Penn Valley Common Read: Some of My Best Friends Are Black

The official website for the 49/63 Neighborhood Coalition, the Kansas City neighborhood organization that is profiled in Some of My Best Friends are Black.

"Black Lives Matter is a chapter-based national organization working for the validity of Black life. We are working to (re)build the Black liberation movement."

The leading source of quality data about America's people and economy.

This site features many articles and facts about school integration.

The goal of Stanford University's Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project is to use the best available data to clarify patterns and trends in the equality of educational opportunities and outcomes in the United States.

"The Mission of the Housing Authority of Kansas City, Missouri is to develop, rehabilitate and manage decent, safe and sanitary quality affordable housing in a manner that promotes equal opportunity, fair housing and the deconcentration of race and poverty. In accomplishing this goal, HAKC is committed to maintaining its developments as affordable housing assets that can meet the needs of low-income households in the long term and serve as viable community resources promoting economic independence and self-sufficiency for its residents."

Part of the KC Race Project. Focusing on landmarks pertinent to the story of segregation, integration, and the failures of integration in Kansas City - the bus tour's goal is to expose participants to a new perspective on the racial landscape of the city. They provide historical and factual information about each landmark along the way.

In partnership with local educators, Johnson County Library helps facilitate intentional dialogue about the structural forms of racism in America and Kansas City. They focus on the American education system in particular, attempting to conduct a sincere investigation into the history, causes, and potential solutions to systemic, structural racism. At the same time, they provide students a chance to share their own unique stories, break down barriers between diverse groups of students, and use their diversity to understand collective strengths.

The history of greater St. Louis is bound up in a tangle of local, state, and federal policies that explicitly and decisively sorted the City’s growing population by race. These policies yielded both an intense concentration of African Americans in certain wards or neighborhoods of St. Louis itself and a virtually unbreachable wall between the City and its suburbs. This web project presents four interactive series of maps which illustrate this history of racial segregation. Includes primary documents.

Mapping Inequality offers access to the national collection of "security maps" and area descriptions produced between 1935 and 1940 by one of the New Deal's most important agencies, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. HOLC recruited mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers in nearly 250 cities to create maps that color-coded credit worthiness and risk on neighborhood and metropolitan levels. These maps and their accompanying documentation helped set the rules for nearly a century of real estate practice. Through offering a digital library of the state's role in housing development, this illustrates vividly the interplay between racism, administrative culture, economics, and the built environment.

The primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education. Search for education statistics and view many published reports on education.

Which neighborhoods in America offer children the best chance to rise out of poverty? The Opportunity Atlas answers this question using anonymous data following 20 million Americans from childhood to their mid-30s. Using this interactive map, you can trace the roots of today's affluence and poverty back to the neighborhoods where people grew up. See where and for whom opportunity has been missing, and develop local solutions to help more children rise out of poverty.

Racial Equity Tools is designed to support individuals and groups working to achieve racial equity. This site offers tools, research, tips, curricula and ideas for people who want to increase their own understanding and to help those working toward justice at every level – in systems, organizations, communities and the culture at large.

The Souls of Poor Folk is an assessment of the conditions and trends of poverty today and of the past fifty years in the United States. In 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., alongside a multiracial coalition of grassroots leaders, religious leaders, and other public figures, began organizing with poor and marginalized communities across racial and geographic divides. Together, The Poor People’s Campaign aimed to confront the underlying structures that perpetuated misery in their midst. Fifty years later, The Souls of Poor Folk challenges us to take a look at how these conditions have changed since 1968. The stark findings draw from a wide variety of sources, including primary and secondary data as well as interviews with and testimonies by people who have been living through and responding to these changes on the ground.

"HUD’s mission is to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. HUD is working to strengthen the housing market to bolster the economy and protect consumers; meet the need for quality affordable rental homes; utilize housing as a platform for improving quality of life; build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination, and transform the way HUD does business."

The Urban League of Kansas City's mission is to enable African Americans and other disadvantaged persons to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights. The website contains information about this group, their many projects and publications, and statistical info on Kansas City.

Over three years of intensive study, the authors of this website uncovered massive opportunities in creating/sustaining health equity among a large section of their community. Historical property value discrimination (through redlining in the 1930’s) has snowballed over time into their neighborhoods suffering from inadequate housing, lack of access to adequate health care, and environmental health injustices.