In last Sunday’s issue of Kansas City Star, the editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Relics of racism belong in museums, not on Kansas City street signs.” That provocative piece called for renaming some of the major streets in Kansas City—but would renaming those streets help anything?
There has already been some movement in that direction. As
the editors wrote that three years ago “Kansas City took the bold step of stripping
the name of prominent real estate developer J.C. Nichols from a parkway and
fountain near the Country Club Plaza.”*
Now the target is historic—and infamous—Troost Ave., a major
north-south street that has long been the dividing line between the affluent part
of Kansas City to the west and the economically deprived and racially
segregated part of the city to the east.**
The avenue is named after Dr. Benoist Troost (1786~1859), the
first physician to reside in Kansas City and an outstanding civic leader. But
according to the 1850 Federal Census Slave Schedule, Troost owned six enslaved
men and women.
But is that sufficient reason to remove Troost’s name from
the historic street?
It is rather ingenious that Truth is the proposed new
name—but that reminds me of the rather untruthful social media platform known
as Truth Social, so I don’t know if much would be gained by renaming.
June and I are graduates of William Jewell College
(class of ’59), and most of our college classes were in Jewell Hall. Dr.
William Jewell (1789~1852) was a physician in Columbia, Mo., and provided the
bulk of the funds for the founding of WJC in 1849.
Construction on the first classroom building of WJC was begun
in 1850, and it was named Jewell Hall. The first major remodeling was completed
in 1948, and that is where June and I had most of our college classes. Recently,
though, there have been strong suggestions for the name to be changed.
According to an April
28 article in The Kansas City Beacon, “A commission created to study
William Jewell College’s historical ties to slavery recommends renaming Jewell
Hall, its oldest building, to honor the enslaved people who built it.”
What would it help to rename Troost Avenue or Jewell
Hall? I didn’t know when I was a student that Dr. Jewell had been a slave owner
or that enslaved people had helped build stately Jewell Hall—and I don’t know
that I would have been particularly upset if I had known that.
After all, that was more than 100 years earlier, before the
Civil War. What I should have been more concerned about was the fact that there
were no African American students at Jewell when we were students. (June and I
were friends, though, with Gladstone Fairweather, a very black Jamaican.)
The first African American students at Jewell were not
admitted until the early 1960s, and one of those was A.J. Byrd, who has become
a prominent citizen of Liberty and was recently elected to a second term on the
Board of Liberty Public Schools.
For decades, though, WJC was primarily a White school with
just a few Black students. In recent years, however, the percentage of BIPOC
students at Jewell has increased dramatically.
June and I are encouraging enrollment of Black students in Jewell
with the establishment of the Leroy and June Seat Family Scholarship, which awards $2,500
each year to an incoming student who self-identifies as a person of color and
an active follower of Jesus Christ.
Whether it is an avenue in Kansas City or the college here in
Liberty, rather than renaming, seeking to change the past, it seems wiser to
make changes in the present which will create a better future for those who belong
to segments of society that have been unfairly treated in the past.
_____
* My 3/20/19 and 6/30/20 blog
articles were partly about Nichols. You can access those articles here
and here.
** The Wikipedia article gives helpful
(and correct) information about Troost Avenue, including “points of interest.” One
of those is Rockhurst University, located between
52nd and 55th Streets along Troost. For years I drove down part of Troost Ave.
going to teach my weekly class at Rockhurst U.
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