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Land of Opportunity: The Road of Resistance
Premieres Feb. 13, 2025, at 7 p.m.
This installment of Land of Opportunity explores the impact of real estate and federal policies on urban communities. Inspired by Richard Rothstein’s ‘The Color of Law,’ this film focuses on Kansas City’s Highway 71 project and reveals how the city’s urban renewal efforts displaced 10,000 families.
Land of Opportunity: The Road of Resistance Preview
A revealing look at Kansas City’s Highway 71 project and the cost of urban renewal.
Land of Opportunity
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law a series of programs called the New Deal intended to rebuild the nation. Some of those programs encouraged discriminatory housing policies such as redlining, resulting in dilapidation of 85% of Kansas City’s black neighborhoods.
Well-to-do black families set their sights on the prestigious Santa Fe Place neighborhood, located just south of the black East Side. Established by rich white elites, the neighborhood association filed a racially restrictive covenant, intended to bar black families from moving into the area for 30 years.
A black physician named Dr. Dennis Madison Miller, among others, took the neighborhood association to the Missouri Supreme Court four times in their attempt to move into the neighborhood. After the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Shelley vs. Kraemer, ruling racially restrictive covenants to be unconstitutional, black families moved into Santa Fe Place four times faster than any other neighborhood where they could purchase property.
Land of Opportunity is the story of integration in the Santa Fe Place neighborhood as one example in the fight for housing rights across America following the Great Depression.
Land of Opportunity
The story of a neighborhood in fight against racially restrictive housing policies.
About the Filmmaker
Nico Giles Wiggins is a writer, director and executive producer of Nico Giles Media, a mission-driven production company focused on developing documentaries and films featured on Netflix, PBS, ABC, CNN, Hulu, and other platforms. Wiggins received a regional Emmy Award for The Land of Opportunity, which aired on Kansas City PBS in 2020. Learn more at nicogiles.com.
