Every morning, Shawnna Murrell prays. She sits in silence and prepares herself for whatever the day might carry, good or bad, easy or hard. On Tuesday morning, she says, she missed that ritual. And by the afternoon, a FedEx driver standing at the door of her own business had reminded her exactly what she prepares for.
Murrell is the founder of Murrell Homes Real Estate Group, a Black-owned brokerage at 43rd and Madison in the West Plaza. Around midday, a FedEx driver arrived carrying a check from a title company, payment for a transaction one of her agents had just closed. He pressed the doorbell. The office, busy as it is most days, did not answer immediately.
The Ring camera he activated caught what he said next.
“What the f*** is this n***** number?”
Murrell did not hear it in the moment. She was in her office manager’s office when she noticed a missed notification on the doorbell app, roughly thirteen minutes after the driver had come and gone. She pressed play, expecting nothing more than a delivery alert.
“When it started playing, and I heard those things, it kind of took me back,” Murrell told The Defender. “I was like, did I just hear what I thought I heard? So I played it again.”
She called colleagues over and played it a third time. “Am I tripping, or did he really just say that?” she recalled asking them. “It shocked us all.”
FedEx Driver’s Racial Slur Was Aimed Directly at the Black-Owned Kansas City Business
Murrell’s building houses two Black-owned companies on its first floor: her brokerage on one side and her partners, on the other. A lawyers office is upstairs. Deliveries arrive multiple times a day, and drivers sometimes press the wrong buzzer looking for another tenant. So before she let herself conclude anything, Murrell went looking for the package.
She found it dropped on the ground at the doorpost. The label carried her company’s name.
“When I saw that it was our name, so clearly he was talking about my company,” she said. “After that, when I determined, okay, you were coming for me, then that’s when the anger came in. That was not necessary.”
The detail that stays with her is the button itself. The driver pressed the doorbell that started the recording. “He clearly pushed a button to start the recording,” she said. “I guess he wasn’t thinking that that was going to pick up.”
Murrell attempted to reach the FedEx station that serves the area after community members texted her its number. Someone answered the phone, then hung up. She had a meeting to run and a business to operate, so she has not yet gotten through. She says she intends to file a formal report.
“It’s unacceptable,” she said.
What Accountability From FedEx Looks Like After the Ring Camera Incident
Asked what she wants to come of this, Murrell told me “there needs to be accountability. I never want anyone to lose their job,” she said. “But that’s a grown man. He has to be accountable for his actions. If that’s the policy, if that’s the rules and regulations, then he made his bed. So now he got to lay in it.”
She wants to speak directly with FedEx about its standards for employee conduct. “I know you can’t control everyone, but there are standards, some policy rules and regulations around employee conduct. That’s what I want to get more information on.”
Murrell Homes Real Estate Group: The Black Women-Founded Brokerage He Slurred
The business the driver reduced to a slur is one of the most significant Black-owned brokerages in Kansas City. Murrell Homes Real Estate Group launched in December 2021, coming out of the pandemic as a team of fourteen Black women real estate professionals. Five years later, it has grown to nearly forty Black and minority agents serving buyers, sellers, small business owners, and multifamily investors across the city.
“I was born and raised in Kansas City, and I believe that our community deserves positive professional representation in the home buying process,” Murrell said. “We’re here sharing love and support for our community. And that’s what I expect from everybody else.”
The check the driver delivered that day tells the truer story. Inside that envelope was a closing, a family stepping into a home of their own, a transaction completed by a Black agent at a Black brokerage in a city that spent a century trying to keep Black families from owning anything at all. He left it on the ground. Murrell picked it up and went back to work, because there are nearly forty agents in that building doing what no slur can undo: putting Black families in homes, one set of keys at a time.
If you have experienced racial discrimination at your job in Kansas City, contact The Kansas City Defender at ryan@kansascitydefender.com
