Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.
For 140 years, it has been one of the most influential forces in shaping Kansas City and the region. And yet for much of its early history — through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians. It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining. Decade after early decade it robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.
That business is The Kansas City Star.
Before I say more, I feel it to be my moral obligation to express what is in the hearts and minds of the leadership and staff of an organization that is nearly as old as the city it loves and covers:
We are sorry.
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The Kansas City Star prides itself on holding power to account. Today we hold up the mirror to ourselves to see the historic role we have played, through both action and inaction, in shaping and misshaping Kansas City’s landscape.
It is time that we own our history.
It is well past time for an apology, acknowledging, as we do so, that the sins of our past still reverberate today.Play VideoDuration 3:11Six unique Black Lives Matter street murals painted across Kansas CityHundreds of volunteers gathered to create six unique Black Lives Matter street murals throughout Kansas City. BY SHELLY YANG | JILL TOYOSHIBA | CHRIS OCHSNER
This spring, the Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minneapolis beneath the knee of a white police officer ignited protests worldwide over racial injustice. In doing so, it has forced institutions to look inward.
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Inside The Star, reporters and editors discussed how an honest examination of our own past might help us move forward. What started as a suggestion from reporter Mará Rose Williams quickly turned into a full-blown examination of The Star’s coverage of race and the Black community dating to our founding in 1880.
Today The Star presents a six-part package. It is the result of a team of reporters who dug deeply into the archives of The Star and what was once its sister paper, The Kansas City Times. They pored over thousands of pages of digitized and microfilmed stories, comparing the coverage to how those same events were covered in the Black press — most notably by The Kansas City Call and The Kansas City Sun, each of which chronicled critical stories the white dailies ignored or gave short shrift.
Our reporters searched court documents, archival collections, congressional testimony, minutes of meetings and digital databases. Periodically, as they researched, editors and reporters convened panels of scholars and community leaders to discuss the significant milestones of Black life in Kansas City that were overlooked or underplayed by The Star and The Times.
Critically, we sought some of those who lived through the events the project explored. They include victims of the 1977 flood, and students (now long into adulthood) of the illegally segregated Kansas City Public Schools. We talked to retired Star and Times reporters and editors, many of whom, along with other colleagues in their time, recognized institutional inertia, and fought for greater racial inclusion.
Reporters were frequently sickened by what they found — decades of coverage that depicted Black Kansas Citians as criminals living in a crime-laden world. They felt shame at what was missing: the achievements, aspirations and milestones of an entire population routinely overlooked, as if Black people were invisible.
Reporters felt regret that the papers’ historic coverage not only did a disservice to Black Kansas Citians, but also to white readers deprived of the opportunity to understand the true richness Black citizens brought to Kansas City.
Like most metro newspapers of the early to mid-20th century, The Star was a white newspaper produced by white reporters and editors for white readers and advertisers. Having The Star or Times thrown in your driveway was a family tradition, passed down to sons and daughters.
But not in Black families. Their children grew up with little hope of ever being mentioned in the city’s largest and most influential newspapers, unless they got in trouble. Negative portrayals of Black Kansas Citians buttressed stereotypes and played a role in keeping the city divided.
In the pages of The Star, when Black people were written about, they were cast primarily as the perpetrators or victims of crime, advancing a toxic narrative. Other violence, meantime, was tuned out. The Star and The Times wrote about military action in Europe but not about Black families whose homes were being bombed just down the street.
Even the Black cultural icons that Kansas City would one day claim with pride were largely overlooked. Native son Charlie “Bird” Parker didn’t get a significant headline in The Star until he died, and even then, his name was misspelled and his age was wrong.
But white businessman J.C. Nichols got plenty of ink. His advertisements promoting segregated communities ran prominently in The Star and Times. Nichols, who developed the Country Club Plaza, was a protege of The Star’s founder, William Rockhill Nelson, who enthusiastically supported his effort.
Mid-century, as civil rights and skirmishes against desegregation dawned, The Star and Times remained largely on the sidelines. “We don’t need stories about these people,” the editor at the time, Roy Roberts, reportedly said. This was the same editor, featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1948, who used to have his driver take him and a coterie of other white editors down to the Kansas City Club for highballs, cards, a sauna and roast beef sandwiches between deadlines.
As much as The Star and Times shaped attitudes in the city, it was also shaped by them.
“Appalling and biased,” is how community members we met with described the newspapers’ desegregation coverage, in particular.
It was only a change in leadership in the 1960s that would alter the newspapers’ course and launch the modern era at The Star. It effectively started in the Deep South, where a young reporter named Charles W. Gusewelle would send regular dispatches from the front lines of the civil rights struggle. The staff diversified. Black reporters, men and women, were hired on.
Still, missteps followed.
In 1968, five Black men and one Black teenager were killed over three days of rioting in Kansas City at the time the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was to be buried, having been assassinated by a white man’s bullet only days prior. At least four and perhaps all were shot by police. A mayor’s commission determined that most were “innocent victims,” and yet there was no follow-up newspaper probe as there would be today, no independent investigation, no calls for the officers to be charged, or for the police chief to resign.
Nearly a decade later, raging waters surged in the deadly flood of 1977. The Star and Times quickly dubbed it “The Plaza Flood.” That set the stage for the papers, both lacking the staff diversity to challenge assumptions, to focus mainly on property damage at the Country Club Plaza, not so much the 25 people who died, including eight Black residents.
That same year, a reader named Thomas A. Webster would hit a hopeful note in a Letter to the Editor, saying, “No longer are blacks and news about them deliberately ignored or purposely slanted. No more is the reading public as abysmally unaware or as uninformed about black citizens as in the past.”
It was a low bar, but The Star had finally crossed it.
That was 43 years ago. Progress is still being made — and still necessary. For some Black leaders, there is still an inherent fear in dealing with the mainstream (white) media.
The good news is, solutions are not impossible. Our gradual improvements need to accelerate. We need a more diverse staff. We need deeper community conversations to better focus our coverage. We need a spectrum of voices to represent our entire community. And we occasionally just need good advice.
I would say that that work begins now, but it already has.
This fall, we hired an editor to focus on race and equity issues, and we’ll continue to make diverse hires a priority. We know the quantifiable value that diversity brings to our journalism, recent stories such as these:
The Star investigated racist language that persists in housing covenants. A story about Westport nightlife asked, “Is the KC social scene for whites only? Young blacks say they’re ‘tolerated,’ not welcomed.” The Star wrote a number of stories on the Lee’s Summit school board’s resistance to racial equity training for teachers. This year alone, The Star relentlessly covered the city’s Black Lives Matter protests and the reckoning that followed: An examination of streets named after slaveholders and monuments to the Confederacy, and a renewed look at J.C. Nichols, a Kansas City icon who “stood for hatred” in promoting his racist housing policies.
To grapple with the fact that Missouri ranks No. 1 in the country for the rate at which Black residents are killed by gun violence, The Star launched a two-year solutions journalism project and started with an investigation of how a lack of trust in police in communities of color drives gun violence in Kansas City. Earlier this month, The Star published a three-part investigation of systemic racism in the Kansas City Fire Department, prompting the city manager to direct the KCFD chief to initiate a six-point plan to address racial discrimination.
We also know this coverage matters most when it’s accessible to everyone. To that end, we’re making all of today’s project stories free to all readers on our digital platforms. In the weeks ahead, we will be testing ways to make content that’s focused on stories, issues and people in our diverse communities free to readers in specific Kansas City ZIP codes we have too often failed to serve.
We are partnering with the Kansas City Public Library on upcoming public events to introduce our team, discuss points of the stories and hammer out additional next steps.
For months, our Opinion section has featured a wonderful series, Lifting Black KC Voices, and there’s a new installment this morning, along with a related editorial.
Finally, we are announcing the formation of The Kansas City Star Advisory Board, a group that will meet monthly with our top newsroom leaders to advise on key issues of the day.
And we encourage other Kansas City businesses to come forward and own their history as well, tell their stories, get the poison out — for the sake of the community and their employees. Please email me or one of the reporters on our team.
It’s been an education for us, and yet it’s impossible to acknowledge every failure or bad decision or mangled assignment. We think these stories are representative.
It still pains me personally to know that in The Star’s monopolistic heyday — when it had the biggest media platform in the region — the paper did little to unify the city or recognize the inherent rights of all Kansas Citians.
But our history doesn’t have to own us.
We are grateful for how far we’ve come. We are humbled by how far we still have to go.
