In numerology, five is the number of movement.
It represents change, adaptability, freedom and the refusal to remain confined. It is about learning how to move through limitations, transform under pressure and remain open to what the journey demands next.
That message could not feel more fitting as The Kansas City Defender marks five years of existence.
Five years ago, in July 2021, the Defender emerged from the ashes of the 2020 uprisings.
Young Black organizers had filled the streets of Kansas City and cities across the world, demanding an end to police brutality and the destruction of the systems that keep Black communities oppressed. At the same time, traditional media institutions continued to distort, dismiss and speak over the people leading those movements.
The conclusion was simple: We could not continue depending on institutions that had never been built to protect our stories or serve our interests. We needed to build something of our own, for our own.
Born in early July, the Defender also falls under the umbrella of Cancer — a cardinal water sign associated with care, protection, intuition and emotional and interpersonal connection.
Cardinal signs initiate. They do not wait for permission to create new possibilities.
Water adapts without losing its substance. It takes the shape of what holds it, but it can also overflow its boundaries. It nourishes. It connects. Given enough time and pressure, it can reshape what once appeared immovable.
So has the Defender.
A look back
What began as then 24-year-old founder Ryan Sorrell’s response to white media’s distortion of Black movements has grown into a community organization with a staff of 14 people.
We have published investigations and breaking news ignored by larger outlets, including our groundbreaking reporting on a suspected serial killer targeting poor Black women along the Prospect Corridor—claims that KCPD and much of the local media initially dismissed. We have created Black voter guides, reported on police violence and our growing carceral system, documented tenant organizing, amplified student movements, investigated attacks on Black queer people and connected struggles in Kansas City to liberation movements around the world.
Over the past five years, our website has received more than 3.2 million pageviews. More than 1 million people have come to our reporting directly through our social media platforms. Today, more than 18,000 people receive the Defender’s work through our newsletter alone.
But numbers can tell only part of the story.
The Defender was never created simply to publish articles. We have always understood ourselves as one part of a much larger community response — a Black newsroom, but also a meeting place, a political education space, a cultural institution and a vehicle through which our people can support one another.
We have also organized grocery buyouts, free clothing programs, basketball tournaments, concerts, open mics, Juneteenth cookouts, community gatherings and an intergenerational abolitionist Freedom School.
Those programs exist in tandem with our journalism to serve the same mission: building trust, sharing resources and helping Black people develop the information, confidence and relationships necessary to act collectively.
Since launching our grocery buyouts in October 2022, the Defender has distributed more than $10,000 in direct cash to Black people at Kansas City grocery stores.
When the Sun Fresh near 31st Street and Prospect Avenue closed in August 2025, plunging thousands of Black residents into an even deeper food-access crisis, we worked with six Black farms and KC Black Urban Growers to launch an emergency response that has since developed into the Hamer Free Food Program—Kansas City’s first Black food cooperative project.
Through that program, we have fed hundreds of people with fresh produce sourced directly from local Black farmers, built a network of more than 50 volunteers and invested $7,000 directly into Kansas City’s Black farming ecosystem.
Through our Free Clothing Program, we have distributed more than 3,000 items of clothing to over 1,500 people.
Our journalism on racism and student organizing in Missouri and Kansas schools has also helped inspire the creation of more than 10 Black Student Unions. We have trained or assisted more than 100 students as they organized nonviolent direct actions within their own schools.
We have also purchased and preserved Ms. Willa’s Books & Vinyl, Missouri’s oldest Black bookstore, transforming the historic space into the Defender’s headquarters and a living archive for Black Kansas City.
These are not side projects, nor are they charity.
They are expressions of what we believe journalism can — and should — do. They are what it looks like to practice journalism as a form of community care, political education and power-building.
The Defender’s work is rooted in the tradition of the radical Black press: publications that did not pretend oppression was simply a subject on which reasonable people happened to disagree. Instead, the Black press reported what white institutions concealed. It connected Black people across cities and states, defended our communities against organized misinformation and helped movements imagine what freedom could look like.
We inherited that responsibility in a digital age defined by rampant misinformation, unprecedented global connection and rapidly evolving technology.
So we must continue to tell the truth unabashedly — with accuracy, transparency, evidence, and persistence.
We are not here to observe Black suffering from a safe distance. We are here to help our communities understand the systems shaping our lives, expose the people and institutions responsible for harm and create pathways toward collective action.
What comes next
The Defender’s fifth anniversary also arrives at a complicated moment.
The 2020 uprisings forced institutions across the country to make promises about racial justice. Corporations released statements. Politicians knelt in kente cloth. Cities painted slogans onto streets. News organizations pledged to listen more closely to Black communities.
Five years later, the mask has slipped. The powerful grew exhausted of even pretending to care. The performative language of racial justice has been abandoned, DEI programs dismantled and hard-won protections for Black people stripped away.
The backlash has become more organized, institutionalized and emboldened. Black history is being erased and attacked. Cops, jails and surveillance systems continue to expand. Non-white individuals assumed to be immigrants are being hunted and disappeared. Palestinians are enduring genocide in full view of the world. Billionaires and corporations exercise growing control over the information people receive, while local newsrooms disappear and artificial intelligence threatens to reproduce the same racism already embedded throughout our institutions and environment.
In the five years that we have existed, the conditions that made the Defender necessary have only worsened.
But this is exactly the kind of moment water was built for — to fill what has been emptied, nourish what has been neglected, and bring life to what has otherwise been left for dead.
Five years is worth celebrating.
It is also a reminder that the work is unfinished.
Over the next five years, we want to deepen the scope and scale of our reporting, expand the ways we serve our community and continue experimenting with what a Black media institution can be.
These past five years remind us that systems of oppression also grow and change. They adapt—through artificial intelligence, Flock cameras, surveillance on public buses and an ICE apparatus expanding its kidnappings and detention infrastructure in our own backyards.
We will adapt, too.
We will deepen our political education, expand our understanding of the world and one another, and continue refining how we respond to the conditions around us.
Like water, we will forever move forward, toward the places where we are most needed.
We will continue to flow and shift, taking on whatever form the moment demands.
We will nourish what deserves to grow, connect struggles that powerful people would prefer to keep separate and find openings in structures designed to contain us. And when necessary, we will apply enough pressure to reshape, crack or dismantle whatever stands in the way of our liberation.
Five years ago, the Defender began with the belief that Black people, in Kansas City and all over the world, deserved better.
We still believe that. That work is still being done.
And, frankly, we are only getting started. Help us build the next five years — and the radical Black media institution and community organization Black Kansas City deserves.
