The Neck was the heart of Independence’s Black community, until the city demolished it

A historic neighborhood neglected by the city
The Neck was settled in the early 1800s near the city’s square, and populated largely by formerly enslaved people. By the mid-1900s, it was integrated and filled with working-class white people and Black residents who made up the majority of the neighborhood.

A tightly-knit community, it was a place where kids played freely in the streets until dark and collected crawdads in the creek that ran through it.

Alongside all of that, though, was evidence of Independence’s decades of neglect.

In the late 1930s the neighborhood was redlined and deemed “hazardous.”

Property lines were drawn so that it was almost impossible to build large homes in the area. Multigenerational households were forced into small, cramped houses or scattered across several homes.