The candidates thought they had come to be heard.
Six of them, all running to be the next executive of Jackson County, sat in a row at the front of the Morning Star Youth and Family Life Center on a Saturday morning, at 27th and Prospect, and waited to make their case.
The 19th Annual Urban Summit Conference had taken as its theme a warning and a dare: Power to the People. No Vote, No Hope. The candidates had come to collect a constituency. By the time the morning was finished, it was the young people who had done the judging, and the verdict was not kind.
One of the men on that stage made sure of it. Before the morning was over, he, a white man, would call the moderator, the president and CEO of the Urban League, “Auntie Gwen.” He would tell a row of young Black organizers that they were asking the wrong question. He would grumble about “rednecks out in the middle of nowhere” and “a war in Persia,” and Reverend Dr. Vernon Howard would have to rise from the audience to make him stop.
By the time the Urban Summit’s own master of ceremonies took the microphone, he would name the man what the entire room had already decided he was, “the belligerent racist that was up here on the stage.”
We will get to Holmes Osborne. He earned his place at the bottom of this story. But the young people earned the top of it, and they are the reason it is worth telling at all.
This is what power looks like before it has a title. A row of organizers and artists and workers in their twenties and thirties, all Black, all of them voters, sitting calmly while grown men with campaigns and consultants tried to win them over and mostly failed. They had been invited to talk about the youth vote ahead of the August 4 Democratic primary, a race thrown wide open by the recall of Frank White and the churn of candidates entering and exiting in his wake. The county executive runs Jackson County’s government, the most powerful local office most people never think about, with authority over the budget, the property tax assessments that have pushed families off the East Side, and the jail itself. For a county of more than 700,000 people, it is the office that decides who thrives and who gets caged, which is why the young people came to weigh it.
What the young people delivered instead was a moral audit of a county government that has found hundreds of millions of dollars for a jail and a stadium and almost nothing for the people who live in the shadow of both.
The panel had been convened around a question that haunts Democratic strategists across the country.
Why have young people, and young Black people most of all, been tuning out of electoral politics, and what would it take to bring them back?
Nationally the answer gets filed under apathy or laziness or misguided youth. In that room it was named as something truer. Amaia Cook, born in 1998 and an organizer who works with young Kansas Citians every day, told the story of her own generation. She came up in a world shaped by the wars that followed 9/11, the 2008 recession, and a housing market that keeps pricing people out of the neighborhoods that raised them. “We entered into a world that really wasn’t set up for our success,” she said.
Mili Mansaray named the political half of it. Young people are exhausted, she said, by being handed a choice between the lesser of two evils, and they want a politician to earn their vote rather than assume it.
“No one shows up for us at the end of the day,” another panelist said early, before the questions had even sharpened. “I feel like we’re just left behind.”
They did not stay left behind for long. They took the floor and they did not give it back.
The Stadium and the Lie of Scarcity
The first thing the young people refused was the story the county tells about money. There is never enough of it for them. There is always enough of it for a stadium.
Mili Mansaray, Senior Editor at The Kansas City Defender, moved to Kansas City four years ago, and she has watched the pattern long enough to name it. She talked about the deal to fund the Royals’ move downtown, a vote she said “happened really quickly and really discreetly without the knowledge of the general public,” backed by the city’s general revenue through TIF financing, the same revenue that is supposed to fund streets and housing and transit. She was not impressed by the promise of concession-stand jobs.
“That’s not empowering,” she said. “That is just continuing the same system that we already live within.”
Then she said the thing that hung over the rest of the morning. When people ask for housing, for transportation, for mental health resources, she said, “there’s always this sense of we can’t, we can’t. There’s limitations, there’s limitations. But then when it comes to things like a stadium, you see how quickly at the drop of a hat that able is.”
If there’s a will, there’s a way. The candidates would say that phrase too, later, as if it were their own idea. The young people had already used it as an indictment.
Jeremy Tindall, a youth pastor and the owner of Tindall Made, and one of two descendants of Bishop James D. Tindall on the panel, put the same truth in plainer language. He drives past the sports complex every day. “If the county really cared, that area would be cleaned up,” he said. Instead the conversation is about tearing down parts of downtown for “a team who just lost last night,” a team “at the bottom of their division.” He asked the only question that matters. “You can have a really beautiful stadium, but if everybody around it don’t have a home to live in, if around the neighborhoods it’s filled with trash, who are you working for at that point?”
Then he turned the county’s logic against it.
“They built this really nice jail, okay? So y’all already are predestining them to go to jail. But yet I don’t see any new institutions popping up that’s going to help them transition.” He let the silence sit. “Make it make sense.”
“They built this really nice jail. So y’all already are predestining them to go to jail.” – JEREMY TINDALL, ON THE COUNTY’S PRIORITIES
“That land was essentially built on where a community was”
If there was a center of gravity to the entire morning, a moment when the room stopped being a candidate forum and became something closer to a tribunal, it came when the conversation turned to the jail, and Amaia Cook took the microphone.
Cook organizes with Decarcerate KC, which fights for alternatives to incarceration in Kansas City. She started with who is inside. “A majority of people who are locked up in Kansas City are Black,” she said. “A majority of people who are locked up are dealing with issues of substance use, mental health, poverty, the things that contribute to a cycle of going in and out of jail.”
And then she told the part of the story the county would prefer the public never sit with. The new Jackson County Detention Center, now complete, was built on land where people already lived.
“There were people who lived in homes, and the county came to them with this project disregarding their lives,” Cook said. It was a mobile home community, a “disenfranchised people being on that land, and the county essentially removed them.” A tenant organization had to fight just to win those residents the benefits to relocate, she said, so the county could clear the ground for a jail.
“I just want everyone to sit with that tension,” she said, “that the city, the county, they are making decisions by removing people from their homes, removing people from poverty from their homes, to lock more people up in this community.”
“The county is making decisions by removing people from poverty from their homes, to lock more people up in this community.” – AMAIA COOK, DECARCERATE KC
She was not finished. Because the county and the city could not agree on a combined facility, could not bring themselves to build something smaller and cheaper, she said, the region is now on track for three new jail facilities within five years. Two of them, at the city level, will sit right across from an elementary, middle, and high school, where mostly Black and brown students live and go to school.
A county that could not find money to support a Black-owned grocery store at 31st & Prospect last year is building three jails in five years, two of them within sight of the children it claims to be saving. Cook did not raise her voice to say it. She did not have to. When she finished, another young panelist named Eric Hawthorne, who leads economic development for the Urban Summit, reached for the microphone, then set it back down. “She encapsulated it so perfectly,” he said, “there’s really no need to follow up.”
The candidates had been planning to talk about the jail as a budget item. For the rest of the morning, every answer about the detention center was an answer to Cook. Mili Mansaray, one of the young panelists, named what the shift revealed. She had been “pleasantly surprised,” she said, to hear the candidates themselves push back on the new jail. “It makes me wonder who’s asking for this in the first place.”
A row of auditions
To their credit, several of the candidates told the truth about the jail. Ryan Meyer, a marketing consultant, who sits on the streetcar transportation district board and has run for office twice before, losing a 2022 county legislature primary and a 2014 state house bid, walked through the official case for the new detention center, that the old facilities were inhumane and overcrowded and would have drawn a losing federal lawsuit, and then he asked the better question himself. “Why was it so overcrowded? Why couldn’t we rehab the facilities that we have for a much smaller detainee population?” Because the county does almost nothing, he said, to address “the nexus of crime, which is mental health, drug abuse, and especially hopelessness.” Dan Tarwater, who served years on the county legislature and lost a brother to addiction, agreed the facility had become “the largest mental health, drug addiction place” in the region, by default the county’s largest provider of treatment for mental illness and addiction. He said flatly, “We need more of that. Not detention centers.” He meant more treatment for addiction and mental illness, not more cages.
These were honest words. The young people had heard honest words before.
Abarca, the only candidate currently holding county office, leaned on his legislative record: the $35 million in COVID funds, the internship program, the majority-minority legislature he now chairs for the first time in the county’s 200-year history. For a panel that had spent the morning indicting the county’s priorities, the man who runs its legislature had a particular burden of proof.
“To me, it started off hearing us,” the young father said when the moderator asked whether the candidates had listened, “but then it turned into a political campaign again.” He had counted. “I only seen one person write things down. We’ve been talking for about an hour and a half.” His standard was simple and merciless. “Just because you’re on this panel, don’t mean you secured a vote. It doesn’t mean you secured anything.” And then the line that should be printed on the wall of every campaign office in the county: “If that’s your starting point, you’re not gonna get my vote. A title will not make you want to do it.”
Hawthorne named the disappointment behind the skepticism. He invoked the presidency of Barack Obama, “a pivotal moment,” and the lesson his generation drew from it. “You can sell us a lot of hope, you sell us a lot of change, but what are the tangible results?” He rejected the language of disinvestment for something harder. “Really what we are is an underdeveloped community. There’s no development over here. There’s development on the Plaza. There’s development in Westport.” Then, with the bitter patience of someone who has been asked to be grateful too many times, he described what the county offers instead. “We have to celebrate small victories. We have to just be happy with the bits and crumbs.”
Cook closed the loop the candidates kept trying to slip. “It’s easy to say the right words if you sit down and listen enough,” she said, “but are you listening to acquire votes, or are you listening to create actual real tangible change?” The young people were not props. “We are not just here to be a token and trying to build a platform just to say, ‘oh, I had this one panel where I talked to youth,’” she said. “We are actually here ready to take action. So listen to us, engage with us…”
The candidates’ response to that was instructive. One after another, they offered the young people seats.
One man on the stage was not playing along. Where the rest at least performed listening, Holmes Osborne used his turns to lecture. Asked a direct question about economic mobility and the redevelopment of the sports complex, he wandered off into the $39 trillion national debt and “a war in Persia that nobody wants,” circled back to the empty downtown jail, and then turned to Gwen Grant and said, “Ma’am, could you read the original question, please?” He was warming up. The worst of him was still to come, and the young people would be the ones he aimed it at.
The candidate who did the reading
If the morning had a candidate who met the young people on their own terms, it was Stacy Lake, the only Black candidate in the field and the only woman on the August ballot, and she earned it by doing what none of the others did. She brought receipts.
Lake introduced herself through her people, the daughter of a community activist and dentist, the granddaughter of the first Black woman to earn a business degree from Lincoln University, the great-granddaughter of a pastor and organizer. Then she told the room why she first ran. In 2019, the East Side was crushed by a property tax crisis, she said, when home values jumped and assessments rose by as much as 70 percent in an area where unemployment ran between 30 and 40 percent, and “hundreds, if not thousands, of the residents in our area lost their homes.” When nobody else would challenge Frank White over it, she said, “I was the only person who contested Frank White.” Lake lost the 2022 Democratic primary to White by 4,171 votes, roughly six percentage points, out of nearly 64,000 cast. She is back.
Where the others spoke in vision statements, Lake spoke in dollars. She called for a deep audit of a county government that State Auditor Nicole Galloway gave a failing grade in 2020, a county whose budget, by Lake’s account, was once off by $100 million that had been sitting unspent and untracked in its own accounts. She zeroed in on the county’s contract with Tyler Technologies, the outside firm handed millions to run assessments, which she described as owned by an interest with reason to inflate the very property values that tax East Side families out of their homes. “We need to bring that back in-house,” she said.
When the candidates were asked to share a concrete promise to the young people, Lake’s was the only one with a deadline attached. “Within the first 100 days, I will create a youth advisory council in Jackson County government.”
Lake’s analysis was the sharpest in the room, and her record of standing alone against White is real. None of that exempts her from the standard the young people set for everyone on that stage. A panel seat is not a vote, and a campaign promise is not a budget line. Lake’s own words were the most useful frame for judging all of them. “We are going to vote for politicians who will bring forth revolutionary changes to our community,” she said, “not to feed off of our community.” The young people will be watching to see which she turns out to be. So should the rest of Jackson County.
“If a Black man is passionate, he’s an angry Black man”
There was a tell that ran underneath the whole morning, and the young people caught it. More than one candidate, asked what they had heard, reached for the same word. They heard the young people’s anger.
The young father refused it. “Don’t misrepresent my passion for anger, because everyone already does it,” he said. “If a Black man is passionate, he’s an angry Black man. That’s not what it is. I’m passionate about this community. I’m passionate about where it’s headed, because my daughter has to live in this community as well.”
Cook had said the same thing in her own register earlier. “As a young person, you hear that a lot, like, oh, why are young people so angry? I am frustrated, but that’s not the underlying feeling that I have. I feel passion. I feel love for this city.” Then she asked the question that exposed the double standard completely. “How can you, as a potential elected, be passionate and I be angry, when we’re looking at the same conditions and wanting to change it?”
To their credit, two candidates heard it and walked it back. Ryan Meyer apologized for projecting. “When I’m faced with people that are well-meaning, that are smart, they know what’s going on,” he said, “I think I was projecting a bit. So I’ll try to listen better.” Tarwater apologized, too. It is worth noticing what that exchange revealed. The candidates had come to court the young people, and within the same hour they had to apologize for diminishing them. The young people had not raised their voices once. They had simply refused to be called angry for loving their city out loud.
One man on the stage never offered any such reckoning. He had no use for it. He had already decided what these young Black people were owed, and the answer was a lecture.
“Auntie Gwen”
That man was Holmes Osborne.
Osborne, a financial analyst who sits on the Metropolitan Community College Board of Trustees and is running for county executive for what he described as the eighth time he has sought office, had not responded to the invitation by the deadline. The Urban Summit added him at the urging of a state senator, an accommodation extended in good faith. He repaid it by turning the morning ugly.
When the young people asked the candidates how they were engaging with young voters authentically, before an election, as members of the community rather than as supplicants for a vote, Osborne told them they had it wrong. “I think you’re asking the wrong question,” he said. He filibustered about a data center deal in Independence, and when the moderator, Urban League of Greater Kansas City President and CEO Gwen Grant, tried to hold him to the question, he kept going. “The young people can do this themselves,” he told them. “You don’t need a bunch of people in their 50s and 60s to help you.”
Grant did not let it pass. “You’re telling the young people that they’re asking the wrong question?” she said. He doubled down. Later, he turned to Grant, a Black woman who has led the Urban League for years and was running the panel, and said, “Ma’am, could you read the original question, please?” His worldview kept leaking out in asides, a complaint about “rednecks out in the middle of nowhere,” a reference to “a war in Persia that nobody wants,” and, at the very end, a final instruction tossed at the room as though it were a revelation. “Register voters in the urban core.”
The room read his demeanor for exactly what it was. The disrespect had started before the panel even began. As Grant recounted onstage, when Osborne entered the room and she walked up to greet him, “he referred to me as Auntie Gwen.”
The word “Auntie” has a history in this country, and it is not a warm one. The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, which documents the everyday artifacts and etiquette of American racial hierarchy, is precise about it: Black women were addressed as “Auntie” or “girl” under Jim Crow, and “under no circumstances would the title ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ be applied.” It was a mark of diminishment and the white household’s way of saying I know you, I have use for you, and I will never call you ma’am. That Osborne reached for this word to address Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, convener of nineteen years of civic organizing, a Black woman who has spent decades building the kind of institutional power that does not come without cost, was not a slip. It was a signal. It told everyone in that room exactly what kind of candidate had walked in, and exactly whose authority he had already decided, before the panel began, that he did not intend to recognize.
It was an elder in the audience who refused to let it stand. Dr. Vernon Howard, the first vice president of the Urban Summit, head of the Kansas City Chapter of the SCLC, the organization Martin Luther King founded, and a longtime civil rights leader in Kansas City, rose from his seat and addressed Osborne directly, telling him plainly that he would not be permitted to disrespect the moderator, that he would not disrespect Mrs. Grant, that he would not disrespect these young people. The Urban Summit’s own master of ceremonies, recognizing Howard from the stage a short while later, did not soften it. He thanked “the one who got up and straightened out the belligerent racist that was up here on the stage.”
When the panel ended, Grant set the record straight in her own voice. “I’ve done this a lot, and seldom have we experienced the level of disrespect that I had to,” she said. “And as a Black woman.” She had tried to hold her peace. She decided the people in the room deserved to know instead.
“Our future is bright because of them.” – GWEN GRANT, URBAN LEAGUE OF GREATER KANSAS CITY
Our future is bright because of them
Here is the part the candidates could not manufacture and the disruptor could not touch.
When Grant turned from Osborne to the young people, the entire weight of the morning changed. “These young people were outstanding,” she said. “They were outstanding. Our future is bright because of them.” She told the room why she had broken her peace. “I have to stand for them, because I am so proud of them. Everything we’ve asked of them, they show up, they listen. And we don’t try to tell them how to think or what to do. We respect their opinions.”
That is the inheritance the Urban Summit was built to protect, and it is the answer Osborne stumbled into without understanding it. The young people do not need anyone in their 50s and 60s to think for them. What they need, and what the freedom movement always gave its youngest, are elders willing to stand up in a room and say you will not speak to them that way. Dr. Howard understood the assignment. Gwen Grant understood it. The candidates who came to harvest the youth vote learned, in real time, that this generation will not be harvested.
They will not fall for the platitudes. They will not be grateful for crumbs, will not be flattered by an advisory committee, will not let a stadium stand where a clinic should be or a jail rise where a family used to live. They came to a room full of people who hold power over hundreds of millions of dollars, and they did not ask for permission.
The candidates wanted to know how to win the youth vote. The young people had already answered. Come back when the cameras are gone. Build something where you tore something down. Stop predestining our children for the jail you built across from their school. Do that, and you will not have to ask for our votes. We will be the ones organizing.
No vote, no hope, the banners said. The young people in that room turned it around. They are the hope. The vote is just the beginning of what they intend to take.
Disclosures: Gwen Grant is on the Kansas City Defender Board. Mili Mansaray is a Senior Editor at The Defender. Amaia Cook, executive director of Decarcerate KC, is engaged to Kansas City Defender founder and executive editor Ryan Sorrell.
