The Long Walk Home

Now, when Wilson drives down his old street, the place doesn't look or feel the same. A few of the stately homes are still in good shape, but people don't sit on their porches as often as they used to. Other houses along the block sag with peeling paint and broken windows looking out on weedy, litter-strewn yards. There are no kids outside. "On a good day like today," Wilson says, scoping the scene from his pickup, "this street would have been full of kids out playing games. You wouldn't have been able to get through without going through a pick-up game."

Wilson turns a corner and spots a couple of teens sauntering along Indiana. He wonders who's looking after those kids. "Back in the day, people would know these kids who are walking right here," he says. "Everyone would know who they are and where they're supposed to be."

Wilson didn't notice it at the time, but the neighborhood was beginning to decline while he was still in school. The district's black population began dissipating in 1972 -- his junior year. Like the whites who had fled more than a decade earlier, members of the black middle class were leaving, too.

One of the reasons was undoubtedly the neglect Central High School was suffering. After becoming nearly all-black in the early '60s, the school's student population mushroomed. Each day, the building was packed with 1,000 more students than it had been designed to hold. Student bodies at all-white Northeast and Van Horn -- both of which were adjacent to Central's boundaries -- remained level because the school board continually tweaked the district's boundaries to maintain segregation. Resources tended to follow the white students, so Central deteriorated rapidly. Cracks spread across the walls, and holes opened up between floors. Students studied with books that had been used years earlier at whiter schools like Southwest.

Though community pride remained, the effects of racial inequality continued to dog the neighborhood. People started getting fed up. Wilson's senior-class yearbook is scattered with indications of social unrest, quotes from Frederick Douglass ("It only takes a spark to light a fuse. We are the fuse"), Malcolm X ("Who would be free themselves must strike the blow") and Stokely Carmichael ("Black power!"). Some of the teachers who had heeded Principal Boyd's call for high academic standards retired or sought transfers to other schools because they were frustrated by the changing attitudes of their students.

This sentiment was expressed most clearly during three days in April 1968, after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was laid to rest.

On April 9, the day of King's funeral, some Central students -- upset that students in Kansas City, Kansas, had been given the day off while students in Missouri had not -- gathered outside the school. Ray Wilson was an eighth-grader at Central Junior High, on the same block as the high school. He wandered onto the football field and watched as students poured out of the high school. Kids were shouting, "Let's go! Come on!"

According to one account, students inside the school ran through the halls shouting, pushing teachers aside, setting trash cans on fire and throwing books and desks through windows. David Smith was in school that day, but he only remembers hearing the principal announce over the intercom that classes were being dismissed. Once outside, he hung around for a while as the crowd swelled with the arrival of students from Paseo and Southeast, which by that point had substantial black populations.

Cop cars swarmed the scene. Black officers were ordered to roam the crowd on foot and urge calmness, according to an eyewitness account published in the Call. White officers sat watching from their cars in the distance. With the exception of a few bottles lobbed here and there, the crowd remained peaceful at first -- partly due to the presence of a cadre of black clergy and a pair of Kansas City Chiefs players.

The students, now more than 1,000-strong, moved east on 33rd street until they reached a police barricade, then turned around and headed back toward the school. But when a student staggered back from a cop car, writhing in pain from a chemical sprayed in his eyes, the crowd erupted and surged northward. A few agitators smashed windows, hurled bricks and overturned cars. When they reached I-70, they leaped over the embankment and forced traffic to a standstill before moving on to City Hall.

In an attempt to calm the mob, radio station KPRS announced a party in a church at 23rd and Benton. The crowd was just dispersing when cops fired tear gas. Violence engulfed the streets.

Wilson, who had followed the march all the way downtown, felt the sting of tear gas. He ran past broken store windows and followed a crowd onto a Greyhound bus. They asked the driver where he was going. "New York," he said. "No," Wilson remembers the agitators' saying, "this bus is going to 31st and Prospect!"

"So he took us there," Wilson says. "Then he got his bus bricked."

Smith had gone to the party at the church. The atmosphere there remained calm until, he says, the cops "shot rubber bullets" and tear gas into the church.