April 9, 1968: Kansas City After King
Near Kansas City, Missouri
Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in Memphis on April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight. In the days that followed, cities across the country saw uprisings: Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Louisville. Kansas City was among them, though it is less frequently cited in the national histories of that week.
On April ninth, the day of King's funeral, a student walkout at Lincoln High School, the historically Black high school on the east side of Kansas City, turned into a march. The march moved through the neighborhood. Police arrived. The confrontation that followed, and the days of unrest that spread from it through April eleventh, left six people dead and millions of dollars in property damage concentrated in the east side neighborhoods. The dead were all Black, and all were killed by gunfire. The official record identifies police and National Guard fire as responsible for several of the deaths. The full accounting of responsibility for each individual shooting remains contested in the historical literature.
The neighborhoods most affected by the unrest were the same neighborhoods that urban renewal and highway construction had already been systematically dismantling through the nineteen fifties and sixties. The business district on Troost Avenue, the traditional commercial corridor for Black Kansas City, was among the areas most heavily affected, and it did not recover its pre-nineteen sixty-eight commercial density in the decades that followed.
The Kansas City Board of Education voted to close Lincoln High School and merge it with other schools in the years following. The closure removed an institution that had been the social anchor of the east side community since eighteen sixty-five. The city's response to the rebellion was, in the east side neighborhoods, experienced more as continued dismantling than as repair.
