The People’s Ballot: Kansas City’s Voter Guide for November Elections
The Kansas City Defender's voter guide breaks down every measure and race on your November 3 ballot in plain language, from Prop A to Amendment 3 to COMBAT.
Ryan's Latest Articles
Keyon Monté’s Second Born Brings Marvel’s Dominique Thorne and Broadway’s Mister Fitzgerald to Kansas City
Keyon Monté brings his New York-premiered play Second Born, starring Dominique Thorne and Mister Fitzgerald, to Kansas City. Twenty seats a night, Oct. 22 to 29.
Black Feast Week 2026 Kicks Off Wednesday With The People’s Buyout, Feeding 100 Black Single Mothers for Free
The Kansas City Defender is fully funding 100 meals at Daiquiri District on Wednesday, October 7 at 6pm, opening a week-long celebration of the World's Greatest Food Culture. We need your help to cover the cost.
“Whiteness Is a Religion”: Dr. J. Kameron Carter on White Christianity, Empire, and the Anarchy of Black Religion
Is white Christianity the Antichrist? Dr. J. Kameron Carter traces how the church helped invent race and why Black religion is anarchic, on Liberation Now.
Exclusive Video: Horrifying Bodycam Footage Reveals Missouri Cop Firing 9 Shots at Unarmed Black Teen, Continues Shooting As Lifeless Body Lays on Ground
"Trying to find a Black kid at night, that's always fun," one of the two officers on the recording can be heard saying on body camera in the minutes before Lafayette County Deputy Kenneth Lewie shot nineteen-year-old Saveion McConnell to death on the shoulder of U.S. 50. The Kansas City Defender has obtained the footage, and the prosecutor's memo that cleared Lewie. Neither says what the state has been telling the public.
No Charges. Black Missouri Teen Saveion McConnell Was Unarmed, Charged With Nothing, and Gunned Down by a Cop Who Shot at Him 9 Times. The State Just Ruled His Slaughter Legal.
Four and a half months after a Lafayette County deputy rammed nineteen-year-old Saveion McConnell with a patrol car and then fired nine rounds at him on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 50, Johnson County Prosecutor Robert Russell announced Tuesday that no crime was committed. Saveion had no weapon. Witnesses say his hands were in the air.
NUCLEAR GUINEA PIGS: How a Small Kansas Town Became the Site of a Nuclear Experiment to Power AI
Artificial intelligence needs more power than America will give it, so the industry went looking for ground where nobody gets a vote. In Parsons, Kansas, where one in five residents lives in poverty, that means the first nuclear reactor in history designed to operate underground, drilled through the aquifer, on land where the Army still detonates waste explosives under federal permit.
While Cutting Buses for the Poor, KCATA Signed a Secret Deal to Harvest Their Faces for a Private Company’s AI
A secret contract. No policy protecting riders' data. The Defender obtained the deal KCATA signed to harvest bus riders' faces for AI.
“I Can’t Breathe!” Black Community Leader Violently Attacked & Arrested For Resisting KC Billioniare Stadium
A Royals stadium worker was violently attacked and pinned to the ground at City Hall as Kansas City advanced the billionaire ballpark with no public vote.
Missouri Begins the Medical Torture of Trans People in Its Prisons. The People It Caged Are Fighting Back
Da'Shae Breeze learned to write at Maya Angelou's desk. Now she writes to The Defender from a solitary confinement cell as Missouri strips away her medical care. She spoke to us from inside state prison, alongside Jessica Hicklin, who spent 26 years in maximum security and won the federal ruling the state just defied.
