Jackson, Johnson, Wornall: Slaveholders all. Time to change Kansas City area names?
Instead of the South rising again, monuments to the Confederacy have been falling like Johnny Reb at Vicksburg since the death of George Floyd, killed on Memorial Day beneath the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.
The same holds for memorials to figures who once held slaves or helped promote racism.
Thursday evening, Jackson County Executive Frank White called for two statues of Andrew Jackson — for which the county is named — to be removed from the front of the Jackson County courthouses downtown and in Independence and located elsewhere.
“Countless men, women and children come through the doors of our courthouses every day. And every day, racism and discrimination are staring them in the face,” White said in a written statement, released after the downtown statue was defaced with red and green graffiti earlier that day. On Friday, the statue was covered with a tarp. When the county legislature meets Monday, White will recommend removing the statues.
Meantime, Kansas City’s parks officials are now deciding whether to change the name of the J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain and J.C. Nichols Parkway on the Country Club Plaza because of the developer’s deed restrictions, which prevented Black people from living in his white developments.
The question now is how far should the Kansas City area go? Is there a case to be made for changing the name of Johnson County, named for a Southern sympathizing slave owner? Or Wornall Road?
Throughout the area where the Border War raged, one can hardly walk, drive or breathe outside air and not be near a place that memorializes white men who supported the enslavement of an entire race of people. Slaveholders’ names are those of many of our counties — Jackson, Johnson, Clay, Cass. Others are on Kansas City’s major streets, including Wornall, McGee and Troost.
“Missouri was obviously a slave state, and the vast majority of its early white settlers were from the upper South,” said Diane Mutti Burke, a professor of history of the American South and Civil War at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “While not all owned slaves, most of them would have supported slavery in some capacity.”
Aside from J.C. Nichols, currently there are no plans to change any names. But on her personal Facebook page, Jackson County Legislator Crystal Williams recently mused that perhaps it was time to not only remove the Jackson statues, but also to rename the county Truman County, after the 33rd president from Independence.
“I think it is something we should have a conversation about at some point,” she said. “It is a longer and broader conversation.”
Chris Goode, who, as member of the Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners, proposed removing Nichols’ name from the fountain and road, said the board has no plans to change other streets or memorials, at least for now. But the issue had been raised.
“I think it is fair to say it already is a conversation,” Goode said.
It is one that experts on Kansas City’s racial history say is time to have.
“With any of these monuments or names,” said Mutti Burke, “the important thing is to think about how these names and monuments reflect who we are as a community now. How do we want to be defined as a community?
“… Some people try to make the slippery slope argument: What do you do about George Washington? But I would argue that there is a big difference between Robert E. Lee, for example, and George Washington as far as the nations they were attempting to build.
“I do think it’s time to have this conversation. It is a difficult conversation, but it’s also an important one.”
The Rev. Vernon Howard, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, whose push last year to rename The Paseo after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was turned back by voters, said that now is the time for change.
“It is pressure that is moving us now, and we’re glad of it,” he said of recent protests. “All of the attempts at reforms, all the statements that are coming from various places, the intention to remove statues and memorials to people who have been filled with hate and racism — these kinds of things should have been done a long time ago.”
Know your history
Among the names that currently define the Kansas City area:
▪ Jackson County. Named for Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), hero of the War of 1812 who would become the seventh president of the United States. He owned at least 150 slaves at the time of his death in 1845. Jackson, in 1830, signed into law the Indian Removal Act, which led to the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans. Some 4,000 Cherokee died on what became known as the Trail of Tears.
▪ Johnson County. Named for the Rev. Thomas Johnson (1802-1865), a Methodist missionary who established the Shawnee Indian Mission in what’s now Fairway. Besides “civilizing” the Native Americans displaced by the Indian Removal Act, Johnson was also a slave holder and Southern sympathizer who, during the years of Bleeding Kansas, supported making Kansas a slave state. He was murdered in 1865. It remains unsolved. Proponents of slavery and abolitionists blamed each other, as Johnson had enemies on both sides.
▪ Clay County. Named for Henry Clay (1777-1852), a statesman and senator representing Kentucky and secretary of state under President John Quincy Adams. Clay called slavery “this great evil … the darkest spot in the map of our country.” He, nonetheless, owned 60 slaves and believed white and Black people could not live in harmony, saying slaves should be freed and sent to Africa.
▪ Cass County. Named for Lewis Cass (1782-1866), a U.S. senator from Michigan. He was secretary of war under Andrew Jackson and helped implement the Indian Removal Act. Cass, who owned slaves, coined the term “popular sovereignty” to describe his belief that the people in territories entering the union should decide whether they were to be free or slave states.
▪ Troost Avenue. Named for Dr. Benoist Troost (1802-1865), a Dutch physician who emigrated to Westport in 1847 and built the area’s first brick hotel, the Gillis House Hotel and published an early newspaper. He was a slave owner.
▪ McGee Street. Named for Allen B. H. McGee (1815-1903), the son of Kentuckian James McGee, an early pioneer who acquired 1,000 acres in what would become the heart of Kansas City. McGee amassed a fortune trading and outfitting settlers during the westward expansion. Owner of at least five slaves, he sided with the South. Just shy of his 54th birthday, McGee would marry 19-year-old Susan Burton Gill, whose father owned at least 20 slaves on a farmstead whose land is now occupied by the Verona Hills subdivision and The Barstow School in South Kansas City, between Wornall and State Line roads.
▪ Wornall Road. Named for John Wornall (1822-1892) who was 21 when he arrived from Kentucky with his parents, and settled on a 500-acre farmstead two miles southeast of Westport. He married Eliza Johnson, daughter of Johnson County’s namesake, in 1854. He became involved in banking and religious philanthropy, supporting William Jewell College. The Wornalls were Southern sympathizers, owning six slaves in 1850 and four in 1860.
Sarah Bader-King, director of programs and curator at the John Wornall House museum, 6115 Wornall Road, said that if the city decided to change the name of Wornall Road, it is unlikely that the museum would take a strong position one way or the other.
“I mean, I think you have to put everything into historical context,” Bader-King said. “At the same time, slavery was a huge atrocity. And there is no moral excusing of it. And, I think, if the city chose to rename Wornall Road, I think that would be the prerogative of the citizens. It is not something that the Wornall House would necessarily have a strong say in.”
She continued. “We, ourselves, are not trying to memorialize John Wornall as an amazing figure in history, necessarily. We are trying to tell the story of an antebellum farm, which includes the enslaved people who lived here. So, we’re trying to give a full picture and we don’t like to leave enslaved people out of that. We’re a museum and we’re trying to educate.”
A national trend
But truth and education are also prime arguments for preserving such monuments, said Lawrence Kuznar, an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
“Back in the day, we were trained — as part of our professional ethics — that you don’t destroy things,” he said this week. “These are all artifacts. They tell us something about the past. At my heart, I’m a scientist, which means telling the truth, warts and all.”
Kuznar said a clear answer is to add more explanatory plaques.
In an opinion piece, “I detest our Confederate monuments. But they should remain,” written on the heels of 2017’s violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kuznar said that removing Confederate statues amounts to “whitewashing our history.”
“We should let them stand and use them to remind ourselves of what we are and are not, the cost our forebears paid for our freedom and to educate our children,” he wrote.
The rally attracted white nationalists near a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that was to be removed. A counter-protester was killed.
“It is really easy to protest a monument,” Kuznar said this week. “And it is easy, in the context of a mob, to tear one down. It makes you feel really good. But it doesn’t really change anything. It doesn’t get at the question of what are the underlying structural reasons for why we have this problem with race in America.
“You’ve removed the statue, but you haven’t removed the problem. It’s a symbolic act.”
To many, symbols matter.
In New York City, the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History is now scheduled to be removed. Roosevelt’s figure, flanked by subservient Black and Indigenous men, is considered a symbol of colonialism and racism.
New Orleans is thinking of stripping the names of Confederates off of its streets, including that of Southern leader Jefferson Davis.
In Portland, Oregon, protesters tore down a statue of George Washington. In San Francisco, a statue of Union Gen. and President Ulysses S. Grant was felled, as was a statue of Francis Scott Key, who penned the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Each owned slaves.
Garrett S. Griffin, author of “Racism in Kansas City: A Short History,” understands the concerns of those who may want to maintain monuments to Kansas Citians like J.C. Nichols.
“People are worried about forgetting the past or wiping out the past,” said the Overland Park native, now living in Grandview. “But that is what history books are for. We don’t need street names to remember dark periods of Kansas City’s history.”
In an email, Griffin offered alternatives.
“We could honor Cathay Williams, the first black woman in the U.S. Army. A freed slave from Independence, she disguised herself as a man to fight for the Union during the Civil War,” Griffin said. “Or Pete O’Neal, head of the Kansas City Black Panthers, still in exile in Africa. Or the Rev. Nelson ‘Fuzzy’ Thompson, KC civil rights leader connected to Dr. King — ordinary people who were on the right side of history, who fought for justice and freedom instead of oppression and dehumanization.”
There is precedent in Kansas City for removing or amending memorials to slavery and its supporters.
Shortly after the Charlottesville rally, the parks department was asked to remove a monument that in 1934 was placed in the Country Club Plaza, but in 1958 was relocated to the median at 55th Street and Ward Parkway. The monument, a gift to the city by a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, honored “Loyal Women of the Old South.”
The memorial was vandalized after a story ran in The Star. Within days, it was boxed, uprooted and removed.
Before White’s announcement on Thursday, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker was aggrieved that citizens seeking justice were forced to pass by statues of Jackson at the downtown Kansas City Courthouse and the Historic Truman Courthouse without reference to him as a slaveholder or his cruel treatment of Native Americans. In December, she suggested that explanatory plaques be placed on both statues.
The Jackson County Legislature passed a resolution introduced by legislator Jalen Anderson. Bids had been taken to create plaques designed to reference Jackson’s legacy as a slaveholder and his policy that led to the Trail of Tears and the uprooting and death of thousands of Native Americans.
The plaques were to say, in part, “This statue of Jackson reminds us we are on a path that in the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr. bends toward justice. In turn, we must acknowledge past injustices to help us create a greater nation.”
Howard of the SCLC objects to the notion that such monuments and commemorative street signs are benign, or that the figures they honor ought to be understood in their time, as slavery then was legal in Missouri and elsewhere.
“As African Americans, we don’t automatically equate that which is legal to that which is moral,” he said. “We never have. Slavery was legal, but not moral. Jim Crow was legal, not moral. Segregation was legal, not moral. And, even now, in this country, there is a law called qualified immunity that can justify a police officer shooting a Black man or Black woman if he or she feels threatened or in danger. It is the law, but it’s not moral. So we don’t equate those two.”
As such, Howard said he does not understand how it can be right in Kansas City or elsewhere to maintain monuments or street names to individuals who supported slavery or the Confederacy.
Who we honor reflects what we honor, he said.
“That is why we advocate for names like Dr. Martin Luther King,” he said. “That is why we advocate for names like (Emanuel) Cleaver II. These are individuals who speak to our principles. They speak to the essence of who we are. They speak to the essence of our democracy and our freedoms for all. That is why we recommend names, because they reflect who we are.”
This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
