For the first time in more than 20 years, today’s Kansas City Star did not contain the image and slogan of its founder.
Since a 1998 redesign, William Rockhill Nelson’s imperious mugshot and condescending slogan — “A Paper for the People” — had appeared on The Star’s masthead. (The masthead is the copy block at the bottom of the Opinion page, which lists the paper’s top executives.)
But after an expansive examination of its coverage of Black people and institutions over the decades — shortcomings laid bare in a remarkable series of stories last month — Star editor and president Mike Fannin decided it was time for the paper to formally distance itself from Nelson.
The new masthead is bare, but much, much better.
News of Fannin’s decision was reported in a Sunday story at the top of Page A4. In the story, development reporter Kevin Hardy wrote about the connection between Nelson and Kansas City’s most infamous racist, real estate developer J.C. Nichols.
Nelson was 40 years older than Nichols and schooled him in real estate development.
As Hardy said, both men were visionaries but also avowed segregationists. Besides leading The Star, Nelson built homes, many for Star employees, on land north of Brush Creek and south of the site of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. (It wouldn’t surprise me if the museum board was the next institution to review its linkage to Nelson.)
The residential developments of both men came with racially restrictive covenants — the only difference being that Nelson’s covenants expired after a period of years, while those of Nichols did not.
(As a side note, I live in a Nichols-developed neighborhood, Romanelli West, near Meyer Circle. A few years ago when I was president of our homes association, I found once, to my horror, that language prohibiting Blacks and Jews from owning homes in the neighborhood remained in deed restrictions on our website. Years earlier, the Missouri General Assembly had passed a bill banning the restrictions and language, but somehow it had not been excised from our records. I had the deed restrictions pulled immediately.)
In his story, Hardy quoted Fannin, Star editor, as saying Nelson’s slogan was “lofty but ultimately dishonest.”
“The Star was not ‘A Paper for the People’ through much of its history,” Fannin said. “It was a paper for only some people, namely white people. Those values don’t square at all with The Star newsroom of today.”
**
After 140 years of celebrating W.R. Nelson, The Star is now consigning him to his proper place in history.
He may be turning over in his grave, but who cares?
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
“Nothing is more unfair,” as an English historian has well said, “than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.” — Barbara Tuchman
The Star’s sheep-like conformity to whatever is politically trendy can no longer surprise anyone. Pack journalism surely is reaching new highs even in the hinterlands, once known for independent thinkers.
The tyranny of “liberal” opinion forces even today’s measly Star to attempt to erase history. Whatever his faults, Nelson stood on his own feet. I have no idea what the art museum will do about its name, although the current director is a multi-culturist who exhibits bad art simply because it has been made by someone whose feelings presumably have been offended.
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
–Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 2
Alas.
OK, Ms. Tuchman, we get the point.
Nothing better than a battle of great quotes.
Reading the initial package of stories I was struck after a while that they presented exclusionary covenants as if Nelson and Nichols had invented them and that Kansas City was alone in suffering their impact. So I checked Wikipedia, which has loads of information and loads of links to the history of such covenants.
The graf under the subhed History begins, “Racial covenants emerged during the mid-19th century and started to gain prominence from the 1890s onwards.” Both St. Louis and Kansas City are listed among cities where they were widely used — also Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Baltimore and Los Angeles.
So it would seem that Nelson may have been an early adopter of this practice but likely wasn’t its originator, and by the time Nichols came along it was pretty standard practice among subdivision developers from coast to coast.
This doesn’t make the practice less racist, and The Star was hardly the only major newspaper that ignored Black neighborhoods except for crime and such. It would have been good if The Star had included this context and taken care to place Nelson and Nichols carefully in it. This is hardly a place for parochial journalism.
Having written this, I’m hoping I didn’t overlook anything in the initial stories. I think I read all of them, but I was reading online and perhaps something eluded me.
Good context, Tom…I didn’t know that.
Full disclosure: I grew up in a Nichols subdivision, on Brookside Blvd., and both Kansas City houses I owned as an adult were in Nichols’s Crestwood subdivision, just south of UMKC. Covenants galore.
Do you think we’ll have to do some time in purgatory for living in Nichols developments?
I certainly hope not. Avoiding houses built by developers who used covenants would restrict one’s housing choices a lot in cities all over the country.
I can only hope our descendants 100 years from now will be less judgmental of us than we are to those who preceded us. William Rockhill Nelson was a man of his time, no better, no worse, and to use the social standards of today to erase his overall important legacy to the community is ridiculous. Also, The Star is a mere shell of the paper he founded, and it’s been bought and sold to outside interests a half dozen times over the past 30 years or so. Decisions made by the current management are almost irrelevant when you think of how divorced from the community its become. Sad.
I would just like to be remembered as decent person, not the prick I often tended to be in my younger years.
Dang, I was worried about the things I did during my drinking and gambling years…now I have to include living in a Nichol’s subdivision! I hope St. Peter is lenient on all three.
JimmyC…thanks to Patty, Brooke, and Charlie, you have mellowed and matured well.
There was a book of the title of “SAM” which purportedly was a fictionalized account of the life of William Rockhill Nelson, written by a former Star staffer. I checked it out years ago from the KCMO library. I wonder if they still have it?