The sun was on Prospect Avenue this past Saturday, April 25th, and something old was moving through it.
The line started before we did. The Defender Mutual Aid Team, arrived at Bluford Library at 10:30am in the morning to begin setting up. Families were already waiting.
Two and a half hours before our doors opened, on a corner this city has spent decades teaching itself to fear, our neighbors were holding their place for a chance to walk through doors that would not charge them at the threshold.
One of our neighbors, still standing in line, turned to a member of our team and said, “I just wanna say before y’all start, that I am grateful. Thank you for setting this up.”
By 1pm, our doors at 31st and Prospect were open. By the end of the afternoon, more than 150 of our neighbors had moved through the space, leaving with bags of spring and summer clothing, with pads and tampons and toothbrushes and soap, with the small loud dignities this country has decided Black, brown, and poor people do not deserve.
“It feels like a department store,” one community member told us, looking around at the tables of folded jeans, the racks of shirts hanging by size, the women’s tops, the men’s tops, the music playing through the room while folks moved between stations.
That was the design. We were not running a charity but intentionally made it feel dignified and like a department store owned by The People, where nobody pays at the door because nobody should have to pay to be clean or clothed or cared for.
Our Defender Mutual Aid Team calls this our Free Clothing Program, named in the spirit of the Black Panther Party’s Survival Programs, the same lineage that built free breakfast for children and free clinics for our communities in the cracks the state refused to fill.
Alongside the clothing, our team distributed The People’s Hygiene & Care Packages, full of soap, deodorant, body wash, lotion, toothbrushes, and full menstrual care.
We did this work in coalition. Our comrades from the Party for Socialism and Liberation were on the ground with us all afternoon, setting up a tent outside to greet folks heading in and to care for those who could not make it inside, passing out turkey and cheese sandwiches, chips, and water to anyone who needed something to eat. They worked alongside our team distributing hygiene products and clothing, sharing KC Defender political education material with the community, and inviting folks into the wider movement through their May Day promotion and PSL sign-ups.
We also provided political education with every bag. Our Defender literature shows the more than $300 million Kansas City pours into KCPD every year while children in our neighborhoods go hungry, while families lose their housing, while the price of a bottle of body wash becomes the difference between dignity and humiliation.
One mother with a family told us she had been out of diapers, that they have a hard time finding them free or low cost, and that it was a blessing to walk out with diapers and wipes that day. Another woman told us she was deeply grateful for the tampons and pads because of how expensive they have become.
These are the small economies of survival that this country pretends are not political. A diaper is political. A tampon is political. The fact that a family in one of the richest countries in the world has to wait two and a half hours on a corner the state has abandoned to receive what every human being deserves is political.
Many people in this city call 31st and Prospect a crime hotspot. Fewer remember that this corner was central to the uprisings that swept Kansas City after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. They sent tanks down these streets. They sent snipers to the rooftops. They killed our people here.
And in the decades since, the state’s chosen response has not been investment but abandonment, the slow violence of disinvestment dressed up as policy.
The story you are told about this corner describes the outcome. It never names the cause.
That is the trick of this country. It creates a wound and then criminalizes the bleeding. It defunds our schools and our hospitals and our housing, and then it offers us jails to lock our children in, when what our people have always needed are the life-affirming things human beings deserve. Music in a room. Soap in a shower. Dignified and stylish clothes that fit. A sandwich on a sunny afternoon. Neighbors who know your name.
That is what we built on Saturday.
You could hear it. Laughter. Babies on hips. Folks holding shirts up to themselves and asking a friend if it looked good. An elder in a red coat walking out with a full bag, the afternoon behind him.
About the KC Defender Mutual Aid Programs
The Kansas City Defender mutual aid programs are direct confrontations with capitalist exploitation. They are how we live our revolutionary values in practice, meeting the material needs of our people while building the relationships and the power that any movement worth its name requires. Every distribution is an act of love, and every act of love is a foundation we are laying for the world we are fighting to build.
