Overcoat buttoned up, fedora pulled down tight, an older Black man with a wooden leg hobbled through the slush clutching a sign to his chest demanding justice.

“We protest racial discrimination in the serving of customers at the cafeteria or restaurants in this store,” said the placard Ernest Robbins clung to that freezing night in January 1959.

Macy’s, Jones and three other downtown Kansas City department stores were glad to sell Robbins and other Black shoppers clothes, dishes and linens. But the stores’ dining rooms were off limits to people of color.

Municipal Auditorium had been open to all races for nearly a decade. The Swope Park swimming pool had been integrated by court order several years earlier.

But Jim Crow still lived large in parts of Kansas City and, like the department store dining rooms, hundreds of bars and restaurants were still whites-only when a reporter for The Call newspaper interviewed Robbins and snapped his picture.

“I take my wooden leg and my 74-year-old body and walk on the picket line with and for my people,” Robbins said in the article below his photograph on the front page of the Jan. 30 edition.

Over the course of the seven-week boycott that began 10 days before Christmas of 1958, the Black-owned weekly, a champion of civil rights since its founding in 1919, published dozens of stories and photos about the marches downtown. At least three editorials called for justice and equality in the store dining rooms.

The Kansas City Star and Times opinion pages didn’t make a peep. Had your only source of news been the city’s big daily papers, you’d hardly have known any of it was going on.

The jointly owned afternoon Star and morning Times were late to the boycott story and gave it scant coverage throughout the entire struggle. Readers of the Springfield (Missouri) Leader and Press learned about the protest five days before The Star published its first article: a four-paragraph story in the bottom left corner of a front page filled with more than a dozen other stories.

All through that cold winter, it was as if Ernest Robbins and the other protesters shivering on the sidewalks outside Macy’s, Jones, Peck’s, Kline’s and Emery, Bird, Thayer did not exist. The Star and Times would not give their readers an update until early February, when the boycott was nearing its conclusion.

It’s no secret why the coverage was so stingy. The Star’s second-floor newsroom was run by white men who commanded an all-white and nearly all-male staff of reporters. They wrote stories for and about white people because that’s the way the white editors felt it should be.

“We don’t need stories about these people,” Roy Roberts, the cigar-smoking top editor, reportedly told cub reporter Giles Fowler when he killed Fowler’s story about the boycott.

The papers overlooked the protest the way they overlooked nearly everything else involving the Black community prior to the mid-1960s. The exception was crime, where articles only referenced the race of a victim or alleged offender when that person was a “Negro.”

Fowler’s anecdote about his exchange with Roberts appeared in a 1998 master’s degree thesis, written by former Star reporter Brian Burnes, examining the papers’ poor coverage of civil rights issues before a newsroom leadership change led to a more progressive, albeit clumsy, approach to coverage of the Black community.

Fowler, who was among 30 former Star reporters interviewed for the project, died in 2018. But two surviving former colleagues said they don’t doubt that the exchange with Roberts happened exactly as Fowler described it.

As the civil rights movement dawned, Roberts’ Star stood still, growing as antiquated as the spittoons scattered around the newsroom.

“He froze things up,” former Star reporter Charles Hammer said, “not probably because of anything active. But because he didn’t make any decision to change anything, nothing much changed.”

Hammer, 86, was in his mid-20s when he hired on a few months before the department store boycott began. After Roberts stepped aside as company president in 1963 and Fowler’s father, Richard Fowler, took charge, he said the newspapers’ approach to the Black community changed for the better. Reporters were finally turned loose to write about issues like fair housing and employment discrimination.

“Everything changed when Roberts left,” said former Star reporter J. Harry Jones Jr., who is 90 and lives in the Chicago area.

Early in his tenure, Richard Fowler assigned a young reporter named Charles W. Gusewelle to cover the civil rights movement on a national basis. His 28-story series got prominent placement in the paper the way it wouldn’t have years earlier. Gusewelle would go on to become a beloved columnist for 37 years.

Jones, Hammer and other reporters were encouraged to write about issues affecting the Black community.

“It had become possible to act like a modern newspaper,” Hammer said.

But there would be growing pains and missteps in the decades that followed.

‘It was a segregated city’

Were it not for The Call, there would likely be no detailed written record of a signature event in Kansas City’s civil rights movement.

Online archives show that The Star and Times printed nothing, or next to it, about the department store protest.

Inspired by the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had led four years earlier, hundreds of mostly Black protesters gathered in downtown Kansas City in freezing temperatures, carrying signs like the one Robbins had and calling out other Black people who shopped at the department stores.

The Call reported that the protesters included ministers and prominent figures like Leon Jordan, owner of the Green Duck Tavern and later co-founder of the Black political club Freedom Inc.

Jordan was among the businessmen, according to the paper, who donated cash to keep the coffee pots percolating at the two churches on either side of the state line that served as boycott headquarters. H.W. Sewing, head of Douglass State Bank, named after the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, opened his wallet, too, The Call reported, as did prominent grocer and banker Isadore Gross, who would go on to become president of the Black Economic Union and what is now the Urban League of Greater Kansas City.

“Through rain, sleet and snow, the pickets keep marching,” said an editorial in the paper’s Jan. 30, 1959, edition. “They believe thoroughly in their cause and they give every indication that they will see it through.”

When the stores finally promised to drop the color barrier in February, The Call celebrated with a banner page-one headline and an editorial inside.

In The Star and Times, the boycott’s end merited only a slim, one-column news story on an inside page. Opinion writers said nothing.

In the late 1950s, civic leaders were growing increasingly concerned that racist policies at hotels, bars and restaurants were hurting business. Kansas City lost conventions of groups whose memberships included Black people.

When Major League Baseball arrived in 1955, visiting American League teams had to find rooms for their Black players in Kansas City, Kansas, during the Athletics’ homestands because they were barred from downtown hotels.

Those restrictions fell after the Yankees insisted that catcher Elston Howard, a former Negro Leaguer, stay with the rest of the team at the Hotel Muehlebach. But many restaurants still refused service.

“It was a segregated city,” Giles Fowler told Burnes. “Hotels and restaurants didn’t usually welcome Blacks, although there were some exceptions. But mostly, if you went into a hotel or restaurant you simply didn’t see a Black person unless they were carrying a tray.”

Four months after the department store boycott ended, The Star reported that the city’s commission on human relations had surveyed half of Kansas City’s 1,089 licensed eating places and found that 58% of them refused or limited service to Black people. Of those that gave a reason, most said they feared their white customers would object.

Opining later that month about an embarrassing incident that became national news, The Star’s editorial page sympathized with that position. “Kansas City Restaurants in the Cold War,” the headline read on July 31, 1959.

A story in The Times the previous day reported that an official from the Nigerian civil service union was initially denied service at a local cafeteria while visiting here as part of a delegation of foreign labor leaders. Only after it was explained that the trip was sponsored by the State Department was he allowed to stay and eat with the rest of his group.

“I consider the request an insult not only to me and my country, but to the whole continent of Africa,” said Alaba Kalejhaiye, who on the day of the slight had been awarded a key to the city by Mayor H. Roe Bartle.

The editorial said the incident was unfortunate, mostly because the Soviet Union could exploit it for propaganda purposes, calling out its Cold War arch-enemy the United States for hypocrisy.

For the restaurant owners who barred Black people, the paper was understanding.

“There is no reason to blame the management of individual restaurants,” The Star said. “They are simply reflecting their views of what they consider a community attitude. They are in business to make money and they try to please their patrons and they should.”

The editorial noted, however, that many restaurants and hotels in town had ended their discriminatory policies.

“And to their general surprise, the problems of racial prejudice simply haven’t materialized,” it said. “The trend is so pronounced that it must be assumed that eventually the bars will be lowered generally in Kansas City.

“We hope it can be done quietly and without stirring public feeling. We hope it will not come to mandatory action by ordinance as suggested by the Kansas City Commission on Human Relations.”

Five years later, the paper’s timid position would flip entirely. The Star not only backed passage of an ordinance outlawing discrimination in bars, restaurants and other public accommodations, it ran a front-page editorial favoring voter passage of the law, which opponents had forced onto the ballot in hopes of killing it.

But more broadly, the paper’s position on integration in the 1950s was consistently timid. When the University of Kansas City (now UMKC) admitted its first Black student, The Star maintained its silence until well after.

“Today most responsible people, both white and Negro, regard segregation as a problem to be handled on a common sense basis,” The Star maintained in a May 23, 1951, editorial. “Where proper change can come about on a calm and reasonable basis, it represents progress.”

That piece ran the same month that the City Council voted to end segregation at Municipal Auditorium, the newly opened Starlight Theatre and all other taxpayer-owned facilities.

Except the whites-only swimming pool at Swope Park. Swimming was a special case, the paper would later opine, without explaining exactly why.

“As a practical matter nothing is gained by arguing with the deep seated prejudices that are sometimes aroused at swimming pools,” the paper said.

A federal court challenge by The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People followed. When the city lost the case at the district court level in April 1952, The Star ran a front-page story headlined “Lifts a Negro Ban.”

The Call wrote that the ruling was, according to a headline, “Another Step Nearer to Real Democracy” and how “little by little since World War II, our growing city has thrown off the shackles which have burdened its citizens of color for generations.”

But it was summer 1954 before the pool was open to Black people. The parks board kept it closed to everyone for two seasons while the city tried and failed to win on appeal.

The Star agreed with the long closure, fearing that opening the pool to Black people before justice had run its course would lead to the kind of racial violence that erupted in St. Louis in 1949. That is when white people armed with bats, clubs, sticks and knives rioted after the city opened the pool at Fairground Park to Black swimmers with little public discussion beforehand.

Another excuse: An integrated pool was a money-loser, driving away white people and their admission fees. So careful planning was called for.

“The serious blow to the St. Louis pools was the dwindling patronage after a bad start,” a May 30, 1952, editorial read.

But the paper did not abandon hope that integration could be achieved without problems. Los Angeles got through it without problems in the 1930s, the editorial said.

“If the Supreme Court finally holds that Negroes must be admitted to this particular pool of course the park board will have to do everything possible to make the new rules work.”

A sudden transformation

By late 1963, the papers’ news coverage and commentary on the civil rights movement had transformed.

Thanks to the newsroom leadership change and growing public awareness locally and nationally of civil rights issues, The Star and Times were suddenly more interested in knocking down racial barriers.

It wasn’t so much that the papers were leading the way as they were reflecting the mood of Kansas City’s civic leadership, which not only felt a moral duty to change but worried the city would lose out on conventions and other business opportunities if it was perceived as backward. The papers began pushing for an ordinance to guarantee equality in public accommodations.

“Things were changing, things were moving and the idea was that if we don’t have this on the books, if we don’t become a public accommodations city, we are going to stop. So let’s keep moving,” former editor Bill Baker told Burnes.

The Star’s awakening in 1963 was a year marked by the March on Washington and King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, the shocking church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young Black girls and the assassination of Medgar Evers.

The domestic terrorism precipitated President John F. Kennedy’s introduction of landmark legislation that his successor Lyndon Johnson signed into law a year later as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the midst of all that, the city’s first Black city councilman, Bruce R. Watkins, introduced an ordinance that August written by attorney and civil rights activist Harold L. Holliday, outlawing discrimination at “any place … open to the general public which solicits or accepts the patronage of the general public.”

The Times reported the news on its front page, and three days later The Star ran an editorial in support of it, saying it was “a logical extension” of an existing anti-discrimination ordinance pertaining to hotels, motels and restaurants. It targeted bars and attractions like Fairyland Park at 75th and Prospect, which for two years had been resisting calls to allow Black residents equal access to its roller coaster, swimming pool and other amusements.

Neither the ordinance nor The Star’s support of it went over well with tavern owners, who spoke out at a public hearing that same week. An attorney for Fairyland also complained, as did the owner of another attraction that barred Black people, Kernodles Lake and Recreation Park.

“I’ve always had the privilege to discriminate,” the Times quoted Paul Kernodle saying. “Discrimination is a good word that’s been kicked about by the Commies.”

Through a court action, opponents forced the ordinance onto the ballot. It passed largely on the strength of the Black vote that next spring. Coverage of the campaign by white-owned dailies was extensive and support from the editorial page as enthusiastic as The Call’s treatment of the department store boycott five years earlier.

According to Burnes, llus Davis, Kansas City’s mayor at the time, would later credit The Star’s support for its passage.

“It passed by a thin margin, and had we not had the support and backing of The Star, it could have gone down,” he said in an interview a few months before his death in 1996.

The newspapers’ coverage of civil rights issues would continue to improve, but with lapses along the way.

According to Hammer and Jones, as late as 1966 a key Star editor tried to block publication of a series written by one of his reporters that focused on a Black man and white woman and the trials they faced as a married couple.

When executive editor Richard Fowler found out, he demanded that it appear in the paper and it did.

On the front page.

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

Mike Hendricks

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4738

Mike Hendricks covered local government for The Kansas City Star until he retired in 2025. Previously he covered business, agriculture and was on the investigations team. For 14 years, he wrote a metro column three times a week. His many honors include two Gerald Loeb awards.