The Kansas City Star issued an apology for more than 100 years of coverage of the black community that “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.”
The newspaper in Missouri, which was founded in 1880, reviewed decades of its coverage related to race and published its findings on Sunday in an article written by editor Mike Fannin. The post, titled “The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star,” began with the admission that the paper “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.”
The investigation into the Kansas City Star’s coverage of race was spurred by a summer of unrest and a national conversation about race that followed George Floyd’s death on Memorial Day and a suggestion by reporter Mara Rose Williams.
The report is part of a six-part series documenting the newspaper’s coverage of the black community, and the team of reporters who worked on it “pored over thousands of pages of digitized and microfilmed stories,” compared those to stories about the same events covered in publications with a black audience, and sought to interview people who lived through certain events, including reporters who worked at the Kansas City Star.
“Reporters were frequently sickened by what they found — decades of coverage that depicted Black Kansas Citians as criminals living in a crime-laden world. They felt shame at what was missing: the achievements, aspirations and milestones of an entire population routinely overlooked, as if Black people were invisible,” Fannin wrote.
He said that when the Kansas City Star wrote about black people, which wasn’t often, “They were cast primarily as the perpetrators or victims of crime, advancing a toxic narrative. Other violence, meantime, was tuned out.”
Fannin closed the article by saying the Kansas City Star will form an advisory board that will meet monthly with newsroom leaders to “advise on key issues of the day,” and he said the newspaper urges other “Kansas City businesses to come forward and own their history as well, tell their stories, get the poison out — for the sake of the community and their employees.”
