For 199 years, the radical Black press has been the infrastructure beneath every major turning point in Black American life. In an era of AI and social technologies, what is the role of the revolutionary Black Press today?
The department has received $1.2 billion since 2022. Now it claims it can't afford basic services while an officer who has killed three people remains on patrol. A Kansas City Defender investigation.
The newly appointed president of the National Organization of Minority Architects, Bryan C. Lee Jr., sits down with The KC Defender's Executive Editor Ryan Sorrell to discuss why, in an age of fascism, building a blueprint for liberation means reclaiming the spaces where Black life can flourish
The evening the food boxes arrived, a Black neighbor wept.
Charles L. Adair, a 50-year-old Black man, was arrested on traffic warrants and brutally killed less than 24 hours later inside the Wyandotte County jail. An autopsy shows jail cops violently knelt on his back, breaking bones and suffocating him. Officials lied to the public, covering up his brutal killing with a fraudulent press release that blames Adair's death on him being an alcoholic.
Excavating Kansas City’s layered history of racial violence—and the insurgent tactics our ancestors deployed—reminds us we’ve survived this storm before and we’ll outlast it again. Professor DJ shows how Black Study itself is a frontline of struggle, and a live, breathing tradition in the City of Fountains.
This essay from The Defender’s Executive Editor mourns the passage of the human caging facility tax while offering a radical, abolitionist vision of what comes next. Drawing from the Black prophetic tradition, it exposes the jail as a parasite — and imagines a future we are already building.
The Kansas City Star endorsed an $800 million jail project with no guaranteed mental health services, no data, and no plan—just more cages. We respond with facts, history, and the clear alternative
The Defender's inaugural Freedom School cohort brings together multiple generations of Black radicals, equipping them with organizing skills, Black radical history, and the tools to resist oppression.
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