Kansas City loves a street name fight. Here comes another one | Opinion
Sometimes a story comes along and it’s quickly apparent that those of us in local news and politics are in for a tedious time ahead.
That’s how I felt when I read the New York Times investigation into the iconic labor leader Cesar Chavez this week. The paper’s findings are ugly: Two women say Chavez molested them when they were children and he was in his 40s. These were girls who grew up inside his movement, whose families trusted him. The third accuser is Dolores Huerta — his closest ally and co-founder of the United Farm Workers — who says Chavez raped her and that she kept it secret for 60 years because she feared it would damage the movement she’d given her life to.
It’s a devastating piece of reporting, and a reminder of how long the women around powerful men have had to carry their secrets alone.
But my business is local journalism. So I also couldn’t help but think about how we’re in for another drawn-out public debate about a street name — in this case, the mile-long stretch of the West Side formerly known as 23rd Street that the city renamed Avenida Cesar E. Chavez in 1994.
Kansas City historically doesn’t handle these things very well. Consider The Paseo.
In 2019, the City Council voted to rename the East Side artery after Martin Luther King Jr. The Paseo signs came down and the MLK ones went up. Within months, residents put together a ballot initiative to force a citywide vote reversing the name change. It passed with a nearly 70% margin. The city took the MLK signs down and put the Paseo ones back up. Total cost: about $100,000.
(Eventually, in 2021, Kansas City named a different East Side corridor — made up of parts of Blue Parkway, Swope Parkway and Volker Boulevard — after Dr. King. A fine outcome, but one that took years and a lot of civic agony to get there.)
More recently we have the Truth Avenue saga. In 2022, Troost Avenue businessman Chris Goode led a charge to rename his street, named after a slaveholder and notorious for decades as the city’s racial dividing line between Black and white communities.
First the proposal to call it Truth Avenue got watered down into an “honorary” name that would have satisfied nobody. Then a year later, when a full rename came back to committee, Mayor Quinton Lucas put it on indefinite hold. Three years of meetings, testimony, online petitions, newspaper coverage and a lot of community debate about history and identity and what a street name means. It’s still called Troost.
JC Nichols’ name, ‘removing history’
If I sound disappointed that the mayor buried the Truth, so to speak, I’m not.
For one, I thought he made a pretty good point last year about the headaches street name changes create for residents and business owners — updating bills, mail, IDs, everything tied to your address.
But more than that, I can’t help but feel that the civic energy these battles consume would be better spent on actual improvements in the very communities they claim to honor. I’d rather see a thriving Country Club Plaza than founder J.C. Nichols’ name removed from a fountain and street for racist policies from 100 years ago. As it is, we have accomplished the latter but not the former.
Unpopular opinion here, and I suppose this is my white privilege creeping in, but I’m not even sure I think it was the right decision to take Nichols’ name off the Plaza. Yes, he was a bigot, and that’s bad. But he built the place! There are limits to how far you can scrub a city’s past before you’re just left with a sanitized fiction. I tend to agree with Erik Stafford, a local Black historian who opposes renaming streets and monuments honoring former slave owners and racists.
“When you remove all of that stuff, you’re removing history,” Stafford told The Star last year.
Chavez is an easier call. We’re not erasing Kansas City history by taking his name off the signs. He has no roots here. It wasn’t even called Avenida Cesar E. Chavez until 30 years ago. And from a cost and logistics perspective, it’s a short stretch, only about a mile. Sure, rename it.
But it won’t be a breeze. The process requires a committee review, a report, mailed notices to every property owner within 300 feet and a public hearing before the council can even vote. And that’s before you get to the harder question: whether Latino community members who have long regarded Chavez as an American hero are inclined to reconsider that because of a newspaper article.
Local leaders are, cautiously, feeling that out. Guadalupe Centers, a cornerstone institution on the West Side, issued a statement Thursday that stopped short of endorsing any action. The mayor said he’s still processing the news. Councilman Crispin Rea, who represents the West Side, says he’s in conversations with community leaders about what a name change might look like. Rebecca Amezcua-Hogan, who is running to represent the area in 2027, said she hoped the street “would be renamed in honor of the West Side’s Hispanic community or for the women of the National Farm Workers Association.”
I live on Chavez. Several nights a week, I hear cars take over the intersection outside my window — engines screaming, tires screeching. The drivers do their doughnuts long enough to make clear they’re not worried about consequences, then peel off into the night. As a West Side resident, I’d rather see some community meetings with police focused on that problem than spend months engaged in a civic slog over the name on the sign outside my door. But if we’re going to make this a priority, let’s at least move like it.
This story was originally published March 20, 2026 at 10:41 AM.
