KCQ wants to know: What do you wish you learned in school about Kansas City Black History?

On Thursday morning, we were sitting at a long table in a room with a wall full of windows at North Kansas City High School talking about Black History month.

One student, Aisatu Nakoulima, interjected and said she wanted to make sure that people in her community knew that Black history is “not an additional history.”

The 16-year-old, who is co-president of her Black Student Union (BSU), said the role Black people played in shaping Kansas City is not separate from the rest of history, but a crucial part of the whole picture. She and some of her classmates have raised their voices this year to make sure their school libraries and classes include stories that represent that more whole picture.

This Black History Month, our team at The Star is going to write stories answering students’ questions about Black history here in Kansas City—looking into things like what role Black high school and college students played in the civil rights movement here, and what some of the first Black-owned businesses were in the city.

We want to celebrate KC Black history as “not an additional history,” and we want to hear what you’re curious about to guide our stories too. There’s a form at the bottom of this where you can share your questions with us.

Collaborating with Black Student Unions

We’ve been having conversations with student leaders at Black Student Unions (BSU) at a few schools across the metro—and we have more planned—to listen to what they’re curious about.

Why BSUs? These groups are organizations committed to fostering community among Black students in education and often advocate for equity in their schools. Many BSUs became prominent in the late 1960s, when Black students across the nation were fighting for schools to admit more Black students and develop stronger Black studies curriculum.

We want the story ideas for this series to come directly from students, because too often we spend time writing about the adults who get to decide what and how kids learn about things like history, without actually hearing from students themselves.

And even though this project is focused on youth, if you have questions you want to know about local Black history, we want to hear from you too.

How this project will work

Our team of reporters will work with our friends at Kansas City Public Library to research and write stories based on the students’ questions that we’ll publish as part of our KCQ series throughout the month.

Then, we’ll share the reported stories with the students who asked the questions, and they will transform them into stories on a social media platform like Instagram or TikTok that will better reach other young people. We’ll share their work on The Star’s social media too.

We want these stories to live in The Star as part of our promise from the project we published last year called The Truth in Black and White. It’s our goal to keep making amends with the way our paper didn’t do justice to our city’s Black history as it was happening in real time.

Please ask us your questions about Black history in Kansas City using the form below, or by emailing us at kcq@kcstar.com.

This story was originally published February 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM.

Kynala Phillips

The Kansas City Star

Kynala Phillips was a Service Journalism Reporter at The Kansas City Star, where she worked to answer readers questions about the resources and services in the community. She attended the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and is originally from Madison, Wisconsin.