What’s Your KCQ is a collaboration between The Star and the Kansas City Public Library series that answers your questions about the history, people, places and culture that make Kansas City unique. Have a suggestion for a future story? Share it with us here, or email our journalists at [email protected].
In December, when Kansas City’s Guadalupe Centers announced a plan to use the former FBI field office on Summit to expand its charter school program, a reader asked What’s Your KCQ? about the history of another area school a few blocks to the south.
Today the building at 1936 Summit St. still bears the engraving “ West Junior High School ,” but those who have lived in the area long enough may recall the institution’s final decade when it became both a senior high school and the center of community activism.
By the late 1960s, years of highway construction had left the West Side physically isolated. Its declining population, made up of roughly equal numbers of Hispanic, Black and white residents, suffered from unemployment at double the citywide average. The Star reported that federal housing officials told the mayor the area was “no longer viable as a residential community.”…