Turnout at Kansas City’s first race reparations “community conversation” Saturday was modest enough that one of the approximately 30 participants suggested forgoing the scheduled breakout sessions.
“We need to do more media outreach, because the room should have been full,” Terri Barnes, chair of the Mayor’s Commission on Reparations, told The Heartlander. “And I just know, because I’m on my way to a church event and people at my own church will say, ‘Well, I didn’t know that was happening.’
“So part of it is an awareness issue. There’s still just a lot of people who don’t know.”
Dr. Adrian N. Carter, CEO of the Carter Development Group of Florida that was hired to lead the research on reparations here, promised the gathering “a comprehensive historical account of Kansas City’s role in perpetuating harm. We’re looking at harm from the city’s incorporation to present day.”
The team’s initial report is due next August, with a final report on recommended reparations expected in February 2027.
Saturday’s “Shape the Future: Kansas City Reparations Community Conversation” at the Kansas City Health Department at 2400 Troost was an invitation to black residents to “share personal experiences and stories of harm with the Research Team, should they desire, after the main session.”
“It will be race-based”
The dearth of media coverage before and at the event Saturday – even from black radio station KPRS, Barnes notes – may be because the novelty has faded from the commission’s 2023 founding and its initial lack of funds, she said.
“When we were seated back in May of 2023,” she said, “there was a buzz. People were showing up. And then when they found out we didn’t have money, the crowds of 50 went to a crowd of 30 and then it went to a crowd of 10. We kind of lost people over that two-year period because people began to think, ‘Oh, that’s just not going to happen.’
“Right now, we’re sending out emails on Facebook. We don’t have a media partner to help us get the word out.”
Barnes says the commission is well aware of the legal and political headwinds the notion of reparations is facing – with Supreme Court rulings against race-based college admissions and employment, and the court’s fresh look at race-based gerrymandering in political districts. A presidential executive order in May even froze commission funds for a time.
The commission has availed itself of regional and national teleconferences on reparations each month, and there’s a national conference each year in Evanston, Illinois. The KC reparations committee also gets legal counsel on what’s possible under the law.
Barnes is also mindful of the view among many that reparations is about cutting checks based on race, which would seem legally suspect.
“Well, it will be race-based. It’ll be for black people,” she says. “But we ain’t cutting no checks. I mean, everybody keeps saying that.”
Barnes candidly acknowledges that eligibility for reparations, whatever form that takes, is a minefield of its own – even in the black community.
“There are some people that say you should only get paid out if you can draw a direct lineage back to an enslaved person,” she explains. “Some people are saying if you’re black, whether you could draw a line back to an enslaved person or not … you’ve been impacted. It might be different; you might be impacted differently. But you’ve certainly been impacted.
“So, yeah, there’s a whole argument about that. And even for some of the reparations commissions that have gone forward, they get to the question of eligibility: ‘Who’s eligible?’ We have not tackled that in that way yet.
“I’m personally a believer if you’re black, then you’re eligible. Because regardless of where you go, the first thing people see is that you’re black and you get treated a certain way.”
What the commission is looking at
For now, the commission on reparations is gathering information on harm done to black citizens by the city government in five aspects:
- Economics
- Health
- Housing
- Criminal Justice
- Education
Meanwhile, the commission’s work is divided into four often-overlapping phases:
Phase 1: Historical Research & Data Collection – August 2025-June 2026
Phase II: Community Engagement and Oral Stories – November 2025-March 2026
Phase III: Analysis & Report Development – July 2026-January 2027
Phase IV: Recommendation Development – November 2026-January 2027
What might reparations ultimately look like, if not cutting checks? While the commission is far from considering that question, Barnes imagines – purely speculatively – such things as offering free health care to those 72 and older.
“Because we know back when they were 16 through 40, they couldn’t get health services from General Hospital 1 and 2 because of the racism, because of the limited access they allowed doctors to get,” she argues.
“It’s those types of things that are reparations.”
Barnes makes a point of saying reparations – which she says simply denotes “repair” to past harm – isn’t improvements to already-expected city services such as streetlights: “Reparations is not normal public policy.”
City Health Director Dr. Marvia Jones told the gathering Saturday there are some ZIP codes in Kansas City where residents’ life expectancy “is 25 to 28 years lower than people who are just a mile away.”
She also cited national studies that show people living near highways – such as Highway 71, which cuts through black communities – are more likely to experience miscarriages and births with complications, as well as asthma.
“Radical response to historic injustice”
Jones said she was haunted by such things while having children in just such an area.
“I can tell you that for years, I have worried: What did I do to them just by carrying them in this part of the city? No one – no one – should have to think about that. … How do we repopulate the core of Kansas City, but do I do that to the detriment of my children? Do I do that to the detriment of my health? No one should have to think that way. And yet, that is something that folks have to think about.”
Perhaps inspired by Jones’ testimony, Barnes – again, just brainstorming – suggests that for low-life-expectancy ZIP codes, “each one of those families will get at an additional $1,000 dollars a month for the next 50 years, because we want to make sure they can shore up their home or shore up where they live or their health care or whatever it is that they need.
“That’s reparations. It is a radical response to a historic injustice that’s never been addressed. It’s a repair.”
But how to do all this without running afoul of the law?
The commission’s counsel, Barnes explains, “was able to call some of the what we call ‘movement attorneys,’ because very few people have expertise in reparations, right? But there are three or four that do, and they are all right now working on other cases because all of the reparation cases are being sued.
“I can’t explain it to you because I don’t understand the law, but there are ways that these proposals can be written, there are ways that things can be researched and there are ways that things can be documented that reduces the likelihood of the lawsuits.”
“Most effective path forward”
Patrick Tuohey, a senior fellow at the Missouri-based Show-Me Institute, said the impulse to address entrenched barriers to economic opportunity is worthwhile.
“I appreciate the need to confront policies that have denied – and in some cases continue to deny – many Americans the ability to build wealth and pursue their own ambitions,” he told The Heartlander in a written statement. “From slavery and Jim Crow to redlining and the progressive urban-renewal programs that hollowed out so many neighborhoods, there is real work to undo.
“The most effective path forward is to ensure that core public services – public safety first among them – are delivered responsibly, and to remove the regulatory barriers that stifle entrepreneurship, job creation and housing construction. Too often, these areas are crowded with layers of well-intended rules that drive up costs and suppress growth.
“Just as redlining, though race-neutral on its face, disproportionately harmed black homeowners, Kansas City’s own race-neutral development policies – from generous subsidies for large projects to burdensome building and energy codes, restrictions on housing providers, and limits on short-term rentals – fall heaviest on black communities, schoolchildren and small business owners.
“This problem is not abstract. For example, our permitting timelines and code requirements routinely add months and substantial costs to small residential projects – costs that freeze out first-time developers and small landlords. These barriers map directly onto the racial gaps we see in homeownership, business formation, school quality and neighborhood-level public safety.
“Reparative policy should focus less on symbolic gestures and more on dismantling the structural impediments that still block mobility. Repair begins with clearing those barriers and insisting that essential public services are delivered effectively – or delivered at all.”
