B-REAL Academy’s third cohort celebrates graduation at Sankara Farm.
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A letter from Ryan Sorrell, Founder of The Kansas City Defender
Kansas City’s story has too long been told through a white-supremacist lens that renders Black life disposable and Black joy invisible. At every police shooting, eviction court, and school-board coup, legacy outlets have handed the megaphone to power and called it “objectivity.”
We were forged in the tear-gas haze of 2020 to flip that script. Like Freedom’s Journal, America’s first Black newspaper, born in 1827, we exist to “plead our own cause.” In five years, that cause has moved the ground beneath this city.
A missing persons unit, reinstated
When Black women were disappearing from Kansas City while the authorities looked away, we reported until the city reinstated its missing persons unit and Missouri convened a statewide task force, work Ta-Nehisi Coates cited in Vanity Fair.
An ICE detention facility, stopped
When a massive ICE detention facility was proposed for our region, our reporting and organizing helped stop it.
The footage the state kept quiet
When the state went quiet about what happened to nineteen-year-old Saveion McConnell on the shoulder of U.S. 50, we obtained the body camera footage and the prosecutor’s memo that cleared the deputy who killed him.
A secret surveillance deal, exposed
When KCATA cut buses for the poor while secretly signing a deal to harvest riders’ faces for a private company’s AI, we put the contract in front of the people.
And we do more than report. When Ms. Willa’s Books, the oldest Black bookstore in Missouri history, was headed for the auction block, we saved it, along with 10,000 volumes of Black thought and memory, and made it our home. We give away free clothing. We put cash directly into people’s hands at the grocery store. We train Black Kansas Citians to organize their own neighborhoods through B-REAL Academy, our abolitionist freedom school. That work has earned eight national awards, and it was earned first in the streets, the courtrooms, and the kitchens of Black Kansas City.
The violence we fight is relentless. ICE cages our neighbors in Leavenworth. Kansas City police run a surveillance platform descended from Palantir. Developers game public money for data centers while Black families are pushed out of their homes. Your dollars are ammunition in an information war that right-wing fascists have waged against us, and every gift becomes something you can touch:
- a record pried loose,
- a coat on a child’s back,
- a family’s groceries paid in full,
- a young organizer’s first campaign,
- a first edition kept in Black hands.
The Black press is our shield and our sword.
Give today, and help us carve escape routes out of authoritarian darkness toward a future where Black freedom is the baseline.
With love and in struggle,
Ryan Sorrell