JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

Three years ago, Kansas City civil rights leaders could not get a meeting with the Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners regarding their push to rename The Paseo after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The park board president at the time, Jean Paul Chaurand, was holding fast to a decades’ old park board policy of naming parks and boulevards after people “who have made significant and outstanding contributions of land, funds, good or services” to the city. With King never having lived or made a lasting mark here, he would not have a parkway or boulevard named in his honor, as far as Chaurand was concerned.

At the time, Steve Kraske, then a columnist with The Kansas City Star, wrote that “a political freight train is bearing down on him (Chaurand) at 100 mph” and that he could very easily become “roadkill.”

Five months later, he was off the park board. (I don’t know if his intransigence regarding honoring King had anything to do with it, but, suffice it to say, he was replaced by another of former Mayor Sly James’ park board appointees, Mary Jane Judy.)

We all know the circuitous route the path to honoring King took after 2018. James appointed a committee to look into the matter. After months of hearings and deliberations, the committee came up with a few recommendations, none of which took root.

A frustrated City Council majority then stepped in. On Jan. 25, 2019, then-Councilman Quinton Lucas stood and made an emotional and compelling speech, urging his colleagues not to “kick the can down the road for two years or three years or 10,” and saying it was time for the Council to get to “yes,” instead of a continued “no.”

The measure passed on an 8-4 vote. Interestingly, Sly James, who was not well liked by Kansas City’s Black ministers and was on increasingly tense terms with Lucas, was not in attendance that day.

Ten months later, however, in November 2019, voters overwhelmingly decided to restore The Paseo name after a group called “Save the Paseo” gathered enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot.

By that time, Lucas had been elected to succeed James and was ensconced on the 29th floor of City Hall.

He appointed four new park board members, retaining only one of James’ appointees, Northland resident David Mecklenberg. He named Jack Holland, a major Lucas supporter and a municipal finance expert, to head the board.

Holland and the other board members proceeded slowly but methodically on how to honor King, and Lucas gave them plenty of leeway. Last summer, a consensus was reached among the interested parties, including Lucas and the Black ministers, to put King’s name on a five-mile, east-west stretch of Volker Boulevard, Swope Parkway and Blue Parkway. It would extend from Brookside Boulevard on the west to I-435 on the east.

Wisely, the park board decided not to give short shrift to the legacy of William Volker — a humble philanthropist who donated the land that became home to University of Missouri-Kansas City — and to transfer Volker’s name to the section of Oak Street from 45th Street (by the Nelson Gallery) to 52nd streets, near the southern end of the UMKC campus.

This afternoon, about 30 people gathered at the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department offices on 63rd Street and watched as the park board unanimously — and at long last — resolved one of the most nettlesome dilemmas that has faced the city in many years. To sustained applause, the board unanimously approved the renamings.

At a news conference in the park board chamber immediately after the meeting, one speaker after another heralded the move as a momentous and pivotal development for Kansas City. At least one speaker noted the importance of renaming an east-west street that runs through both Black and white neighborhoods.

Lucas was on hand, and he, too, heralded the day as very special. It was lost on no one that the day came a lot sooner than it otherwise might have had he not been elected mayor two years ago.

…As you regular readers are well aware, I’ve been hard on Lucas for not doing more to push Police Chief Rick Smith out the door, but I’ve got to say, he — with the help of an enlightened park board and parks department — made this happen. Today, Kansas City, Missouri, announced, officially, how it feels about racial justice.