February eliminating DEI programs in state agencies. Kansas’ Democratic governor allowed a 2024 bill to become law without her signature, prohibiting state colleges from requiring students or staff to make any kind of personal statement about DEI.
The U.S. Supreme Court has since ended affirmative action in college admissions, meaning that schools can no longer consider race in their acceptances, and a Virginia school board voted to revert back to Confederate general names for two of its schools.
Some conservatives on social media have advocated for the president to grant Derek Chauvin a pardon for his 21-year federal sentence for the murder of Mr. Floyd.
“What I found frustrating is that we’d done all this work, we’d done all this reading, but we still had only two Black families in our congregation,” says Warren Pierce, a member of the Deep Listening Group and a Ford Motor engineer. “When it came time to cross the road, well, what does that mean in action? That’s when we ran out of steam, and that’s where the real challenge lies.”
In March, jackhammers took to the streets in downtown Washington as demolition began on Black Lives Matter Plaza. Mayor Muriel Bowser attributes the removal to pressure from Republicans in Washington, who have threatened the mayor’s autonomy amid budget shortfalls and crime.
The demolition was supposed to take six weeks, but it finished ahead of schedule.
Five years later, momentum has stalled
The weekend after Mr. Floyd was killed, Todd Harris was walking home at night when a white Prairie Village police officer stopped him and asked him where he was going.
This random stop happened within earshot of his own bedroom window. A Black man from Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd was killed, Mr. Harris and his family are one of the few Black households who live in Prairie Village, which today is 1% Black. He often reminds his children that kids who live less than a mile away live “totally different lives.” So when Mayor Mikkelson asked him to be a part of the city’s new diversity committee, he said yes.
“Why people want to live here is obvious,” says Mr. Harris, a business owner. “But we have a problem: The city looks the same. And that’s not indicative of the world we live in.”
When Mr. Harris and the rest of the diversity committee later reported to the mayor, they had one recommendation at the top of their list: offer more affordable housing options. But the suggestion never got past a list of bullet points. “It started a political firestorm,” Mr. Mikkelson says.
Although Johnson County is largely Democratic – it was one of five Kansas counties to vote for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in November – a local conservative group began to protest at City Council meetings.
The group, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Monitor, passed out flyers. It helped organize 10 petitions to recall Mr. Mikkelson. The council did approve some minor changes to allow more residential development in commercial areas, but given how contentious the debate about housing had become, he says, there was “no appetite” to go further with the idea.
Mr. Harris resigned from the diversity committee. He was frustrated with the movement, too. He just kept thinking about all of the houses he would drive by with “Black Lives Matter” yard signs. Now it all just felt like virtue signaling, he says.
“Everyone is an advocate until it requires them to actually do something. Fast-forward to where we are now, nothing’s really changed,” says Mr. Harris. “Their intentions might have been good, but actions speak louder than words.”
“There are still people pushing forward.”
Toni and Chuck Wurth, a white couple, fly a Black Lives Matter flag in front of their thrift store, Troost39, along the Troost Wall.
They, too, saw George Floyd’s death as “a catalyst, a fuel, an opportunity,” Mr. Wurth says. As that progress stalled, however, he says the racial divides in his city – and his country – can just feel “so overwhelming.” They still have friends and family who won’t come visit their business.
Since taking over the store almost a decade ago, the Wurths have tried to keep the store a place where locals from either side of Troost can come for community, not just for shopping. And on one spring Tuesday afternoon, the Wurths’ mission seems to have been at least partially realized. Patrons of all different races and ages sifted through clothing racks and checked price tags at the bottom of used appliances. There’s free coffee. People linger. One woman shows Ms. Wurth her new puppy.
“I can’t change the police department. I can’t change City Hall. I can’t change the aftermath of redlining,” says Mr. Wurth. “Just do what’s in front of you, but don’t wait for the other systems. Let’s go develop relationships.” This sentiment was heard up and down Troost, in Prairie Village, and across Kansas City.
Mr. Kneeland, whose pizza restaurant is across the street from Mr. Goode’s juicery, still recalls how white patrons tried to support his business five years ago. Knowing the area’s history of redlining, he named his pizza place The Combine, which for him means to merge or unite. A sign above his bar says “Exist together.”
When a boycott of Target for disbanding its DEI initiatives took off on social media this past March, along with an encouragement to support Black-owned businesses, Mr. Kneeland’s tables were full.
Though it had disbanded, the Deep Listening Group still stays in touch through a network called Showing Up for Racial Justice. Wendy Barth, who helped organize the group, says each member has “made ripple effects in their own communities.”
These changes were likely small, she says, but that doesn’t mean they were worthless. Ms. Barth researches almost everything she buys, down to her shampoo, to prioritize Black- and Latino-owned businesses, even if that means she can’t order off Amazon and has to pay for shipping. “It may feel like a small way to move the needle, but it’s a small resistance,” she says.
Mr. Williams is again working with local churches to organize the fifth annual Juneteenth celebration in Prairie Village this summer. Even though he had to move out of Prairie Village recently because he couldn’t find affordable housing, he still remembers his first Juneteenth event in 2021. It was “the most welcome” he’d ever felt in his community.
“That was the good that I saw. There were people who wanted to learn more, do more,” Mr. Williams says. “And I think that spirit has continued in the surrounding community. And even though there has been a swing back, there are still people pushing forward.”
