Best Remnant of Kansas City's Not-So-Glorious Days

It's only fitting that Minnesota should have two grand monuments to civil rights activist Roy Wilkins while Kansas City has none. Born in the heart of Mississippi, Wilkins' family moved north when he was very young. In Minnesota, he experienced true racial harmony, attending school with white kids, living next to them, befriending them. But when he moved to Kansas City in the late 1920s to take a job with the Call, he experienced a rude awakening. Once, early in his eight years here, he offered his seat on a streetcar to an elderly white woman. "I'm not old enough to accept a seat from a nigger," she barked at him. He grew to hate Kansas City, though he had an excellent job with what was then the second-largest Negro weekly in the United States. Our city's Northern pretensions didn't fool him. He called Kansas City what it was -- a Jim Crow city through and through. In time, he was awarded a column, appropriately titled "Let's Talk About It." Wilkins pulled no punches -- not from the cops who did nothing about black-on-black crime while coming down hard on any black male who dared talk to a white woman, and not from the east side thugs who ran the numbers racket, draining hard-working folks of their meager fortunes. After moving on to become head of the NAACP during the zenith of the civil rights movement, he made no secret of the fact that Kansas City's bald-faced racism had inspired him to activism. Blurry remnants of a sordid, not-so-distant past, the columns Wilkins wrote during his short but influential time here are available on microfiche on the first floor at the Main Branch of the Kansas City Public Library.