The shooting of Ralph Yarl reopened big questions about racism and segregation that have been fused into the city’s history for generations but never fully reckoned with. After front door shooting, Kansas City grapples with race:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — From one vantage point, a post-pandemic boom seemed to be taking hold in Kansas City. It was the only Midwestern city selected to host World Cup soccer games. A sparkling airport terminal had just opened, replacing dingy old gates. And downtown, construction crews were at work on a giant stage outside Union Station, a remade train depot that will soon host thousands of visitors for the NFL draft.
“The man should have said, ‘Who is it?’ Or open the door and look if he didn’t know him,” Paul Long, a 68-year-old resident of Kansas City, said as he waited at a bus stop last week. “This kind of stuff happens to Black people for the wrong reasons,” said Long, who is Black. “It’s not the city. It’s the people. Some are good and some are not so good.
That lasting segregation, along with sprawling municipal boundaries that span more than 300 square miles, has created a Kansas City in which many Black and white residents live separate lives. A rush of investment over the past 20 years has brought more people and businesses to the once-struggling downtown.
“It’s almost like this veil of nicety and smiles that kind of overlays microaggressions and all kinds of crazy stuff,” said Watley, who is Black and the founder of Shirley’s Kitchen Cabinet, a nonprofit organization that seeks to empower Black women. Yarl told investigators that he merely rang the home’s doorbell. He said Lester opened the door and began shooting, striking him once in the forehead and once in the arm. Lester, who has pleaded not guilty to assault in the first degree and armed criminal action, told investigators that he was “scared to death” to see Yarl at his door and believed he was in physical danger.
Many in Kansas City also disapprove of their Police Department’s unusual governance structure, in which the police answer to a board made up mostly of residents appointed by Missouri’s governor, rather than solely to the city’s mayor.
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