Black Kansas Citians tell their stories as mayor’s reparations commission forges ahead
Sitting in a quiet room at the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City on Thursday afternoon, Mickey Dean reflected decades back on the construction of U.S. 71, a highway that cut through the heart of Black neighborhoods.
“I know it caused a lot of damage in the Black community,” he said. “I think that somehow, there should be compensation for that, in terms of what people lost. You lost your home, not only did you lose your home, but we know that the home is one of the ways you create wealth. You lost that, you lost a business, there’s gotta be some ways to try to calculate that damage.”
Dean — who works with the Kansas City commission that is currently studying the concept of reparations and is tasked with eventually making recommendations on the topic to city leaders — joined a group of Black Kansas Citians on Thursday to speak at listening sessions hosted by the commission and a separate initiative called the Black Audit Project, which is gathering stories and assessing communities on their work helping Black residents. Residents talked about their own stories, injustices they’ve seen or know of, and fixes or solutions they’d like to see.
“We’re still feeling the effects of all those things that happened during slavery,” Dean said. “We were set back at that point in time, and we’ve never been allowed through government laws, government structures, we’ve never been allowed to catch up. When we talk about repairing the damage, we’re talking about the damage that occurred not only during our period of enslavement, but from that point forward. We’ve got to document that damage and then see who caused that damage and see how to repair it.”
Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University and the Black Audit Project’s founder, encouraged attendees to share both their stories of injustice across a broad spectrum of local life and the solutions they wished were in place. Stories collected by the Black Audit Project, he said, would go into the record as an aid to the Mayor’s Commission on Reparations to help build the case for reparations.
“I believe that solutions to these problems are going to come from us,” he said. “It’s not going to be some experts who come in and dictate to us what the solutions will be.”
Gary Jones, who works as Kansas City’s community engagement coordinator, spoke of his childhood and the blessing and curse of moving out of the urban core to the Lee’s Summit School District, where he’d stand alone as the only Black student in his classroom. He was exposed to many things that got him to where he is today but also learned that he couldn’t stutter or say the wrong word, he said. He had to be “top tier” at all times.
“I really hope in this conversation of reparations, that we really do lift up the mantle of education so that these kids that are under me will have the opportunities that are needed,” he said.
One Black Kansas Citian told of how her great-grandmother was forced to abandon a grocery store she owned outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the context of the 1921 race massacre there.
“I just keep thinking about if my great-grandmother had been able to keep her store, would she have had money to pass down to her children?” she said. “And would they have had money to pass down to their children? And would I have been able to have a $10,000 or a $5,000 down payment to put on my home and lessen my mortgage?”
Kenneth Ford, a retired ironworker and a member of the mayor’s commission, addressed the unwritten rules and standards that he’s seen applied to Black community members.
“You have to be the best at what you do,” he said. “When I run a job, there wasn’t a whole lot of ‘redo.’ I had to put it in right the first time. I’ve seen the white guys do things wrong, and they laugh about it. Let me do something wrong, ‘I knew you couldn’t handle it.’ It’s just two different standards.”
The Mayor’s Commission on Reparations was seated last May and is studying the areas of health, education, economics, housing and criminal justice to identify harms to Black residents and what role the city played in contributing to those issues, said Terri Barnes, who chairs the group. It has held listening sessions and coordinated with similar groups throughout the country. Eventually the commission is to bring back recommendations for city leaders.
Barnes said she hopes the community will see the effort as not a “Black thing” but as something for the broader community to be engaged in and educated on.
“I feel the burden of doing this thing right for Black people,” Barnes said. “It’s been 40 years coming. This is not a new conversation, it’s just happening in Kansas City.”
This story was originally published March 14, 2024 at 11:00 PM.
