In Jackson County, the 911 tax passes, and Baker stays. Here’s the fate of statues
Jackson County voters decided Tuesday to retain the two-term county prosecutor and support a new tax to pay for the 911 emergency call system, but rejected a proposal to remove two controversial statues outside county government buildings.
Of the three, the matter of whether to continue displaying the bronze likenesses of Andrew Jackson was the most contentious.
Some 59% of those casting ballots voted to keep the monuments to the former president for whom the county gets its name. A similar percentage voted to give prosecutor Jean Peters Baker another four-year term, and a slim majority, 52%, favored the 911 tax.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests last June, Jackson County Executive Frank White proposed removing the two statues of Jackson on horseback. White, the county’s first Black county executive, noted that the seventh U.S. president, after whom the county is named, had been a slaveholder.
Jackson also made the forced removal of tens of thousands of Native Americans from the Deep South among his main priorities before and during his presidency in the 1830s. Many members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee and Seminole tribes died of disease, starvation, exposure and violence as they marched to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River along what came to be called the Trail of Tears.
But a majority of county legislators balked when White asked for permission to remove the statues and find another home for them. Led by chairwoman Theresa Galvin, the legislature voted along racial lines, 7-2, to put the issue on the November ballot and let the voters decide.
One of the two Black members who voted no, Jalen Anderson, said legislators were elected to make those kind of decisions. After all, he said, the statues were installed decades ago without a vote of the people.
White, likewise, called the ballot measure a cop-out.
“This is truly a body that doesn’t want to do what it’s been elected to do,” White said at the time. “They don’t want to have criticism, and when that comes, you want to push this off on the public.”
Concerns about the Jackson statues predated the protests that began across the country last summer after the death of George Floyd and monuments to Confederate generals and slaveholders were toppled in city after city.
Almost a year ago, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker proposed installing plaques next to both statues outlining Jackson’s controversial past.
She said context was needed for visitors to the downtown Kansas City courthouse and the Historic Truman Courthouse at the center of Independence Square. Commissioned by Harry Truman when he was the elected head of county government, the downtown Jackson has stood outside the north entrance of the courthouse since the building opened in 1934.
Sculptor Charles Keck later gave then-President Truman a half-size version of the original, which Truman donated to the county in 1949 for display outside the Independence courthouse. The building, which was renamed in Truman’s honor, no longer hosts trials but is now home to county offices.
Baker said it bothered her that so many people walk into the downtown courthouse each weekday to engage with our judicial system only to pass the statue of a man with Jackson’s troubling history. And yet there was nothing to acknowledge that today’s society recognizes that everyone deserves equal treatment under the law.
Last December, the legislature voted to install plaques next to each statue providing that context. Planning for that ceased when last summer’s protests broke out.
Hours after two men were arrested for spray painting graffiti on the Jackson statue in Kansas City on June 25, White suggested finding another home for both statues. Legislators set an election date instead after some of their constituents voiced opposition.
911 tax, prosecutor
Also Tuesday, 165,000 voters approved a measure that will assess a monthly fee up to $1 on cell phones to support the county’s 911 emergency system. Nearly 152,000 voted no. Cell phones are the source of most 911 calls, yet the system is currently funded by a 7% surcharge on landline bills. With the number of landlines dwindling, so has the amount of money taken in to run the system.
The $1 monthly fee would replace that surcharge and apply to all devices that can make make a 911 call.
This was an off year for all but two county elected positions. Baker, a Democrat who was appointed to fill a vacancy in 2011, was running for her third term as county prosecutor. As expected, she beat her Republican opponent, Tracey Chappell, in a county where Republicans normally don’t win countywide races.
Sheriff Darryl Forté ran unopposed after defeating former Sheriff Mike Sharp in the Democratic primary in August.
This story was originally published November 3, 2020 at 6:45 PM.
