Editor’s note: This story includes several quotes containing a racial slur. The quotes illustrate the severity of the discrimination described by firefighters.

Moments after saying his favorite knot was a noose, a white Kansas City fire cadet threw a rope around the neck of his Black classmate and pulled it tight.

Word of the incident last year at the Kansas City Fire Academy spread quickly to firefighters in the city. Many wanted the white cadet, Benjamin Barton, fired.

Instead, he remained employed for several more weeks and eventually was allowed to resign.

Demands by Black firefighters to hold Barton fully accountable ran into barriers both outside and inside the Kansas City Fire Department. A year-long investigation by The Star found that incident is part of a larger pattern of systemic racism and harassment that has been tolerated by the department for decades.

For generations, white men have dominated the department. Only last year did the city name its first ever female chief, Donna Lake. Black and women firefighters have been ostracized and put in danger, shut out of the most desirable fire stations, and passed over for promotions. As a result, one of the city’s most important public safety institutions, with a budget of $195 million, looks nothing like the community it serves.

“If (you’re) not the right color, not the right sex, you are going to have a problem,” said Therese Brown, a retired Black firefighter.

The Star interviewed more than 30 current and former Black and women firefighters. Many feared retaliation if they spoke out publicly. Their accounts, along with thousands of pages of court records and city documents never before made public, paint a picture of widespread discrimination and a lack of accountability that have forced Kansas City to pay out millions in taxpayer dollars to resolve ensuing lawsuits.

In interviews this fall, top officials at City Hall, the fire department and its two unions acknowledged the KCFD has problems in its diversity and its culture.

On almost half of the city’s fire crews there is not a single Black firefighter, according to the department’s data from July. They’ve been kept out of sought-after stations in the urban core where crews respond to far more fires and gain valuable experience.

Four of nine busy inner-city stations analyzed by The Star haven’t had a single Black captain in 10 years — as far back as city data obtained by The Star goes.

Black firefighters have been shut out of promotions, resulting in a department where of the 48 highest-ranking members, only three are Black.

It’s been more than three decades since Kansas City’s only Black chief retired. Last year, the city appointed Lake, who went by the name Donna Maize until this fall, its first woman chief.

The last Black Kansas City firefighter in the running to be chief was James Garrett, who endured open racism for decades and rose to become the department’s spokesman and deputy chief. But he was passed over for the top job, and when he filed a federal discrimination complaint, the city paid him a $111,000 settlement.

Brown, the third Black woman hired by the KCFD, suffered both racism and sexual harassment in her 22 years with the department. She said fellow firefighters drained her oxygen tank, and a future fire chief abandoned her under a collapsed wall in a burning building.

Stephen Seals, a Black battalion chief, tried to stick up for Black cadets at the academy when one of them was called a racial slur in 2016, according to court filings. But when he confronted a white peer, Seals was disciplined and, according to a second lawsuit he filed, he was passed over for promotion in retaliation.

Before the recent barrage of race discrimination cases, two women firefighters took the department to court over sex discrimination and sexual harassment so severe a federal judge wrote that he had to ponder a court order barring firefighters from bringing strippers and prostitutes into stations.

For years, internal investigators have failed to root out discrimination in the department, where city officials say an insular culture keeps problems in-house.

And because City Hall discloses very few personnel records, public accountability only comes when firefighters sue the department.

In the last 20 years, Kansas City has paid out $2.5 million in judgments, attorney’s fees, court costs and litigation expenses to fend off lawsuits from employees who accused the department of harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

Right now, the department is facing at least three lawsuits for sex and race discrimination.

For years, Fire Department and City Hall officials have known fire stations are segregated. Former Fire Chief Paul Berardi said stations were more integrated and diverse when he was a young firefighter 30 years ago.

City Hall has put little to no pressure on the department to change. Informed of The Star’s findings, former City Manager Troy Schulte said he wasn’t surprised.

“I’m disappointed that ... I didn’t get that kind of level of detail. My bad,” Schulte said. “I probably should have asked more of those probing questions of my chiefs. But, you know, that’s one of those issues that’s been chronic, we’ve been, we’ve been dealing with a pretty, pretty insular organization that’s been insular for decades.”

The Star relayed its findings to more than 10 current and former City Council members. Most said they knew little about the problems Black firefighters faced. Several were alarmed at the findings or frustrated they didn’t know more about the department’s internal culture.

Mayor Quinton Lucas said he became vaguely aware of some concerns at a meeting of the Urban Summit, a Black Kansas City leadership organization, when he was a councilman. But he couldn’t recall in detail what was said aside from agreement between the department and union leadership that “there was a need for progress.”

“We need to try to root that out with, you know, every bit of our energy in connection with the Fire Department,” Lucas said. “I think they are trying to do better. I think this fire chief is doing better with how she’s addressing these issues.”

Lake said she didn’t doubt firefighters had faced discrimination because of their race or sex.

“I think it’s something that we continue to struggle with. It’s just like, in every aspect of our society.”

Tim Dupin, president of International Association of Fire Fighters Local 42, which represents Kansas City firefighters, drivers and captains, said the culture in the firehouses “has to be changed.” When he was elected, Dupin said, he took notice of all the discrimination lawsuits Black firefighters were filing.

Dupin acknowledged there is racism in the department.

“I won’t say that there’s not,” he said.

“I don’t think we’re any different than any department, any department or any business out there that there is systemic racism.”

But Lynne Bratcher, who has represented several Black firefighters who have won discrimination claims, said other organizations do more to stop discrimination.

“Corporations when they see that they have a policy that is promoting discrimination, they’ll change it because it is in their best interests financially,” Bratcher said. “The city does not operate with this good business judgment and it’s frustrating.”

The city has made efforts to change before. Through the 1980s, every fourth person promoted in the department had to be a woman or minority. The policy was rolled back in 1991 after white firefighters claimed reverse discrimination.

In 1998 and again in 2007, the City Council passed ordinances to study and address gender and race disparities among all city employees. But it never happened.

Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, said the stories from firefighters, segregation of stations and gross underrepresentation of Black firefighters in leadership roles show that “racism, bigotry and discrimination are alive and well” in the department.

“It’s unconscionable,” she said, “But it is emblematic of a deeply rooted systemic problem, a problem of systemic racism that continues to perpetuate itself because it has gone basically unchallenged.”

‘A slap in the face’

James Garrett had been a fire cadet for just a few months in 1994 when his class was exercising in the academy parking lot and two white firefighters driving past in a city-issued truck shouted the n-word at the Black cadet leading the class.

“They shouted, ‘Go get ’em, nigger,’ or ‘Lead ’em, nigger,’ or something like that,” Garrett said. “... And everybody in the class heard it.”

Garrett and other Black cadets complained. Their captain, the department’s first Black woman, Carolyn Mitchell, told someone above her. But no one was ever disciplined, Garrett said.

“Once you get past the, ‘I don’t believe that just happened,’ I guess what I thought was after I complained about it that somebody would take up that cause and at least reprimand them, something would happen,” Garrett said. “And when nothing happened, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

Over his years in the department, Garrett said it was common to hear racist slurs. Firefighters, he said, used the n-word so freely he would have to tell them to stop doing it in front of him.

“And I’ve had to do that at almost every station I’ve gone to,” he said.

Garrett rose quickly through the ranks and became a deputy chief, the first Black firefighter to achieve that in 15 years.

His career has been an outlier.

Twenty-five years later, the department is still far whiter than the city. Only 14% of the department’s nearly 1,300 employees are Black in a city where 30% of the residents are.

Kansas City is a lot like other major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, that have struggled to change their overwhelmingly white fire departments.

More than 80% of the 370,000 career firefighters in the U.S. are white, according to the National Fire Protection Association, in a nation where 60% of residents are. That’s an average that includes regions with tiny minority populations unlike Kansas City’s.

In Kansas City, that lack of diversity is even more pronounced at stations in the urban core that are surrounded by largely minority neighborhoods.

At Station 23 in the Northeast, 29 of the 30 firefighters are white, even in a ZIP code where more than 23% of the residents are Black and 36% are Hispanic, according to an estimate from the 2018 American Community Survey. Every captain that has worked there for the last 10 years has been white.

Over the last 10 years, Black firefighters made up only 7% of the more than 200 firefighters assigned to Station 35, on Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard just east of Prospect Avenue. The station sits in a ZIP code that is 88% Black.

Both stations are home to busy pumper crews that respond to thousands of emergency calls, including hundreds of potential fires, every year.

When Chief Berardi stepped down at the end of 2017, Garrett and Lake were among the finalists to replace him. But then-City Manager Schulte named Gary Reese, a white firefighter who had less experience in the upper ranks than either Garrett or Lake.

Schulte said Lake was his preferred candidate, but that he and the union compromised and promoted Reese. Reese did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this series.

Garrett filed a discrimination complaint saying he had been passed over for the job of fire chief because of his race and age and as retaliation for testifying against the department in another firefighter’s discrimination case.

The city settled his case for $111,000 before it could ever become a lawsuit.

It was just over a year after the settlement that the noose incident roiled the department again.

As he felt Barton’s rope tighten around his neck, the Black firefighter said he grabbed it and stared Barton down. He froze for a moment as he thought about how to respond.

“I went back and sat down because I didn’t want to lose my job or anything like that since at that time, I was a probationary firefighter,” said the firefighter, who asked not to be named in this story for fear of damage to his career.

Barton tried to make amends and claimed he didn’t realize what he had done was racist, the firefighter said. But the firefighter had a hard time believing Barton did not know the noose represents a history of lynching in the United States.

“Man, it’s 2019. Who in their right mind can live in America and not know what a noose represents to a Black person?” the firefighter said. “I know people live under rocks, but that’s got to be like the deepest rock in the world.”

Barton did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including a certified letter, which he received in October. A LinkedIn page that was taken down after The Star attempted to contact him in August showed he had moved out of the state.

After the incident, staff at the academy failed to follow policy and report it to the city’s internal investigators at the Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity Office. Schulte, who was city manager at the time, said the fire department often tried to keep problems in house and away from City Hall.

But word spread quickly, and soon another firefighter filed a complaint on behalf of the Black cadet.

E.F.F.E.C.T., an advocacy group for Black firefighters in KCFD, posted a “call for action letter” on its Facebook page, saying Barton should be fired.

In an interview with The Star, the group’s president, Sylvia Brown, said the situation was “grossly mishandled.” She credited E.F.F.E.C.T. with raising awareness so that Barton did not continue on in the academy class.

“If this young man is behaving like this in the academy, what will he do in the field?” she wrote in the letter to fellow firefighters, which was posted on Facebook.

When the case reached the city’s Human Resources Department, officials decided to fire Barton. Schulte said he and then-Chief Reese agreed with that course of action.

But Local 42 filed a grievance, arguing that Barton should be given an opportunity to defend himself.

“I didn’t support his position or anything like that, but I did support the process,” said Dupin, the Local 42 president.

Schulte compromised with the union: Instead of being fired, Barton would agree to resign.

Schulte said battling the union’s claim would have taken months, during which time Barton would have been suspended. He said he believed that would have sent a poor message to firefighters regarding how seriously the city took the incident.

“That’s why I was very supportive of the original termination proposal, because it sent a message: this won’t be tolerated,” Schulte said. “... but I felt a protracted suspension would ... again, have sent a worse message to the minority members of the fire department that we don’t take this seriously, you know, we’d rather argue about the arcane policy type stuff, procedural stuff than deal with the underlying issue.”

Brown said the decision upset firefighters — both Black and white.

The Black cadet Barton victimized called it a “slap in the face.” He said he was proud of how he handled the situation: thinking of his career and walking away.

“For me to take the higher road for it and still not get the justice that I felt was satisfactory to me was actually kind of heartbreaking,” he said.

Even in that case, where the incident was reported and city investigators corroborated it, Black firefighters and city staffers couldn’t get full accountability.

‘Why are you here?’

When Therese Brown was hired in May 1993, she was only the third Black woman to become a Kansas City firefighter. She was warned that the “good ole boys’ network” would make things hard for her.

But she loved the job. She stuck it out for 22 years despite harassment from male firefighters, who she said demeaned her constantly.

“I mean, it was just like, ‘You’re probably not gonna make it,’ you know, ‘Why are you here?’” Brown said. “You know, ‘What are you doing here?’”

She said a white firefighter once shoved her and called her a “Black bitch” as the two entered a burning building.

In one of her first building fires, she said, Paul Berardi, then a captain, saw a wall collapse on her and did nothing.

“He actually left me where one of the walls had fell down on my legs and he just was standing there just looking at me,” Brown said. “So I had to like pull all these bricks and stuff and like unbury myself from this wall collapsing on me.”

Berardi, a white firefighter who later became chief and has since left the department, denied it.

On another occasion, when Brown and her crew responded to a call, she left behind an unfinished meal.

When she and the other firefighters returned to the station, one of them asked her if she was going to finish her food. But Brown had already been warned by Kathleen Kline, one of the department’s first women firefighters, never to eat food she had left unattended at the station.

Brown told the other firefighter she wasn’t hungry.

“And so when I looked in my cup, it was a wad of gum spit in my cup,” she said.

One of the stations she worked at didn’t have separate sleeping facilities for women. She didn’t trust the rest of her crew, so she slept in a bed in a woman’s bathroom and locked the door.

One day when she reported for her shift, she found feces smeared across the wall. They put dead rats in her toilet.

“I’m not going to say that I was scared, but I was just really mindful of every little thing,” she said.

Brown said she reported the rats and feces to her battalion chief, who disciplined the captain at her station.

But often, she said, other firefighters would pretend not to witness the harassment.

“If nobody’s going to tell the truth, it’s like me against everybody,” she said.

Getting accountability depended almost entirely on which captain was in charge.

Brown left the department in January 2016 after being on and off unpaid sick leave for an injury. She complained to the city and sued for discrimination, saying white firefighters were compensated when they suffered job-related injuries. In 2017, she settled with the city for $27,000.

Often, it falls to Black firefighters themselves to demand action when they experience or witness discrimination.

In 2016, a white cadet called his Black classmate the n-word. Stephen Seals, a Black battalion chief whose son was also in the class, caught wind of it and filed a complaint that same day.

The details are outlined in a federal lawsuit Seals later filed claiming he was retaliated against for reporting the discrimination.

A few days after the incident, the department was preparing to investigate. But in the meantime, Seals went to the academy to complain the investigation wasn’t being done quickly. He said he was tired of Black cadets in the class being treated poorly.

Seals and Travis Williams, a white battalion chief in charge of the academy, got into a heated argument, and Seals refused to leave the academy. Each was interviewed separately by fire management and blamed the other for the escalation.

Fire officials interviewed the Black cadet who was the target of the slur, but he said the white cadet was joking and apologized. He declined to give the white cadet’s name, so no further investigation was conducted.

In the end, only Seals was disciplined. Having just been promoted to battalion chief six months earlier, he was in a probationary period. It was extended by six months.

Seals’ lawsuit, filed in federal court in 2017, claimed that probation was retaliation for reporting the use of the n-word, but the city said the extension was because of the altercation between the two battalion chiefs, not because Seals reported discrimination. It was dismissed.

Williams said when Seals came to his office unannounced and got in his face it was the first he’d heard of the issue. He defended the department’s handling of the situation, saying when he oversaw the academy he taught cadets to be the best employees possible and treated everyone with respect.

Seals filed another lawsuit last year, this one in Jackson County Circuit Court, claiming he had been passed over for promotions to deputy chief as retaliation for the 2017 lawsuit. The suit says Reese promoted five less-qualified white firefighters to deputy chief without opening the positions for application. He later interviewed candidates and promoted a sixth white firefighter. That lawsuit is pending.

After the white cadet used the n-word in 2017, the department’s deputy chief for professional development gave the academy class a presentation on the city’s discrimination policies.

Williams didn’t assign any additional training at the academy, according to his deposition in the Seals lawsuit.

He also drew a distinction between what he believed were two different versions of the n-word: “nigger” and “nigga.”

“If you look it up in the urban dictionary, it crosses racial lines,” Williams said in his deposition, “and when you … listen to 103 or 105 or 102 or any of the radio stations that play hip-hop music, you hear it in all the songs, you hear it in all the movies where celebrities like — you know, that, you know call each other that as a term of endearment.”

Neal Lester, who teaches a class about the n-word at Arizona State University, called that notion “nonsense.”

“Any white person who is grown should know that there’s a problem with that,” said Lester, a foundation professor of English and founding director of Project Humanities at the university.

“And if you’ve got to figure out a choreography about whether it was the ‘a’ or the ‘er,’ the reality is that the root of the word is the same.”

Sexual harassment

Before the more recent rush of race discrimination lawsuits, several women went to court in the 1990s over sex discrimination and sexual harassment.

Two white women, Kathleen Kline and Anne Wedow, said they were denied promotions and described appalling incidents of groping, harassment and intimidation.

They reported in their lawsuits that women at the academy were called “c---s.” A note was left on Kline’s locker calling her a “dick-sucker.” Kline told The Star women in the department never knew when someone might walk up and pinch their nipples. One day when she was a young firefighter, Kline said she received a call at the station, and someone on the other end said “you’re gonna burn, bitch.”

Soon thereafter, her crew reported to a basement fire where, she said, another firefighter stuck a fire hose in the window and pushed the fire toward Kline and her crew, who only had one way back out of the fire. She reported the incident but said there was no investigation.

Wedow said that, in some ways, things worsened after the lawsuits because they angered male firefighters. She placed the blame with the department’s management.

“It’s got to change from the top down. It isn’t going to change from the bottom up,” she said. “Nobody would put their foot down and say, ‘Look, you know, we’re all human beings. We’re all doing a dangerous job. You know, everybody needs to stay safe and do what needs to be done without regard to whether you like the guy next to you or not.’”

The two also said they witnessed severe racism in the fire houses when they were on the job.

Kline said she was called a “nigger-lover.”

“I think my moniker of nigger-lover became part of the reason I was hated — because I was a white girl talking to Black males,” said Kline, who retired in 2006. “And there were a ton of white males who did not like that.”

Kline said that when she had to fill in at another station, her temporary crew would express relief that she had been sent instead of a Black firefighter from her station.

“Oh, we’re glad they sent you instead of that nigger,” she said they told her.

In 2017, Kline and Wedow were expert witnesses in a race discrimination case against the department. They reevaluated Black firefighters’ promotional exams, saying the men deserved far higher scores than they were given on a subjective portion of the test.

The plaintiff in the case won at jury trial and was awarded more than $350,000. The city had to pay another $700,000 in attorney’s fees and other litigation costs. Kansas City appealed the case only to lose again and pay $174,000 more in fees.

Kline was denied a promotion to battalion chief in 1993 — only to be promoted through court order at the end of her lawsuit.

In that same court order, U.S. District Court Judge Ortrie Smith raised alarms about sexual harassment in the department, which he said happened “so often and so openly that it is implausible that they have not been observed by captains.” He said there was “little indication” that department management ever stepped in.

Smith ordered the Fire Department to install locks on bathroom doors because male firefighters were walking in on their female colleagues, and he ordered further training on civil rights and sexual harassment, noting severe examples.

“For instance, the court finds that strippers and prostitutes have been brought to fire stations; female employees have had their breasts ‘grabbed’; male firefighters watched X-rated videos (either on VCRs or on pay-per-view) on communal televisions in fire stations while on duty; copies of magazines depicting nude women are kept in fire stations; sexual slurs are used to refer to women; sexually suggestive jokes, pranks and comments occur on a frequent basis.”

In a second lawsuit filed in 1999, Kline and Wedow complained that many fire stations didn’t have appropriate accommodations for women, including bunk areas and bathrooms.

More than 20 years later, there are still six stations that lack proper facilities for women, Lake acknowledged, though the city passed a ¼-cent sales tax in 2001 in part to pay for those upgrades.

Earlier this year, the department went back to the voters, who approved another ¼-cent to finish those upgrades and pay for other capital needs. It goes into effect in January.

Through federal coronavirus relief funds, the department had been able to make some temporary bunk room upgrades also needed to allow firefighters to social distance, giving the firefighters more privacy.

But the same six stations still don’t have separate bathrooms and locker rooms for women. The department is planning for those upgrades to begin when the department starts receiving the new tax proceeds.

Laura Gunter, an assistant division chief who is married to a former firefighter, testified in 2017 about hearing the n-word around fire stations, her husband’s captain talking about “dirty f---ing Mexicans” and sexually harassing comments made about her.

She then sued in 2019 for sex discrimination and retaliation, saying the city attorney’s office began investigating her because she hadn’t previously reported discrimination she experienced or witnessed. Her suit also claims she was passed over for promotions because of her testimony.

In a 2017 deposition, Gunter said when her husband, Mark Gunter, was still on the job, his crew responded to a fire and another firefighter said he had a question for him.

“And my husband thought that they were still talking about work,” Gunter said. “And he said, I just want to know what your wife’s tits look like.”

Neither Laura nor Mark Gunter returned a request for comment.

Lake said firefighters think of their stations as a home away from home, but it “still is the workplace.” She said there’s “no excuse for people to treat each other in a poor way.”

“Off color remarks and using racial slurs — even if you think you’re best friends with somebody that is of a different race, or a different gender or a different culture — it’s unacceptable.”

Calls for change

Mayor Lucas said he was “horrified” by the Star’s findings regarding Black firefighters’ treatment.

“First, I would ask that the fire chief — and I imagine she has already started — investigate every one of those allegations and incidents to make sure that if such things occur, that they’re addressed and dealt with adequately and appropriately, including up to termination,” Lucas said.

The power to change the fire department ultimately comes from the City Council, which appoints the city manager, who is responsible for day-to-day operations, including overseeing the fire chief.

City Hall’s ability to take immediate action on station segregation, promotion bias and discipline is constrained by the firefighters’ union contracts. Local 42’s is set to be renegotiated in the next several months.

Firefighters have also looked to several Black members of the City Council for help in recent years.

Former Councilwoman Alissia Canady said she spoke with Black firefighters who wanted the Black members of the council to get involved. Canady said she and other council members took the issue to Schulte, but that because of the city’s council-manager form of government, there wasn’t much the council could do.

“The council is not in the business of running departments,” Canady said. “That is not the council’s responsibility; that is the city managers’ responsibility.”

Schulte recalled Canady approaching him about Seals, the Black battalion chief who felt he was retaliated against for reporting use of the n-word. He said he connected her with then-Chief Reese and didn’t hear from her again.

Former Councilman Jermaine Reed said he was approached by Black firefighters several times during his two terms and took their concerns to the department’s management, which didn’t deny the claims firefighters were making.

But others, including Councilwoman Katheryn Shields, who is white, said they knew little about discrimination in the department. Shields, who served with Canady and Reed on the last council, said she hadn’t heard from firefighters — or any of her Black colleagues who had heard of the issue.

“I have not had any minority council members since 2015, since I’ve been back on the council, say, ‘Hey, we got a problem here, and I’d like to talk to you about how we address it — or to even express frustration or anything else,’” Shields said.

Some council members are starting to press the fire department.

Shields, Councilwoman Ryana Parks-Shaw and Councilwoman Melissa Robinson questioned fire officials in October about discrimination as they considered extending a contract with the firm that has administered the department’s promotional exams for nearly two decades.

Parks-Shaw and Robinson both said they were shocked by The Star’s findings and believed it was their responsibility to investigate and hold the department accountable.

In May, council members voted 11-1 to loosen the city’s nepotism rules only in the fire department, which Black firefighters say already advantages white firefighters whose families have been on the job for decades.

The change allows higher-ranking firefighters to supervise their spouses or children so long as there is another firefighter between them. A firefighter can serve directly above a relative so long as they delegate their supervisory role to someone above them.

Lucas, who sponsored the legislation, acknowledged a potential for discrimination when the same people and families keep serving in a position for generations, but he said the department was trying to diversify.

Councilman Brandon Ellington, 3rd District at-large, was the lone vote against the ordinance. Councilwoman Teresa Loar, 2nd District at-large, was absent.

At the same time, Sylvia Brown, the Black firefighter who heads E.F.F.E.C.T., said she feels like the department is making strides since the outrage last year over the noose incident. She cited a new diversity committee set up by the department and two fire unions.

“Right now on the other side of that negative situation, the department is trying to heal itself, is trying to bridge the divide, especially since director Donna (Lake) has taken control,” Brown said.

In October, that committee held an open house for new recruits to get a look at firefighting gear and learn more about the job. The idea is to eventually hold similar demonstrations for community groups, churches and youth clubs to help recruit firefighters of color.

Last year, the department — along with other area police and fire departments — launched Camp Fury, a week-long camp where Girl Scouts train with firefighters, emergency medical responders and police officers to learn more about careers in public safety.

The department recently hired an analyst who will work to identify barriers to recruiting and promoting minorities and women.

Black leaders in Kansas City — even those who weren’t surprised by The Star’s findings — said it was cause for action.

Rev. Vernon P. Howard Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, said that for years, Black firefighters have complained about discrimination and the lack of opportunities for sought-after fire stations and high-ranking positions.

In a city with such large communities of color, Howard said the department’s diversity “must be addressed.”

The Rev. James Tindall said he has raised issues — particularly the hiring of Black firefighters and segregation of stations — with the department.

Over the years, several Black firefighters who feel they’ve been discriminated against have come to meetings of the Urban Summit, which was founded by Tindall, a former Jackson County legislator.

Most recently, he said he pressed Lake on the issue when the department asked for the Urban Summit’s support in its campaign this spring for the ¼-cent sales tax increase voters passed in June.

“I would hope these things would go away,” he said after learning of The Star’s findings.

“What you just stated is, you know, very hurting, and (I’m) dumbfounded, but I’m not surprised.”

Read the next two parts in the series, examining how Kansas City’s fire stations are segregated and how the upper ranks of the department remain overwhelmingly white.

This story was originally published December 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Racism in the KCFD: Black and women firefighters face discrimination and harassment."

Allison Kite

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4088

Allison Kite reports on City Hall and local politics for The Star. She joined the paper in February 2018 and covered Midterm election races on both sides of the state line. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism with minors in economics and public policy from the University of Kansas.