Kansas City wants to be the first city in the country to scan the face of every person who boards a public bus. The riders it would test the technology on are its poorest and its Blackest, and the company behind the cameras is a penny stock fronted by a man whose last company collapsed in fraud.
A Black child ran ahead of his mother into Harris Park and called it the best day of his life. He did not yet know whose names would be spoken there, or what his people had survived to give him a day like this one. He will understand it someday. We spent the whole afternoon teaching him without saying a word.
Three years of organizing brought a Chicago landlord to a table in the Historic Northeast. Two hours and three languages later, the tenants of North Lawn walked out with frozen rents, erased debt, repairs on deadline, and a signed path to owning their homes.
As a generation walks away from a Black church it found too silent, Alfred Street Baptist Church answered Mizzou's attack on the Legion of Black Collegians, and lit the path forward for every congregation watching.
The law firm that won lawsuits for the family of George Floyd and the family of Sonya Massey has come to Missouri to fight for Saveion McConnell. Witnesses say the nineteen-year-old’s hands were up when the deputy shot him. More than a month later, the deputy faces no charges. This Friday, Saveion’s mother is calling on Kansas City to rally beside her in Lexington, the seat of the county that killed her son.
At the Urban Summit's youth vote panel, six candidates for one of Kansas City's most powerful political offices came to be heard, in a heated session that more than once turned to open insult. The Black youth on the panel came to be reckoned with, and answered with the clearest vision of the county's future anyone on stage had to offer.
On June 19, the Defender and Decarcerate KC fill the field with Black vendors, good music, and family reunion energy, free and open to the whole city.
Organizers from nine host cities previewed an independent readiness scorecard this morning, one scored not by officials but by the people who have to live with the result.
Three years ago, North Lawn tenants forced Wiser KC LLC into the most protective housing agreement in Missouri history. Then, the landlord broke it.
On the same day the Missouri Supreme Court hacked Black political representation into three pieces along the line of Kansas City's racial apartheid, the Star aimed its opinion page bludgeon at the only Black candidate running against the man the map was drawn to protect.
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