The Kansas City skyline at sunrise in 2024. (Getty Images)
Recent accounts of a brutal law enforcement presence descending on a city recalled an earlier moment in Kansas City’s history, when Black civic leaders successfully forced the removal of the city’s police chief.
I wrote about the removal of Chief Lear Reed in “Kansas City’s Montgall Avenue: Black Leaders and the Street They Called Home” from the University Press of Kansas. That episode underscores how a determined and unified community was able to achieve meaningful institutional change through sustained and nonviolent collective action…