When I got up Sunday and checked my email, first up was one from a friend who, with his wife, divides his time between his home in the Kansas City area and one in the Florida panhandle.
It read: “Good morning, Jim. The KC Star theme today is a powerful statement. What do you think of the apology articles?”
I was completely flummoxed…Apology articles? Apology for what? Had there been a massive error in a big story?
I immediately went to The Star’s website and saw plastered across the top of the page the words, “The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star.”
Then I knew what it was all about. Nevertheless, it was the most jolting and unexpected series of stories I’ve ever seen in The Star in my 50 years in Kansas City, including 36-plus years as a reporter and editor at The Kansas City Times and The Star.
It was disturbing, too, partly because it made me ask myself if I, who joined the paper in 1969, may have contributed to the paper’s failure to cover much of anything emanating from east of Troost Avenue or anyone living east of the longtime dividing line between white and Black Kansas City.
(I couldn’t think of anything I did overtly to contribute to the appalling situation, but, like nearly everyone else at the paper, I was definitely focused almost exclusively on the white community and white power structure.)
The Sunday package was a remarkable undertaking and a sincere mea culpa. It consisted of…
- A formal apology from Editor Mike Fannin
- Six separate “news” stories about different areas in which The Star had failed miserably, since its founding in 1880, to cover racial matters adequately
- An editorial vowing that the editorial board would chart a new course on social justice
- A separate story about The Star having formed an advisory group “to ensure fair, inclusive coverage of communities of color”
One of the most admirable aspects of this series is that The Star is not attempting to profit off it, at least directly. I believe the entire package of stories can be accessed without a subscription at http://www.kansascity.com. The Star rarely drops the pay wall, but this was an appropriate time to do so.
Mara Rose Williams
The person who pushed for the series was Mará Rose Williams, an education reporter who has been with The Star for 22 years. Williams followed her late husband, Ceasar Williams, to the paper after he was hired as an assignment editor in the late 1990s. Ceasar Williams died in 2010 at age 61.
The other reporters on the team were longtime employees Eric Adler and Mike Hendricks and relative newcomer Cortlynn Stark. Visuals were produced by Shelly Yang, Tammy Ljungblad and Neil Nakahodo. Chris Ochsner edited the photos and graphics, and Bill Turque and Sharon Hoffmann edited the stories.
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I will not rehash the stories, but a couple of sources the reporters tapped seemed to capture the crux of The Star’s longtime failure regarding proportional racial coverage.
:: Gerald Jordan, a former editorial writer who has been a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas for many years, said that while he did not believe The Star was guilty of intentional racism, the paper did not assign reporters to cover specific neighborhoods, and that “put us at a disadvantage.” That effectively left minorities and poor people out of the paper because they weren’t running the institutions or setting the policies The Star and Times focused their coverage on.
Chuck Haddix
:: Chuck Haddix, host of KCUR’s “The Fish Fry,” and curator of the Marr Sound Archives at UMKC, said: “They covered the African American community just a little bit. The Kansas City Star always kind of covered classical music and opera and the fine arts, because that was their audience. They also covered country music, too. But they didn’t cover 18th and Vine because of segregation. I think it caused that community to be invisible to white people in Kansas City. You know, people who read The Star didn’t get a sense of what was happening at 18th and Vine or other African American communities.”
**
Because of the startling nature of this package of stories, I sought out reaction from several friends and neighbors.
One neighbor called it a “breakthrough.” Another said simply, “Long time overdue.”
A former Star reporter and friend, a colleague at the paper, said: “The Star has been dumping a lot of criticism on folks such as J.C. Nichols and Andrew Jackson for their racism. And I often have thought, ‘What about the racism that William Rockhill Nelson and other Star execs practiced? Should we take Nelson’s name off the Nelson-Atkins Museum?’ I admire the Star for airing its dirty laundry and acknowledging that it was just as guilty as J.C. Nichols in the promotion of racism in Kansas City.”
Clinton Adams Jr.
Another friend, Clinton Adams Jr., a lawyer and longtime civic activist who was quoted in the Sunday package, said:
“The chatter in the Black community today has been positive. A general refrain has been, ‘What now’? There is skepticism as to how they (The Star) will follow up and fulfill the commitments made.” Adams said he believed the package “could have some impact if other institutions and media outlets will also take an introspective look at their racial history and address their transgressions.”
**
Everything those people said is true.
The only thing I would add is that where Adams’ wonders how The Star will follow up, I wonder how much impact the package will have and how many people will see it or hear about it.
The problem is this: Where The Star once spoke with a bullhorn, its strong voice echoing far and wide, it now speaks with a crackling, dimming microphone.
The Star, like most major metropolitan dailies, has been slaughtered by the internet and the exponential proliferation of platforms and information outlets, many of which spew misinformation, disinformation and just plain junk.
The five-county metro area has about 1.8 million people, only about 90,000 of whom subscribe to the print edition of the Sunday paper. About 50,000 take the print edition of the weekday paper, and, as far as I can tell, a paltry 9,000 people have stand-alone, digital subscriptions.
…The apology package was remarkable. Congratulations to everyone involved, from Mike Fannin on down. I just hope a lot of people heard the cracking and felt the reverberations this redwood made when it fell, and I hope the cracking sound isn’t limited to an echo chamber.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
The Star is very good at telling people what they already know. When I moved here in 1956 the only person in town that I had met was Arthur Duncan, the night managing editor, who hired me. It didn’t take long to figure out that Kansas City was a deeply prejudiced place and so was the paper.
After being assigned to police headquarters, I heard reports one night of a triple murder and called Jim Turnbaugh, the night managing editor, to say I was starting to work on the story. “Are they niggers?” he asked. “Then forget it.”
Readers: Don started working at The Star in 1956. He went on to become The Star’s architecture critic — and, in my opinion, was the best newspaper architecture writer in the country.
A Black editor at The Star told me that when the Star and Times started publishing wedding announcements for Black couples, a white colleague on the staff said with surprise, “I didn’t know you people got married.”
Sorry, I don’t believe that.
One of the stories in the Star was about how J.C. Nichols and William Rockhill Nelson perpetuated segregation in Kansas City. Given that, when is the Star going to remove Nelson’s picture from its editorial page?
I’ve been wondering the same thing since I read the series, Mark…They should have at least scrubbed that photo a long time ago. In it, he looks haughty and extremely satisfied with his fat self — the kind of guy just generous enough to offer “a paper for the people,” the lowly people.
The KCMO Parks and Recreation Commissioners are charged with creating a plan to remove city-owned memorials and monuments of people who promoted racism. It would really look insensitive and negligent in comparison if the Star didn’t even bother to remove Nelson’s picture.
Please, don’t make me get out Dad’s clip files.
Get to the basement, Ned…Now!
I suggested to Mr. Fannin in a long email last night that the time of the reporters who worked on this story would have been much better spent had they focused their efforts on identifying and promoting both Black people and White people who are working across racial and ethnic lines to make Kansas City a better place for everyone to live, work and play. I also pointed out to him that the story failed to mention Laura Hockaday, who, over a 38-year career at The Times/Star (1962-2000), made a real effort as a White woman of privilege to include men and women from the Black community in the papers’ society pages.
No, to me it appears that the paper purposely engaged in a real beatdown of itself in order to try to enhance its overall standing with the Black community as much as possible, like that was going to somehow suddenly bring in a bunch of new subscribers and advertisers.
When Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman at the well who had already had five husbands and was living with another man, He didn’t tell her, “I want you to put on sackcloth, cover yourself with ashes and publicly apologize to the people of this village for your multitude of sins.” No, He simply told her, “Sin no more.”
The Star would do well to lay off the theatrics and just do its job, recognizing that mistakes were made in the past and that they need to be avoided in the future.
So did everyone who works for The Star sleep better last night knowing that Mr. Fannin had publicly apologized for 140 years’ worth of sins of commission and sins of omission?
Mixed feelings…Great respect for Mara Williams and her work but agree with Mr. Nichols that, for Fannin, it’s simply insincere virtual signaling…Hence, confession without repentance and the desire to “sin no more” makes it all meaningless.
I don’t see it that way at all…It’s no secret that Fannin is prize focused — he really wants a Pulitzer — but I don’t see that as the motivation here. For one thing, although this is a better and more complete apology (six accompanying stories prove that) than most other papers have offered, it’s probably not going to win a big prize precisely because other papers have acted in similar fashion. How could, say, the Pulitzer board pick one paper’s apology over another’s?
No, I think this comes from genuine motivation to set the record straight and do a proper mea culpa. And, as you pointed out, this series sprang from the paper’s ranks — not the executive suite, such as it is.
This is not the time or place to be cynical about The Star. This package came from staff that was well aware of the paper’s shortcomings and wanted to acknowledge that in a big way. The staff’s emotional involvement shows up in the breadth of the reporting and the beauty of the writing.
Now, will The Star follow up with actions and more inclusive reporting? I believe it will, but only time will tell. As I said in the post, I think the advisory group is going to be very helpful by holding management’s feet to the fire.