Meet Mará Rose Williams, The Star’s columnist elevating KC’s community voices
I’ve been a writer at The Kansas City Star for more than 20 years, most of that time as an education writer. In the last five years, I’ve worked as an assistant managing editor for race and equity, and as the senior columnist on the Opinion team.
I know and love this city. I’ve raised my two sons here. And I write to preserve the best of it, celebrate it and make sure all of us get to enjoy what it offers.
I became a journalist for the reasons many of us chose this profession: to suss out injustices, with the hope that the work makes lives better. A recent piece about contaminated soil on Kansas City’s East Side is a good example.
I’m an East Coast girl. I grew up in Long Island, New York, in a household where fairness, kindness and responsibility were greatly stressed by my dad, a hardworking immigrant from Jamaica, and my mom, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia. Mom taught me to listen and not to be afraid to challenge the status quo. I draw on that teaching every working day. I’ll even challenge my colleagues if I think race or morality is under fire. And I have passed that sentiment to my two young men.
I often write columns about my lived experiences as a journalist and parent. Most of the time, I’m writing about news and issues. I approach every story intent on learning the truth, trusting my college journalism school education, lived experience, skill, passion for storytelling and my empathetic heart.
I’ve worked at five newspapers, including Newsday in New York and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I’ve covered everything from crime and courts to education, health and social justice. These days, I’m most interested in writing about communities that for too long have not been heard.
”The Truth in Black and White,” a six-story project I conceived and wrote with three other reporters in 2020, took six months to complete. In this project, The Star apologized for decades of failing to tell the stories of Kansas City’s Black residents fully, and too often didn’t tell those stories at all.
Later, I led a three-year series, “Voices of Kansas City,” in which The Star partnered with KKFI community radio to highlight the contributions of Black small business owners, activists and educators.
Every week, I look for stories that fill what was a decadeslong gap in coverage, writing about issues impacting historically marginalized communities, such as Black, brown, the homeless, women, LGBTQ and others.
I tell everyone who will listen: Opinion writing is hard. It exposes the writer’s thoughts, passions, ethics, morality — who you are. It’s not enough to just say what you think, but you must also say why and back it up with the facts and history that helped form your opinion.
I strive to do that. My redistricting piece tugged all threads. And as a woman of deep faith, when I sit down to write, I pray about it first.
The best part of this job is not having the winning point, although I’ve won many awards for my work, it’s the people I’ve met along the way, those who’ve agreed with me and even some who haven’t.
My mantra is that storytelling is the world’s great unifier because if you tell me your story and I listen, and I tell you my story and you listen, there’s a good chance we’ll find we have something in common.
