Kansas City Public Library Reflects On 1968 Student-Led Civil Rights Walkouts That Shook The City

Kansas City MO

15 February, 2022

2:59 AM

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Press release from the Kansas City Public Library: February 14, 2022 It was Monday, April 9, 1968—the day before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral. King was assassinated in Memphis four days earlier, and the weight of his death could be felt across the country. Harry Ross was a student at Manual High School in Kansas City at the time. In an interview in 1969, he talked about how grief rippled through the halls in the days following Dr. King's death. "It was like this—we had just talked at school, you know about how it happened, feeling bad about how it happened," Ross said in the interview. The students had talked about wanting to do something to recognize Dr. King on the day of his funeral. "And some of the kids said, you know, we should walk out the next day," Ross said in the 1969 interview. "It was really something that happened all of a sudden…I was just expressing my feelings and so were many others." What began as Ross and other students expressing themselves at school would soon turn into a wave of protests across the city that would become one of Kansas City's most significant uprisings. Across state lines, students in Kansas City, Kansas, were to have the day of Dr. King's funeral off school to mourn, but not on the Missouri side. Kansas City school officials considered closing schools, but decided against it. "The three black folks voted to say we should not open the schools," said Alvin Brooks, who was the coordinator of school, parent and community relations with Kansas City Public Schools in 1968 and talked with The Star this week. Instead, KCPS Superintendent James Hazlett elected to keep schools open. "Our kids are going to feel that you don't care enough about Dr. King as others do. They're going to be marching out, and we're going to have some trouble," Brooks said of the decision. Like Brooks predicted, students like Ross and some of his fellow classmates made the decision to walk out of school in protest. "We all assembled in front of the school building, and it was just a few of us, and we called ourselves the Young People's Association," Ross said in the 1969 interview. Students at Lincoln High School, now called Lincoln College Preparatory School, had already started marching. Ross said he became a de facto leader of the group marching from Manual, and he led his peers to link up with students from Lincoln. The two schools then marched peacefully to Central High School to join more students before heading downtown. Once they arrived at Central High, things became a bit more tense. This press release was produced by the Kansas City Public Library. The views expressed here are the author's own.