On September 10th, 15 historians converged at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library to workshop chapter drafts concerning marginalized voices fighting for civil rights in the 20th-century Kansas City metro. The project “An Era of Rights: Kansas City’s Struggle for Equality” is led by the UMKC’s Kansas City Monuments Coalition (KCMC) and the Kansas City Public Library (KCPL) in a joint effort to create a centralized hub for late 20th-century Kansas City civil rights and activism information, historical documents, and public monuments devoted to the subject.
The project consists of two parts: a public-facing website with digitized historical documents and materials, and a published academic book on Kansas City’s marginalized communities and their activism. This project is the third collaboration between UMKC and KCPL. Both previous projects, “The Civil War on the Western Border” and “The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and Great Depression,” featured digitized sources, interpretive essays, and encyclopedic articles on a website, in conjunction with a published scholarly collection of essays. “An Era of Rights” follows this model, but is the first in conjunction with KCMC, a cooperative of public history organizations dedicated to telling unheralded stories in Kansas City.
As part of its central mission to represent a more inclusive history of the region, KCMC sponsored this workshop for the authors of the forthcoming edited volume connected to the project. The volume seeks to present Kansas City as a significant hotbed of civil rights activism by highlighting its diverse social justice movements, including Black civil rights, queer liberation, Chicana activism, and other community movements from 1950 to 2000.
Volume co-editors Sandra Enriquez, Rebecca Davis, and Bridget Haney led scholars in presenting their research for peer review at the Kansas City Public Library on September 10th and 11th. Over the course of these two days, each author discussed their work and received about an hour of individualized feedback from the group. Contributors jumped into discussion and critique regarding progress on each essay draft, proposing new angles on arguments, potential interviewees for oral histories, additional reference materials, suggestions on how to best represent the communities they write about, and alternative directions to take each piece. Many took advantage of additional mealtimes to collaborate and make connections about their work. The workshop concluded with a collaborative discussion on Kansas City’s role and significance to civil rights history in the Midwest and nationally.
Next year, contributing scholars will present their research at the Central Branch of the Kansas City Public Library on April 9th and 10th at a public symposium hosted by KCMC. Community members, activists, spiritual leaders, and others will also be invited to present at the symposium to address their various struggles for equality in the city. More information on this event to come.
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