Robert and Gladys Sanders wrote a full-price offer to buy their first house, but they were refused by the house builder because they are black.

But the Sanders’ were determined. They knew a lawsuit would take too long and they could lose the house, so they went about it in a different way. That’s when they had a white neighbor at Sunflower Apartments at the University of Kansas call to make an appointment with another realtor. Gladys said people could tell a black voice on the phone, so neighbor Gwen Greenberg helped out.

“It was illegal for realtors to deny them,” Greenberg said. “I just forced the law. Nothing spectacular.”

Greenberg made an appointment to see the same house the following evening. The house on 809 W. 29th St. was brand new and in Lawrence’s newest neighborhood: Indian Hills. It would be a great place to raise a family because Broken Arrow Elementary was scheduled to be built soon.

The next night Robert and Gladys Sanders arrived, looked at the property carefully and handed the realtor a down payment to purchase the home they had been hoping for. They quietly signed the contract that night.

“We looked at the house as if we’d never seen it before,” Gladys said.

That’s essentially how the Sanders family became the first to desegregate a whites-only neighborhood in Lawrence in 1968.

It wasn’t quite that simple, however. The first time the Sanders’ saw the house was just days earlier with their realtor, Glen Kappelman. After they made an offer, the builder, Russ Jones, refused. The Sanders' think the seemingly friendly white neighbor they’d spoken to while looking at the house the first time had been spying for the builder.

Kappelman called the Sanders’ in the morning and said the builder refused their offer.

On the Sanders’ second try, after the contract was presented to Jones, he tried to refuse it again, but it was already too far along. He said the deal was fraudulent because Greenberg had called instead to make the appointment.

That’s when the Sanders’ called a lawyer. Covenants for Indian Hills purchasers said that no black family could move in. But in 1968, Lawrence passed a fair housing ordinance to desegregate the city; it just wasn’t being enforced.

“Most people were not comfortable with anyone that was different from them,” Greenberg said. “What Bob and Gladys did, it was hard. It was a really, really rough time in Lawrence. There were still a lot of problems between the two communities.”

Petey Cerf, another Lawrence resident, donated the money to pay for the Sanders’ lawyer, James W. Paddock, now a retired District Court Judge for Douglas County.

“My mother was vigorously opposed to segregation, but I guess that’s news to no one,” said William Dann, Cerf’s son.

Paddock said the restrictive covenant for Indian Hills conflicted with the new fair housing ordinance for the city.

“This is why the builder was reluctant,” Paddock said. He said the builder was afraid of offending the other residents of the neighborhood.

The builder, Russ Jones, said he didn’t remember racial restrictions in the covenants of Indian Hills.

“I didn’t want to sell them the house,” he said.

He said he had built a lot of homes in the neighborhood, and felt like he “owed it to his previous customers” to refuse the sale.

“It was a period of racial tension,” Jones said.

Because it was sold through the realtor, Jones said, any legal problems came from the realtor, but he didn’t remember any.

The case never went to trial.

Paddock said he called the realtor and told him he couldn’t keep the Sanders’ from buying the house, and that it was against the law in Lawrence to discriminate based on race, even if a white woman had called for their appointment and misled the realtor. He then wrote a letter to the builder, and eventually the case was dropped.

The Sanders’ moved into the home in June of 1968. Gladys said the next door neighbor, who she suspected of informing the builder that the Sanders were black, never spoke to them the ten years they lived there.

“He was retired military, so I was surprised he was so racist,” she said.

The military had been integrated since the Korean War.

She said he pretended they didn’t exist, even when her children would say “hi.” The neighbor’s wife and son would speak to them, but only if he weren’t around.

Gladys said when her daughter, Sylvia, and son, William, would ask why the neighbor wouldn’t talk to them, she would have to say he just wasn’t nice and that they weren’t bad children.

They’ve moved three times since then. Now they live in a bigger, newer home in west Lawrence, a significant improvement from the Sunflower Apartments and their first home in Indian Hills. This time, thanks to their previous efforts, they had no trouble purchasing the home they wanted.