The victims were Black, so neither the truth, nor their lives seemed to matter.

Not that The Kansas City Star or its sister paper, The Kansas City Times, said as much. The preeminent papers for white Kansas City — staffed by white reporters as they would be for the first 85 of their 140 years — presumably thought they were being objective when on Feb. 23, 1922, The Times ran a story beneath a single column front-page headline:

“Two Patrolmen Are Shot.”

The Kansas City police officers, wounded in their limbs and alive, were white. One, Charles D. Barger, was a 29-year-old World War I hero, a Medal of Honor winner who’d been on the force for 15 months.

Who would doubt his word?

But The Kansas City Call did. Had the killing happened today, it is possible that protesters would be chanting the name Frank Elliott as they do those of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and others.

What the city’s prime Black newspaper knew then is what a review of decades of The Star and Times’ early stories clearly reveals. Black people in Kansas City were written about in The Star and Times more often as criminals — “brutes,” “low negroes,” “dangerous negroes” — or as the denizens of a crime-ridden world, than in any other fashion, one-sided negative portrayals with an incalculable effect on generations of Kansas Citians. Rarely, even up into the 1960s, did the papers doubt, challenge or investigate the police version of events, or interview Black victims.

“Home Invaded and Man Killed,” The Call said in a banner headline, a direct challenge to The Star and Times’ coverage.

“Frank Elliot lies dead in the coroner’s office as the result of a bullet wound received at the hands of a police officer who entered the house where he lived, 1724 Holly Street,” the paper began.

Elliot’s brother, John, yet to be located, stumbled from his house after being shot two to four times in the stomach.

“Those who depend upon the white press for their information,” The Call continued, “are told Officer Barger’s story …”

Barger’s life in subsequent years would descend into poverty and violent chaos, until he cut his own throat in 1936. The police account is the only source of events in The Times’ piece that day. The claim was that Barger and his partner, Howard Pollard, had gone to the house because they were investigating a couple of “negro” men and they were “in search of whisky” amid Prohibition. Pollard went upstairs and began rummaging through a trunk, and just as he found a pistol, he claimed one of the Black men attacked and disarmed him. Shots rang out. Barger rushed up the stairs. More shots. Barger was hit in the arm and wrist, the story said. A bullet pierced Pollard’s forearm. The Times story ends with a list of Barger’s war medals.

The Star followed up with a story saying Frank Elliott bled to death at the hospital.

“The story as it appears in The Star does not say that the officers found any whiskey,” The Call reported correctly, “that they found any disturbance going on, that they found any wrong whatever.”

The police, dressed in plainclothes, had no search warrant, The Call again challenged. The brothers had come to Kansas City for work; Frank was a can washer at the Keystone Creamery on Southwest Boulevard, described “as the best can washer we ever had.” His brother was a member of the respected J.W. Hurse Lodge of Masons and had lived in the boarding house for two years. When Mrs. Redmond, owner of the home, heard gunfire, she also heard the shouts of one officer.

“Die, you ____ dog! Stand up,” The Call said she heard him say. “You’re not hurt. I ought to finish the ____!”

None of those details appeared in The Star or Times. If any Black people were interviewed, they were never quoted. No follow-up story was done — which, with rare, few exceptions, was and would be the case at The Star and Times for decades.

A lynching and a bombing

No follow-up was written in years past when, in May 1900, Henry Darley, maybe 25 years old, was dragged by a mob from a cell in Liberty, a rope thrown over his neck, and lynched near midnight from the courthouse railing. A city worker turned out the town’s lights at the mob’s request. The sheriff had gone home.

The Star story described how Darley prayed, “Oh, Heavenly father, forgive me of my sins and pray for my soul,” and how multiple men were needed to heave the rope.

“A gurgling and gasping sound issued from his throat,” the story said, “and life was not extinct for seven or eight minutes.”

Darley had been arrested for the alleged attempted “assault” of a young, white waitress, who, the day before, said she was afraid when he allegedly entered a room with her, closed the door and grabbed her around the waist. He fled when she screamed. Darley was arrested, but had not been tried. He had not been found guilty of anything.

The mob hung a sign on the young man’s dangling corpse.

“We treat them all alike. See? We protect our homes.”

The papers offered scant coverage when the homes of Black residents were terrorized. The Star gave only six paragraphs in 1925 when “a stick of dynamite or powder bomb” was planted at the front door of a home at 1901 Montgall Ave., just purchased by Samuel R. Hopkins. Hopkins, president of the Square Deal Realty and Loan Co., was one of Kansas City’s leading Black citizens. He was not at home at the time.

The bomb “seemingly was a warning for negroes to keep from locating in the district,” The Star began, then ended, “Negroes are rapidly taking over the Nineteenth and Montgall districts.”

So it would continue at the papers for 40 more years as it did at most white, major newspapers.

“It ties into what we’re dealing with now. It’s so baked in,“ said Wayne Dawkins, a professor of journalism at Morgan State University in Baltimore, a former reporter and author of multiple books on Black journalists and journalism. “If they (Black readers) looked in the white press, they were criminals or some pox on American society. It tended to be just horrifically negative. It was either you had done wrong, or some wrong was done to you; that is when you got coverage.”

Or not. In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was killed, dragged at night from his great-uncle’s Mississippi home and beaten to death. He had allegedly “assaulted” a married 21-year-old white woman when he “wolf-whistled” and propositioned her days prior inside her husband’s general store. Till’s battered body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River. Two white men — the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, John Milam — were put on trial.

In Kansas City, readers of The Call received a score of stories and hundreds of front page column inches in the run-up to the trial and afterward. It took an all-white jury 67 minutes to declare the men not guilty and set them free. The Call ran a photo of the teen’s devastated mother.

The Times ran only two stories on the front page. One was on the woman’s claim that the 14-year-old Till “seized” her at the store. The other, big — top of the front page — was the acquittal of the two white men, with photos of them embracing their wives.

No photo of Till ran. No photo of his grieving mother.

“I started in 1956 and at that point there wasn’t the slightest effort to treat Blacks as normal people,” Donald Hoffmann, The Star’s former architecture critic, told Star reporter Brian Burnes, who interviewed him among 30 Star and Times reporters for a 1998 master’s thesis on The Star’s coverage of civil rights. “When I first came to the papers,” Hoffmann said, “I worked at police headquarters, and we were instructed not even to pay attention to Black murders or Black traffic fatalities. They just weren’t reported.”

In 1968, racial tensions in Kansas City ignited into rioting when on April 9, the Kansas City school district failed to close schools that day for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4. Six people were killed over three days of riots in Kansas City, all Black and male, with at least four, perhaps all, shot by police. It was suggested that snipers might have been involved in two deaths, but no snipers were ever found or identified.

A mayor’s commission report would later determine that four of the people killed on April 10 near the Byron Hotel were all unarmed “innocent victims,” including George Edward McKinney Sr. and his 16-year-old son, George Jr.

On Aug. 18, one day after the Mayor’s Commission on Civil Disorders report was released, The Star ran tiny profiles of each person, taken directly from the report, with no independent reporting. At best, the profiles, with no quotes from family or friends about the victims’ passions or achievements, painted unflattering portraits.

Maynard Gough, shot by police, thought to be 31, had sickle cell disease which “limits life expectancy to less than 30 years.”

Charles (Shugg) Martin, shot by police, 44, high-school dropout, married, divorced, dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army, had a criminal record, “tried unsuccessfully to be a professional football player … was unable to hold a job and was a confirmed alcoholic.”

Even of teenager George Edward McKinney Jr., who was shot alongside his dad, the paper noted he was religious like his father and athletic, but also said, “He was attending Central High School where he was considered an average student.”

Black people dismissed

The first edition of The Star, on Sept. 18, 1880, included this story: George Mitchell, colored, was hanged at Troy, O., yesterday for the murder of his mistress.

Some 150 stories would soon appear in The Star that used either the word “negro” or “colored” in its first few months. Of those, only one — a single news item from November 1880 — paints Black people in anything close to a positive social light. The item is 16 words long: “New York negroes are about to petition Garfield to appoint one colored member of his cabinet.”

In at least two-thirds of stories, Black people were written about as murderers wielding guns, knives and sometimes axes. They are thieves or accused rapists, often being lynched or running from lynch mobs. Two early stories focused on Black women. Both were about prostitutes.

“Let me say this, I am not surprised,” said Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, an associate professor of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, where she teaches about race, gender and media. “From the 1800s forward — right after the Civil War, during Reconstruction — Black people to some were still not considered fully human. Even as you move forward, you’re still going to find Black people being dismissed by the majority of society with the white American press enabling that.”

Early stories that were not focused on crime tended to be belittling and mocking. The paper’s Star Beams column from Oct 11. used Mark Twain-like dialect to tell a story squarely at Black people’s expense, casting the central figure as buffoonish.

“A negro preacher described hell as ice-cold, where the wicked froze to all eternity. When asked why, he said, ‘Cause I don’t dare to tell dem people noffin else. Why, if I say hell is warm, some of dem ole rheumatic niggers be wanting to start down dar de bery fus’ frost.’”

The Star’s coverage of the Black community changed over the next few decades to include occasional pieces tied to politics, housing, education and, after 1920, sports with the rise of the Negro Leagues and the Kansas City Monarchs.

But such positive press was rare, as was crusading journalism benefiting minorities. Throughout their histories, Kansas City’s Black-owned newspapers, such as The Kansas City Rising Son, The Kansas City Sun, The Kansas City Call and The Kansas City American, would champion the cause of racial betterment and extol the achievements of Kansas City’s leading Black citizens and best students.

In 1926, The Call under publisher Chester A. Franklin was running regular tallies of Black-on-Black killings to try to combat the waste and scourge. The Call also wrote stories that fought for integrated juries, passage of anti-lynching laws and questioned brutal police tactics. Black-owned papers were geared toward racial uplift, writing about Black students receiving their doctorates, soldiers decorated as heroes, successful business leaders, orators and politicians.

“The Black press did what the white press should have been doing, but wasn’t,” Bramlett-Solomon said.

She said that while it is true that the mainstream press has “evolved” in its coverage of race, major inequities still exist. As recently as 2018, Travis L. Dixon, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Urbana, released a study of the news media, “A Dangerous Distortion of Our Families,” that still shows news and opinion media over-representing Black fathers as abandoning their kids and Black families as being poor, on welfare and involved in crime greater than what statistics show.

A war hero dies

Much has changed since Officer Barger burst in on James Elliott and his brother nearly 100 years ago. Much has not.

Nine years after Elliott was killed, Barger agreed to leave the police force because of his “physical condition,” including the wounds he had suffered from the shooting on Holly Street. In October 1930, he had been suspended for brandishing his gun at the water meter reader who threatened to turn off his service.

By 1932, more than two years into the Great Depression, he fell on hard times. A Star story described him walking, literally hat in hand, down the aisle of the Defenders’ temple alongside his 5-year-old daughter as pennies, nickels and dimes clinked into a donation plate.

By then the facts of the Holly Street shooting had been inflated. The Star wrote that Barger, the hero, had been shot in his limbs, chest and head not while searching for whiskey without a warrant, but in pursuit of a “negro wanted for murder.”

Stories on Barger did not mention shell shock from the war, now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. But in 1933, he was admitted to a hospital as “deranged,” after he threatened to shoot his wife and kill himself. Divorce followed. He remarried.

Then, on Nov. 24, 1936, Barger slit his own throat with a hunting knife. He had been enraged, in pursuit of his second wife, shouting for her at her father’s house in Oak Grove.

“I want to see Ruth,” he apparently said. “I want to cut her throat.”

Unable to gain access, he returned to his own nearby farmhouse, where he set it ablaze. Sheriff’s deputies rushed in.

“Interrupted by officers as he was engaged in setting fire to his house,” The Times reported, “Barger faced them, waving a large hunting knife. Blood poured from three self-inflicted wounds in his throat. His clothing was torn, he was burned in a dozen places.”

He lunged at a deputy, who shot Barger in the leg. The war hero died the following day at age 44.

The name Frank Elliot, the Black man shot in his own home, was never mentioned.

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

Eric Adler

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4431

Eric Adler, at The Star since 1985, has the luxury of writing about any topic or anyone, focusing on in-depth stories about people at both the center and on the fringes of the news. His work has received dozens of national and regional awards.