Anthony Stone thought he knew Kansas City. He was born here. He lives downtown today — not far from the streets that teemed half a century ago with restive marchers, from the blocks of businesses that burned into the night, from the storefronts and sidewalks where six lives were lost over four days of rioting that shook and scarred the city.
“I had no idea,” Stone says.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the civil unrest that engulfed Kansas City in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. The Kansas City Public Library recalls the violent episode in a pop-up exhibit, It Finally Happened Here: The Kansas City Riot, April 9-12, 1968, rotating through many of its 10 locations and other area venues throughout the year. For dates at specific venues, visit www.kclibrary.org.
In photos and text on a series of 3-by-7-foot panels, it lays out the social and economic conditions and tensions that fueled the riot. It chronicles the descent of a peaceful march to City Hall the day after King’s funeral into deadly chaos. And it looks at both the immediate and long-term aftermath.
Former Kansas City police officer and detective, city councilman and mayor pro tem Alvin Brooks, a longtime community activist who joined the initial march, lends his perspective in a frank and compelling epilogue. “Kansas City’s political, economic, and social communities,” he writes, “can’t turn and hide from our issues or pretend that they don’t exist, an approach that certainly didn’t work half a century ago.”
The story absorbed Stone as he took in the exhibit during a visit to the downtown Central Library. He’s 42, born eight years after the riot, and “my mom, my grandfather, they never spoke about any of this stuff. It wasn’t in our history books at school,” he says. “If you don’t walk in here and see it, somebody like me would never know.
“This is something I’ve heard about (happening) in Alabama or somewhere like that. I’d never heard of anything like it here. I’m reading about the six who died. It’s absolutely bloodcurdling to me. I’d never have believed it.”
It’s why, in part, the Library created the exhibit and devotes considerable attention in its public programming to local history and civic issues.
“Our public memory is very short and very shallow, and it’s part of the Library’s job to maintain the community’s consciousness and its conscience,” Director Crosby Kemper III says.
As for the ’68 riot, “it’s important to take a look at what’s happened in the last 50 years, over the last 100 years, to advance the cause of racial equality,” Kemper says. “We’ve made some progress, but there also are a lot of areas where there is no progress. Or very little. One of the things the Library tries to do is highlight what public policy, public consciousness and attention to the details of our public civic life can do to make things better, to move things in the right direction.”
The exhibit recounts the festering discontent over substandard housing, segregated schools and questionable police practices that set the stage for the riot. The initial protest, a march by high school students, didn’t arise directly from King’s assassination but rather a school district decision not to dismiss classes the day of his funeral. Beyond the fatalities, the toll included at least 78 people injured, more than 1,000 arrests and $915,000 in property damages.
One section of the exhibit is devoted to the six who were killed — all by gunfire, all African-Americans.
Work on the project began last October, and the exhibit debuted at the Central Library in April. Joel Rhodes, a Southeast Missouri State University history professor who wrote his thesis on the uprising, led the research. Photos and other materials were gleaned from the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Kansas City Research Center, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s LaBudde Special Collections, The Kansas City Call, The Kansas City Star and the Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections. The project was underwritten by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee.
Rhodes joined Mayor Sly James, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II, Brooks and other principals in a discussion, “Strife in the Streets: Kansas City Remembers 1968,” at the Library’s Plaza Branch in late March. The event also featured the premiere of a new documentary short, ’68: The Kansas City Race Riots, co-produced by KCPT-Kansas City PBS and KSHB-41 Action News.
More than 400 people attended, and many stood in line with questions or comments. Passions occasionally ran high.
Stone wasn’t there that night. His introduction to one of the most violent chapters in Kansas City’s history would come a month later.
“I know there are some things in the world that are better left unsaid. But are they really?” he says, standing beside a photo of protesters scattering on 12th Street as tear gas billows in front of City Hall. “I will forward this along, make sure my daughter knows about it and learns something about the history of her city.”
–Steve Wieberg
