It was the day after one of the most devastating floods in Kansas City’s history, and the scene on the Country Club Plaza was making headlines.

Police cordoned off the shopping area from onlookers who’d come to gawk at the stores and restaurants ravaged by floodwaters that roiled up from the normally placid Brush Creek nearby. The Kansas City Star and its sister paper, The Kansas City Times, would write about it that day, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 1977, and for days and weeks to come.

Just a few miles southeast, 14-year-old Ricky Turner and his family were searching the creek for signs of his 42-year-old mother, Helen Turner, who’d been swallowed up in the raging water the night before. They would also search for days in the newspapers’ pages for any mention of her.

In the flood’s aftermath, The Star and Times wrote a few stories about some of the people who had died or lost family members, or pets. They described damage to homes, businesses and roadways in the suburbs.

And day after day they enumerated the property damage at the Country Club Plaza, flooded under 5 feet of water.

But Black residents living in Kansas City’s East Side neighborhoods along the creek and tributaries that also poured from their banks on that historic day would later complain, and still do today, that the papers’ coverage focused on the Plaza and more affluent neighborhoods and all but ignored how the flood destroyed their homes and upended their lives.

The Sunday after the rainstorm, The Star wrote of 24 flood victims — but not Helen Turner, whose body had yet to be found. In an expansive rundown, it said, “there will always be the memory of the surging flood wreaking havoc in the night.”

How that story was told by the city’s two mainstream papers of record, however, depended on where you lived.

That same Sunday, on Sept. 18, Helen Turner’s body was found tangled in brush and debris along the creek at Elmwood Avenue. She would be the last of 25 flood victims discovered.

The next day, her name, and nothing more, would be included among a list of the dead in The Star, which was an afternoon paper then. Her obituary would run in The Times on Sept. 20.

Ricky Turner, now 57, recalls the coverage.

“I remember that it was really traumatic,” Turner recently recalled. “I woke up that morning and everything was fine. I went to bed that night and the word ‘mother’ had been erased from my vocabulary. It’s been a long time, but I remember the Kansas City Call (the city’s Black-owned, weekly paper) wrote about my mother. The Kansas City Star wrote about the Plaza.”

The story of Helen Turner’s life and death would not be told by The Star or Times. Until now.

Walls of water

The first wave of record-setting rain arrived early Sept. 12, just after midnight, saturating the ground, filling creeks and rivers and setting the stage for what was to come. The second wave arrived at about 8 that evening, bringing the day’s total rainfall to more than 16 inches.

All that water forced 11 miles of Brush Creek to swell beyond its concrete-coated banks.

Indiscriminately, walls of water, up to 15 feet high and rushing up to 20 mph, roared east from the Kansas side of the state line. The water tore through Kansas City and smack into the minority neighborhoods along the lower end of the creek east of Troost Avenue, the city’s unofficial racial dividing line.

Mud-laden water swallowed up roads and bridges. Cars were tossed about like Tinkertoys. Water flooded businesses, destroyed homes and left death in its wake.

Ricky Turner, an only child, and his mother had spent much of Sept. 12 at Zion Grove Missionary Baptist Church, 2801 Swope Parkway, where she worked as a secretary.

“Dad worked by the Plaza,” Turner says now. “He was a cook at Streetcar Named Desire, so we left the church about 8:30 or 9 p.m. to pick him up from work.

“It was raining. It had been raining all day. We didn’t know it was flooding. We had to cross the bridge over the creek at 47th and Paseo, and the water was high there.”

Just as his mom drove onto the bridge, their 1975 Mercury Monarch stalled out.

“We could see the wall of water coming,” Turner recalled. “It was really high.” At first, he said, they waited in the car for help, but no one arrived. Soon, “water started coming into the car. We could feel the car starting to move, so we got out. We were standing there together when it seemed like the ground just gave way.”

Turner said the two held on to a light pole for a while. “Then we were washed into the creek.” They thought they could make their way across, Turner said.

“It was more of me being only 14 and following my mom’s lead,” he said. The creek swallowed them up. “The water was full of debris, and it was moving fast.”

Turner was able to grab hold of a tree branch and pull himself to safety.

‘The Plaza flood’

The first-day headlines in The Star and Times mourned the property damage on the Plaza and announced the first 18 bodies discovered.

In two cases, those bodies were identified only as those of white women, one found in a car at Ward Parkway and Pennsylvania Avenue and another at Raytown and Ozark roads. The race of other unidentified bodies was not mentioned.

The Star and Times talked about patrons who’d been trapped inside the Plaza III Steakhouse, which, at the south end of the Plaza, caught the full force of floodwaters. They wrote about shattered windows and millions of dollars in ruined merchandise. Photos showed cars swept away and deposited on the Plaza tennis courts.

“The Country Club Plaza — one of Kansas City’s gems — lay shattered and mud-covered today,” The Star said. “One of the greatest tragedies in the flood’s aftermath came when what was believed to be a natural gas explosion about 3 a.m. started a fire that devastated the 600 block of West 48th Street.”

Many of the photos in that first week showed devastated residents looking over piles of soggy belongings, being rescued by boat and queuing up for disaster relief. The only Black faces were the headshots of two Black men who died and a gathering of curious onlookers, whom The Star claimed were hindering cleanup. All other faces were white.

No stories about the water rushing into Black residents’ garages and carrying away cars, and memories. Or about water pouring under their doorways and penetrating walls, chasing residents to the rooftop.

Those stories would only be found in the Kansas City Call.

National media clearly ignored Kansas City’s Black community as well.

“While damage in the Country Club Plaza area was the most visible to residents of Kansas City, suburbs to the west and east also took a heavy flood beating,” a Washington Post story said on Sept. 14, 1977. “Across the state line in northeast Johnson County, Kan., hundreds of homes were damaged. The situation was much the same in the Independence, Mo., area east of the city.”

Mike Fancher was city editor at The Star in 1977 after starting as an intern seven years earlier. Few minority reporters worked at the paper, he recalled.

“If you don’t have a diverse perspective in your newsroom you fall into the trap of seeing the world as you live it,” Fancher said recently from his home in Seattle.

But, he said, other factors drove the limits on coverage too.

“I do think that a very compelling dynamic is that we wrote and edited newspapers for our readers and we sought the readers that our advertisers sought, and that presented us with a white focus,” said Fancher, who would go on to become the longtime executive editor of The Seattle Times before retiring in 2008.

Fancher was in The Star newsroom the morning of Sept. 13, after the rains had mostly subsided. He remembers that almost immediately reporters and editors dubbed the disaster “The Plaza Flood.”

“Once you name a story that, then coverage emanates from that. Our coverage very much focused on the Plaza,” Fancher said.

“Were we guilty of not appreciating the magnitude of the flood outside the Plaza? Yes.” But it was not with the conscious intention to ignore the woe in the minority community.

“Property damage is often elevated over the importance of Black lives,” said Nicole Rodgers, founder and executive director of Family Story, a nonprofit that works to address and dismantle discriminatory privilege in America. “We are seeing that happen even today when the media reports on broken windows during protests over unarmed Black people killed by police.”

In the month after Sept. 12, The Star and Times collectively published 132 articles about the flood and the death it caused. None substantively covered the devastated minority communities or the residents who felt neglected by authorities in its aftermath.

In addition to the devastation on the Plaza, they wrote about the collapse of the roof of Village Colonial Church in Prairie Village, and the foundation of a house in Independence that washed away. In Blue Springs, intersections were impassable, and basements flooded. Residents of a mobile home park in Eastern Jackson County evacuated by boat.

A second-day story in The Times estimated property damage at nearly $5.2 million and said at least 1,200 homes were so badly damaged they were uninhabitable. But it never said where those homes were or who lived in them.

A family’s flood story

“The Star wrote about the people who died, but not about the people who suffered,” said Mickey Sutherlin, now 71, who lost his father in the flood.

Most of the dead were given one story apiece, in The Star’s Sunday wrap-up. The paper wrote about Sutherlin’s dad, 49-year-old Leroy Adams, a truck driver and hard working family man, and how his body was found in his car after it was washed off a bridge near the Plaza. The story never addressed his family’s grief and loss.

The last time he saw his father, Sutherlin was a 28-year-old U.S. Marine not long home from a tour in Vietnam.

Sutherlin was staying at his parents’ home at 49th Street and Paseo Boulevard, just south of Brush Creek. The morning after the storm he peered through the living room window, worrying about his father as water spilled over the banks of the creek and flooded the streets.

His father had yet to return from his night job cleaning buildings.

“Then all of a sudden a wall of water came through,” said Sutherlin, recalling the moment vividly when the flood rushed up to the house. “It moved fast, like it was coming after you.”

He watched his “little blue Toyota” float out of the driveway. Water filled the garage. But most of the house, which sits on a slight hill, was spared. Other houses along Paseo suffered much worse, Sutherlin said.

Sutherlin knew his dad’s usual route because as a teen he often helped him clean buildings near the Plaza. He’d drive south down Broadway, cross the creek near the tennis courts and then turn east toward The Paseo, home.

Sutherlin suspects his father never made it across the bridge. As soon as they could, the family went searching.

“We had been in that creek for days looking for him every day, all day long,” Sutherlin said.

On Sept. 15, a search and rescue team spotted the top of Adams’ yellow Pontiac in the creek. His dad’s body was in the backseat, or where a seat would have been.

Sutherlin figured the water had moved with such force that it busted out the car windows, tore out the seats and ripped the clothes from his father’s body.

“When they found him, all he had on were his work boots,” Sutherlin said.

“We lost our dad, and all our memories that were in the (garage), including all my military stuff. That flood tore our family apart.”

The next day, his father’s name appeared in a list of the dead.

By contrast, the day after the flooding, a headline stretched across page 6 in The Star: “Prairie Village Family Killed in Flood.”

“Their late model Mercedes washed off of Lee Boulevard into a rain swollen creek” the Star story said. Marshall and Margaret Kleinstein, their daughter, who was about 3, and their son, 7, died.

It also mentions another Johnson County resident, the Rev. Harold A. Thomas of Fairway, a missing pastor who was Black. He and his wife had left their car and tried to wade through high water and walk to their nearby home. He was swept away by floodwaters.

On that same page was a story about a missing cat, including a photo of his Raytown owners, who were white. Another story details property damage to Mission Shopping Center in Johnson County, Milgram Food Store’s central warehouse and the General Motors Assembly Plant in the Leeds district. It mentioned that floodwaters rushed through a $200,000 home in Mission Hills, emptying it of its contents.

Proof, in black and white

None of the stories mentioned anyone’s race. But certain areas of the metro, more affluent areas where few minorities lived, got the bulk of the papers’ attention.

Little was mentioned, either in photos or words, about the damage to businesses and homes or the loss of life in some predominantly Black neighborhoods.

As part of a longer Times story Sept. 16 about aid to flood victims, all of one paragraph was devoted to the Town Fork neighborhood, south of Brush Creek near what is now Bruce R. Watkins Drive. It quoted Watkins, then a city councilman, saying neighbors were hard hit by flood and subsequent fire, but rescue workers concentrated on the Plaza. Town Fork was one of the last areas the city cleaned up.

One East Side area the papers did write more about was the Leeds district. In a Sept. 17 Times feature, residents said the city and media were too focused on the Plaza. Few reporters and no politicians had ventured to the neighborhood at that point.

Residents wondered whether the news coverage the Leeds area did get had more to do with the GM Assembly Plant there (which would close in 1988), rather than any interest in the residents living in that historic Black neighborhood near the Truman Sports Complex, bordered to the south by the Blue River.

“We never made it in The Star and we were a little resentful about it,” one woman told The Times then.

Indeed a page 4A story in the Times described the flooded floor of the Leeds plant and damage to cars there.

A Sept. 14 Star story painted the East Side neighborhoods with one broad brush: “It was these older, poorer areas which paid a high price yesterday for being in the path of the creek when it left its banks with a size and force never before witnessed in Kansas City.”

People rifling through debris in those communities got plenty of press. One Sept. 13 story delved into ravaged areas in Johnson County and the Plaza and then said, “In other parts of the metropolitan area residents said they were more concerned about looting than flood damage.”

The next day, reporters visited Manheim Park, at the time a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood east of the Plaza. Their story said only this about the area: “Residents on Virginia were taking matters into their own hands. ‘They started looting in the morning and they’ve been at it all day,’ said a disgusted Ernie Snyder of 4717 Virginia Ave.”

Experts on how the media report on Black and other minority communities say such mentions without a fuller view of neighborhood life perpetuated stereotypes and isolated people of color.

“When it’s never there, when no one ever knocks on your door to ask, how are you doing, well then you just feel no one cares. And worse, the proof is in black and white,” said Rodgers of the nonprofit Family Story.

“And then in the midst of a tragedy during which little is written about your community, identifying it only as the place where looting is occurring, where residents are more afraid of the looters than damage from the flood, further highlights the perception of Black Americans as poor, dysfunctional and criminal.

“These portrayals reinforce the implicit bias people already have about racial differences, which inform behaviors and attitudes that show up in all aspects of our lives.”

The Black press

Black people hoping to read about their neighbors and their struggles turned to the Kansas City Call, founded in 1919 by Chester A. Franklin, a Black editor and publisher from Colorado. It still operates today.

The Call listed the names of eight Black flood victims. But it also featured stories and photos about their lives. Its reporters went into the neighborhoods and talked with residents.

Zane Reed and Barbara Cooper talked of fleeing their apartment at 3500 E. 51st St. and getting trapped on the building’s roof. Reed described waist-deep water in the apartment, and at one point it started gushing in from the hallway and “coming out of the walls.”

Captured in a Call story and photo were the carcasses of horses from the Bo Dollar riding club near Swope Park, sinking into mud left behind when floodwaters receded. The stables stood 25 feet from Town Fork Creek, which flows into Brush Creek. The water rose beyond its banks and claimed 12 of the animals, horses often seen trotting through the park with inner city youth sitting high on their backs.

The Call’s story pointed out that the club, esteemed in the Black community, gave some 250 youth someplace to go and taught them to ride and care for horses.

The Star wrote a sentence about the dead horses and described the club as “a riding organization founded and operated by ex-convicts.”

It wasn’t mentioned again.

The pushback

For days, The Star filled its front pages with stories about cleanup and repairs on the Plaza. On Sept. 25, the annual Plaza Art Fair went off without a hitch. On Thanksgiving Day, more than 100,000 people attended the annual lighting ceremony with nearly no sign the shopping area had been mired in mud two months earlier.

Meanwhile, Black flood victims were saying they weren’t being helped. But The Star and Times made no mention of it until the complaints reached City Council. A Sept. 16 story told of Bernard Powell, president of the Social Action Committee of 20, speaking at a council meeting:

“‘We have people in our neighborhood who need help now. They’ve waited four days already. There ain’t no way in hell they can pay those loans,’ Powell yelled, drowning out the moderator, Councilman Bruce Watkins.”

The Rev. Emanuel Cleaver II, now a congressman but then vice president and founder of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, accused federal agencies of “discrimination,” “‘insensitivity” and “incompetency in the administering of flood relief to blacks,” according to a Sept. 16 story in the Times.

There were no stories investigating his claims. But The Times did cover the press conferences.

Cleaver recalls now that he and other Black leaders posed as flood victims looking for federal aid to find out how Black residents were treated.

The Times mentioned it in a Sept. 29 story on page 7A, “S.C.L.C. Says Flood Aid Program Discriminatory.” It quoted Cleaver and listed his complaints, although the bulk of the comments came from federal officials.

Both Missouri Gov. Joseph Teasdale and Kansas City Mayor Charles B. Wheeler denied Cleaver’s accusations. Again, the papers did no independent reporting.

And the Times reported that after assessing the damage, an aide to President Jimmy Carter “concluded that everything that could be done was being done and returned home early.”

The following May, Cleaver testified in Washington, D.C., before a congressional subcommittee investigating any inequities in the Federal Disaster Relief Program.

He brought with him copies of The Star and Times as evidence that news coverage virtually ignored the Black community while plastering the Plaza on front pages multiple times.

The Times, in a May 17 front-page story, covered Cleaver’s testimony, saying he denounced federal employees and called them “disaster pimps,” saying, “even in a disaster, America could not transcend color.” Most of the article quoted federal and Kansas City officials challenging Cleaver’s claims.

Recently Cleaver told The Star that it was the media and officials’ lack of concern that led him to pursue a political career. He was elected to City Council in 1979 and in 1991 became Kansas City’s first Black mayor. In November he was reelected to a ninth term in Congress.

Gerald Jordan, who is Black, was writing editorials for The Star in 1977 and recalls the stories.

“What I remember is that people were stunned by what happened on the Plaza because it was so visible,” said Jordan, now a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas. “The tennis courts looked like a used car lot. I would say though that I did not perceive any malice as much as it was just blind.

“The coverage went to the Plaza like a moth to a flame, and so the subsequent coverage fell through the cracks. The Star covered institutions, not people.”

And he remembers the criticism.

“I do recall that there was a lot of pushback from the Black community,” Jordan said. “They were saying to us you are so worried about the Country Club Plaza and there were lives lost here in the southeast part of the city.”

To be clear, like the railroad ties on which Union Pacific laid its first tracks through Kansas City’s West Bottoms, racism was planted in the soil the city was built on long before the 1977 flood. The news treatment given to the Black neighborhoods was just another freight train blowing by.

Perhaps subconsciously, a Sept. 13 page 5A story in The Star referred to the Linwood Boulevard Seventh Day Adventist Church as “a place for refugees from the flood.” Suburbanites were referred to as families displaced by the flood or flood victims.

A photo in The Times Sept. 14 showed some concerned Black residents watching as police and firefighters pulled a car from the creek. “Officials said crowds of sightseers were seriously hampering rescue and cleanup efforts,” the caption said.

Jordan would not hang the papers’ failure on intended racism. Instead, he said, “I don’t recall that there were reporters whose job it was to cover specific neighborhoods, so that put us at a disadvantage.”

That way of covering the news, Jordan said, “most definitely” left minorities and poor people out because they weren’t running the institutions or setting the policies The Star and Times gravitated to for coverage.

Rodgers of the Family Story nonprofit says such omissions reverberate.

“If you erase images of Black families from the coverage of the tragedy, then people are not able to summon the same kind of empathy for them as they do for the white families that are shown.

“Sometimes this is done intentionally, but often it is not. We all are part of this system that perpetuates the false narrative about who Black people are. You don’t have to be intentionally racist to perpetuate the inaccuracies. But even if it is not intentional, the consequences are the same.”

This story was originally published December 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.

Mará Rose Williams

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4419

Mará Rose Williams is The Star’s Senior Opinion Columnist. She previously was assistant managing editor for race & equity issues, a member of the Star’s Editorial Board and an award-winning columnist. She has written on all things education for The Star since 1998, including issues of inequity in education, teen suicide, universal pre-K, college costs and racism on university campuses. She was a writer on The Star’s 2020 “Truth in Black and White” project and the recipient of the 2021 Eleanor McClatchy Award for exemplary leadership skills and transformative journalism.