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This chapter looks at how Kansas City and Oakland obtained major league franchises by poaching them from elsewhere, part of a nationwide trend that began in the 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s. The Kansas City Star helped lure baseball’s Athletics from Philadelphia to Kansas City in 1954; the team would face significant trials under owners Arnold Johnson and Charles Finley. In 1963 Lamar Hunt moved the Dallas Texans football team to Kansas City. Oakland already had landed its own football franchise that foundered until Al Davis assumed leadership. The Oakland Tribune shepherded the drive to build the Oakland Coliseum, whereas in 1967 Kansas City passed a bond issue to build its own stadium complex, only to lose the A’s to Oakland.

The introduction discusses how Kansas City and Oakland sought to elevate themselves through big-league sports franchises and urban renewal. It relates the story of a controversial 1970 Oakland-Kansas City football game to illustrate what was at stake in the sports rivalry between the two cities. The introduction suggests that within cities and professional sports, there are always resentments, grievances, and competing agendas at play, and there are always winners and losers off the field as well as on. That is particularly true during historically fraught times when sports is seen as a key indicator of urban status and when many people reject a vision of “big-league” success that they feel disadvantages and disempowers them.

This chapter examines the heyday of the Kansas City Chiefs-Oakland Raiders American Football League rivalry. Their face-offs during the 1968 and 1969 seasons took place amid racial revolt, including the rise of the Black Panthers and the riots following Martin Luther King’s death. It also was a time of increased activism among African American athletes, including those in the AFL. Media coverage of the social ferment ranged from reactionary in the Oakland Tribune to more progressive in Sports Illustrated’s landmark 1968 series on the black athlete. Paralleling the struggles of Oakland and Kansas City to improve their public images, the AFL battled perceptions that it was an inferior league. Those perceptions were countered by the Chiefs’ win in Super Bowl IV.

This chapter tells of the decline of the Kansas City Chiefs after they moved to Arrowhead Stadium in 1972. The Chiefs still could beat the Oakland Raiders at home, but coach Hank Stram was finally fired. The Raiders dominated their division but routinely lost during the playoffs, and they were branded as not being able to win the big game. The two football teams’ frustrations coincided with confrontations over Kansas City’s and Oakland’s investments in professional sports. Citizen groups filed legal challenges over Kansas City’s new sports complex and plans for the city’s new Kemper Arena, whereas the Black Panthers used its newspaper to present a comprehensive critique of Oakland’s ruling elite, including the people who built and profited from the Oakland Coliseum.

This chapter is set in Kansas City, Missouri and Los Angeles, California and demonstrates how Flo Kennedy’s parents contributed to the formation of her black feminist radicalism. Her parents not only stood up for themselves and their daughters against racist white authorities but also held progressive views about personal autonomy and female sexuality. Kennedy’s mother allowed her to kiss boys on the front porch and to discuss taboo topics, such as the scents and sensations of a woman’s body. Both her mother and father actively defended themselves against entrenched forms of power and had numerous run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan, white employers, and black school officials. They taught Kennedy not to defer to any type of authority. The sexual freedom that Kennedy experienced and the battles with both black and white authorities that she witnessed helped her to embrace a black feminist politics and reject the politics of respectability and other social constraints that inhibited black women’s political activism and mobility.

This chapter discusses the baseball rivalry that developed between the Oakland A’s and the Kansas City Royals. The A’s won two more world championships but still fought with owner Charles Finley, who drew condemnation for his actions during the 1973 World Series. The Royals had developed a talented core through trades and their farm system but could not beat the A’s when it counted the most, and the team experienced turmoil of its own. Kansas City’s and Oakland’s decisions to build new sports facilities outside their central business districts contributed to the decline of the two cities’ downtowns, which the cities tried to counter through an array of urban renewal projects that in turn provoked controversy.

The conclusion summarizes what happened after the heyday of the Oakland-Kansas City sports rivalry to the cities and their sports teams: the Kansas City Chiefs, the Kansas City Royals, the Oakland A’s, and the Oakland Raiders. Kansas City worked to keep the Chiefs and Royals by renovating its sports complex; it also built a new downtown arena, the Sprint Center. Oakland would lose the Raiders twice (once to Los Angeles and once to Las Vegas), and it would struggle to find a site for a new stadium for the A’s. The conclusion considers the implications of yesterday’s Kansas City-Oakland sports rivalry for a new era of city-sports relations.

This chapter deals with changes in the Missouri suburbs, describing their consolidation and growth across the postwar period. Particular attention is devoted to several of these districts, which served as bellwethers of change across the period. They include North Kansas City, which grew rapidly through a process of annexation, eventually more than tripling in size geographically as smaller districts agreed to join it. The other districts are Raytown and Hickman Mills to the south, both of which had been consolidated many years earlier. These districts expanded in population during the postwar era, especially Hickman Mills, which registered the fastest growth rate in the region. They offer an interesting contrast, however, in efforts aimed at excluding blacks and other groups considered undesirable. In particular, Raytown may have represented the period's most active case of opportunity hoarding.

This chapter relates the rise in the fortunes of baseball’s Oakland A’s, culminating in their 1972 World Series title. They won despite weak attendance and turmoil under owner Charles Finley. The Kansas City Royals established themselves as a model expansion franchise under owner Ewing Kauffman but still had far to go to match the A’s’ success. Labor unrest engulfed both baseball and the two cities during this period, with baseball players walking off the job not long after lengthy construction strikes in Kansas City and a dockworkers strike against the Port of Oakland. Even as the growing power of the Major League Baseball Players Association transformed baseball, organized labor elsewhere faced an increasingly harsh climate.

This chapter examines the highs and lows that would be experienced by Kansas City and Oakland and the athletes who played there. The Kansas City Royals won their first division title in 1976, the same year that Kansas City hosted the Republican National Convention. The Oakland Raiders won their first Super Bowl in 1977, the same year that Oakland elected its first African American mayor. But the two cities were scarred by violence from organized crime and the Symbionese Liberation Army, as businesses were dynamited and a school superintendent was assassinated. Players on the cities’ sports teams were enmeshed in charges of thuggery and racism, and some football players sustained profound injuries that would not become fully apparent until years later.

The Black Panther Party (BPP) differed from the civil rights movement in two ways: its goal of gaining control over institutions that influenced the lives of African Americans; and its willingness to engage in armed self-defense tactics in the face of violent oppression. This chapter examines the rise and fall of the BPP branch in Kansas City, Missouri, between 1968 and 1971. In order to put the Kansas City branch of the BPP in its proper context, it assesses the city’s sociopolitical environment and looks at the branch’s activities in relation to the larger black freedom struggle at the local, state, and national levels. The chapter considers how the Kansas City branch addressed problems confronting African Americans that traditional civil rights organizations could not, and also comments on the rise of militancy in the city, the challenges that impacted the Kansas City BPP, and its responses to such challenges. It concludes with an analysis of the aftermath and decline of black politics in Kansas City.

This chapter introduces metropolitan Kansas City as the site for a case study to examine the dynamics of suburban development and its implications for educational inequality. Following the lead of its city manager Perry Cookingham, Kansas City, Missouri, undertook an aggressive program of annexation to foreclose the negative effects of suburban development on the central city, expanding its boundaries substantially. Cookingham's plan did not include annexation of school districts, however, and as a result the enlarged municipality contained all or parts of more than a dozen districts, a development that would have important consequences. At the same time, suburbanization resulted in population shifts across the area, with affluent and college-educated adults settling in suburban communities, especially in Johnson County, Kansas. This too would have important educational consequences, giving suburban schools on the Kansas side of the state line a particular advantage in terms of academic attainment and achievement. It also relegated the schools of Kansas City, Missouri, to a range of problems associated with concentrated poverty and declining revenues.

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the volume's principal points and larger implications. It shows that Kansas City offers a nearly archetypal case of the metropolitan revolution, with suburban sprawl transforming the region's social, economic, and demographic landscape. At the same time the educational system changed profoundly as well, with so-called suburban districts growing rapidly and the once preeminent central city district suffering a near collapse in significance and stature. It is telling that school district boundaries, rather than municipal limits, became the lines demarking suburban versus urban residential zones. This institutional form of education became a badge of status as a consequence, a telling indication of the power that this particular dimension of metropolitan life came to represent.

Chapter 2 analyzes debates about re-placeing at the municipal scale. A key focus of this analysis is how different models of infrastructure deployment create visible geographies of digital inclusion and exclusion. The author investigates the practice of re-placeing the city from the perspective of those who plan and implement digital infrastructure projects, the municipal officials who oversee them, the people who benefit from them, and those who “opt out” of or are excluded from these efforts. Employing the example of Google’s Fiber for Communities project in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, the author illustrates how processes of digital infrastructure implementation reveal polysemic experiences of the city as a place. Through interviews and participant observation of Google Fiber deployment and digital inclusion efforts in Kansas and Missouri, the chapter offers an analysis of how infrastructure installation as urban renewal re-places the city and reveals conflicting affective experiences of infrastructure and how digital connection is perceived as relevant among populations with differential mobilities, socioeconomic statuses, and distinct experiences and attachments to the city in which they live.

This introductory chapter discusses an “ecological” approach to understanding urban development, as applied to suburban schooling. It narrows down the scope of the study to metropolitan Kansas City, a major midwestern hub near the geographical center of the contiguous forty-eight states. The chapter briefly considers the process of suburban development examined in light of the racialization of neighborhoods and institutions, especially schools. As historians have amply demonstrated, suburbanization entailed a massive movement of human and material resources out of central cities, leaving poverty and inequity in its wake. While Kansas City's urban schools struggled with growing numbers of impoverished students, outlying districts grew rapidly and remained predominantly white and middle class. And much of this occurred within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri.

Altman grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, in the 1920s and 1930s, during the “Pendergast” era of the city’s history. His childhood included a viewing of the legendary King Kong (1933), as well as experiences listening to Norman Corwin’s radio dramas and groundbreaking jazz. Altman grew up during a particularly rich period of change and innovation in the history of American media, particularly in film, music (both live and recorded), and broadcast sound. New technologies emerged, overlapped, and coexisted with older ones, and Altman would recall and use each and every one of them, to great effect.

This chapter examines the “centurial” time capsules sealed in Detroit, Kansas City, Colorado Springs, and at Harvard and Mount Holyoke colleges, to welcome the twentieth century, along with those imagined by utopian and dystopian novelists, including Edward Bellamy and Mark Twain. Along with pioneering amateur and female historians, these collaborative vessels defied the orthodoxies of the ascendant professional historian—that solitary, objective, implicitly masculine expert concerned with affairs of state and written documents heroically retrieved from dusty archives. Whereas the earliest vessels were content to memorialize politicians and businessmen, these sought to enable historians to write a history of 1900/1 that would be social and cultural as well as political, local as well as national (albeit still focused on the white middle class). They thus included unorthodox evidence: vernacular artifacts, commissioned essays and journals detailing everyday activities, phonograph records, and photographic surveys of the built environment. Centurial vessels also reveal how contemporaries conceived of the future not in abstract terms (as scholarship on temporality has claimed), but in embodied, affective ways. Through this communication device, and in particular the sealed envelope, they fantasized about physically touching their future recipients—an intimacy that generated a sense of ethical duty to posterity.

This chapter follows Massasoit through eighty years of unveilings and dedication ceremonies across diverse locations to interrogate how the national narrative originally imagined by the Improved Order of Red Men was staged and how audiences received it in Plymouth and locations far away from New England. The interplay between the intended narrative of national belonging and regional/local ramifications of the statue's installation is noted, and indigenous perspectives are included. Even after the unveiling ceremonies in each locale and era (Plymouth in 1921, Salt Lake City in 1922 and 1959, and Evergreen Park, Kansas City, Spokane, and Provo in late 1970s), the statue continued to accumulate meaning for viewers. This chapter argues that Massasoit served as a stage (or staging ground) for public discussions over cultural appropriation and the place of Native people in national and local historical consciousness.

This chapter focuses on the hot-swing numbers that the Clouds of Joy recorded in the period between March 1936 and July 1941. It shows that despite evident qualities of the hot-jazz styles of New York and Kansas City, the swing records of Kirk’s band display a comparatively restrained but elegant character. Unlike other black swing bands, the Clouds of Joy do not impress with rhythmic drive, unusual sonorities, or sheer volume. Their swing style is more subtle, unobtrusive, and refined. So, this chapter asks, how can we account for the distinctively restrained-but-elegant quality in the swing recordings of the Clouds of Joy? This central question is addressed with reference to social dancing, but it is as much about race as style: Kirk and his band continued to develop a black-jazz style that ensured their music appealed to Decca’s race-records market while also Signifyin(g) stereotypes of blackness associated with swing music in a subversive way.