Emanuel Cleaver stomps and shouts when asked about comparing MLK Blvd. opponents to KKK

If you didn’t know better, you could easily have come away from Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II’s highly misleading Sunday appearance on MSNBC convinced that it was the racists of Kansas City who won last week’s local election in a landslide. And all for the downhome racist pleasure of peeling Martin Luther King Jr.’s name off The Paseo.

You’d have taken at face value the highly charged set-up to his interview with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who knows so little about the issue that he called the street “Peso,” or “Pace-E-O.”

And then you’d have seen that the first words out of the mouth of Cleaver, whose favorite topic is usually civility, compared those who disagreed with him on this issue to Ku Klux Klan members. Not only that, but it was the KKK members who came out on top in this scenario.

“Even the Klan never marched into a church” where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “was holding a rally,” he said. Unlike members of Save the Paseo, who held a silent counter-protest during a pro-MLK Boulevard rally at the Paseo Baptist Church two days before the election.

That’s an outrageous slander of the Kansas Citians who elected Cleaver, who is a Democrat, mayor twice and then sent him to Congress. And it conveniently omits the fact that significant opposition on this issue came from African Americans who live on The Paseo and resented not being consulted on the name change by the ministers who came up with the idea, or the City Council members who voted for it.

Sharpton came right out and said that this was black-versus-white. The scene he painted had “people coming, mostly white, into a black church to protest and stand for, ‘We want to see Martin Luther King’s name down.’ This is a real symbol of where we are in race relations, with a president that just had his black outreach meeting in Atlanta.”

Cleaver did not tell Sharpton that there was a lot more to it. Or that the president had nothing to do with this vote in heavily Democratic Kansas City. Or that “us” in this us-versus-them scenario was not a monolith.

“They had some African Americans with them,” Cleaver said, as if these were hapless tag-alongs or actors rented for the occasion. “I’m in Washington, so I didn’t attend any of the meetings,” on the name change, “but people are embarrassed here in Kansas City.”

Maybe if he had attended some of the meetings, he would know that he’s the one embarrassing the city.

The Star Editorial Board supported the name change to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, but we do not believe that the many African Americans who felt otherwise and turned out on Election Day to say so are a bunch of self-loathing MLK haters.

Tim Smith, an African American “Save the Paseo” organizer, lamented being cast as racist, “misinformed, confused, disrespectful and godless” by his own congressman, “simply because a handful of black clergy … chose to play the race card for over a year,’’ by painting those who wanted to keep The Paseo as motivated by “hatred for Dr. King.”

“That is a lie,” Smith wrote in an extended Facebook post, “and what undergirds that lie is the type of dangerous racial rhetoric and vitriol that fuels violence. We cannot allow Kansas City to burn over a handful of black ministers’ burned egos.”

Former City Councilwoman Alissia Canady, who is also African American, said, “I was appalled” that Cleaver had compared some of his own constituents to Klan members. “He’s offended a lot of people that respect him.”

Asked about all of this after a community meeting in South Kansas City on Monday night, Cleaver at first said, “I’m not going to talk about that any more.”

Then he repeated what he said on Sharpton’s Sunday show: “The truth is, the Klan didn’t” do what those silent protesters did in entering a church. “They were out of bounds.”

OK, but why pretend that the election was an up-or-down vote on King? And what about the African Americans who opposed the name change to MLK and feel that Cleaver’s calling them a bunch of racists?

At that, Cleaver stomped his foot, raised his voice and said he doesn’t even call President Donald Trump a racist. “Nobody can decide what I meant.”

“Maybe they messed up my words,” he said, but “I’ll die before I change that going in that church was wrong. What they did in the church of Jesus Christ was wrong.”

Why not correct Sharpton’s misimpression that the vote was largely about race? “Nobody can tell Al Sharpton what to do,” Cleaver said.

He said he’d never heard of Save the Paseo’s Tim Smith and doesn’t know former City Councilwoman Alissia Canady either, though Canady says she told Cleaver months ago that her African American constituents on The Paseo had not been consulted on the switch, and didn’t support it.

“She can do whatever she wants to do,” Cleaver said of Canady, “if someone wants to keep this in the news. All of a sudden, I can’t speak out to protect the integrity of a church?”

What’s kept this in the news is what Cleaver said on television. And the larger issue has nothing to do with the integrity of a church.

After Cleaver’s uncharacteristic outburst, a man who lives near The Paseo and had overheard the whole conversation at the community meeting Monday offered his view: “It was about fairness” for African Americans on the street, said Bill Carey, a retired theatrical stage manager. “Had they been asked, maybe they would have had buy-in. I voted to Save the Paseo because the process disrespected Martin Luther King. The people he worked so hard for were being given short shrift.”

As it happens, Cleaver knows what it’s like to be compared to a Klan member. Years ago, as mayor pro tem, after he voted to effectively kill a pro-gay rights ordinance, ACT UP activists in the council chamber yelled, “Cleaver and the Klan go hand in hand.”

“Shut up!” he yelled at them, according to The Star story from May 18, 1990.

Cleaver doesn’t often lose it like that. Or like he did on Monday night, when just before leaving, he apologized for having shouted.

No offense taken, but if he really doesn’t know that last week’s vote was not black-versus-white, then he needs to come home more. And if he does know it, he should have said that on Al Sharpton’s show.