KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Before Theo Davis moved from Washington, D.C., to help pastor a church in Kansas City’s predominantly white neighborhoods north of the Missouri River, a Black church elder called him with a warning:
Davis might encounter a bit more racism in the Northland than he was used to.
“You don’t have to look over your shoulder, but just don’t be surprised if you encounter certain things,” the elder told him, foreseeing the stares and false accusations that would be leveled against Davis.
Davis quickly learned that how he was treated south of the Missouri river, in Kansas City’s diverse city center, was different from what he experienced living and working in Clay and Platte counties, where the population is whiter and tends to vote more conservative.
Conversations about such racism are being shared more widely now as members of the Kansas City community, particularly the Black and Liberian communities, process what happened to Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Staley High Schooler whose parents moved to the U.S. from Liberia.
Yarl was shot in the head and arm last week after mistakenly ringing the doorbell at the home of an 84-year-old man in the 1100 block of Northeast 115th Street, where he thought he was picking up his twin brothers. Yarl had intended to go to a home one street over, on Northeast 115th Terrace.
Andrew Lester, the white homeowner accused of shooting Yarl, was charged four days later with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. Lester told police he saw Yarl through the glass front door and “was scared to death.”
Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson said Monday there was a “racial component” to the shooting, but didn’t elaborate.
Lee Merritt, a civil rights attorney representing the Yarl family, said the teenager was shot “because he was armed with nothing other than his Black skin.”
Amid calls for justice for the teen following the shooting, many Black Kansas Citians living in the Northland have shared their own experiences with racism in their neighborhoods. They’ve told their stories of feeling unsafe and excluded at protests, in churches and among their family and friends.
Dee Porter, a social worker and mother to an 18-year-old son, helped organize a protest on Yarl’s behalf Sunday. Porter, 39, said she knows all too well the challenges of being Black in certain neighborhoods north of the river.
“To see that he was shot in the head in my neighborhood, I have to say something,” Porter said, later adding, “Clay County needs to do better, especially when it comes to people of color.”
‘I could be shot’
When Davis, his wife and their children moved to Missouri about five years ago, their initial impressions were positive.
But it didn’t take long before Davis, who describes himself as a big, Black man with dreadlocks, started having racially charged interactions.
There was the time a white employee at a Northland Walgreens followed him around the aisles and then out to his car, where she watched him back out with her arms crossed.
Or when he took his young children to play in a grassy area of a Northland educational institute where white families were playing. When they later tried to leave, a campus security vehicle blocked them in and questioned him extensively about why they were there, Davis said.
Perhaps the most alarming incident happened when Davis and his wife helped run a transitional housing facility. When one young adult attempted suicide with a knife, Davis called 911 and clearly explained that the person in need was white and that he, the caller, would be standing outside waiting for an ambulance to arrive. Davis even explained what he was wearing to dispatchers. Instead, two officers pulled in, jumped out of the car and pointed their weapons at an empty-handed Davis, shouting for him to drop the knife, he recalled.
After Davis helped de-escalate the situation, the officers acknowledged they had the wrong person, but it didn’t mend the trauma Davis and his wife – who watched the situation unfold from a nearby window – experienced as they both wondered if he was about to become the latest innocent Black man shot by police.
Up until he learned what happened to Yarl, who Lester allegedly “immediately” shot after coming to the door, the pastor helped go door-to-door raising money for charities across the Northland on behalf of the church.
“I didn’t think my life was in danger. I was more concerned about making people afraid and seeing the fear on their face,” he said. “I wasn’t as concerned about ‘I could be shot.’”
Davis won’t be knocking on strangers’ doors anymore.
“This is a cultural thing that has been deeply embedded in the Kansas City and the American psyche for so long, and it’s going to need very thoughtful and reflective leadership of people in our community to speak up, to point out injustices, to very carefully and methodically break down negative and wrong arguments when they come up,” he said.
A segregated history
On Sunday, as hundreds of people marched through the block where Yarl was shot, a white woman in her 60s, whose elderly mother joined her in the protest, said she has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years.
Until recently, the area has all been white, the retired school teacher said. Then a Black family moved into a house at the end of the street less than a year ago. She stopped by to welcome them to the neighborhood, but another person on the street took pictures of them wordlessly as they were moving in, she said.
“I would not say that they’re very tolerant of difference,” she said of some people in the neighborhood.
Since the late 1980s, Cecelia Robinson, a professor emeritus at William Jewel College in Liberty and a volunteer historian, has been collecting and compiling the histories of African Americans in Clay County dating back to slavery.
The Northland includes Kansas City proper north of the river, as well as the surrounding Clay and Platte county towns, such as Liberty, which used to have a much larger Black population, and Gladstone.
“We have a rich history in this community, but it’s also always been a segregated community. A community within a community,” said Robinson, who is Black.
The Northland has a history of excluding people of color, she said, particularly from positions of power and politics, where most elected officials are white.
Two decades ago, just shy of 3% of the population of Clay and Platte counties was Black, according to U.S. census data. As of 2021, that Black population grew to about 7.5%. Slowly but surely, the Northland’s Black population is growing.
By comparison, across the entire city now, 26% of Kansas Citians are Black.
Robinson doesn’t think Kansas City, or the Northland, should be painted one of the worst areas when racism happens everywhere.
Whether the shooting was racially motivated or not, every city still has systematic racism to eradicate.
“This one incident that happened does not represent every single person in the Northland,” she said, adding that while the shooting might cause Black people looking to move to the Northland to think twice, she doesn’t think it’s going to stop progress.
‘We want to live together’
As a Liberian immigrant and pastor at House of God Community Church, Jouty Jalarue, known by most as Pastor Jay, said he’s never felt unwanted in the 11 years he’s lived in the Northland. Most people are pleasant.
But his greatest fear of what could happen because of the color of his skin just did. And it happened very close to home.
In recent days, members of Kansas City’s Liberian community, Jalarue included, have been engaged in tough and painful conversations with their families that they never imagined having when they first moved to America, Jalarue said.
Jalarue and his wife have known Yarl’s parents for more than a decade. He called Yarl’s mother, who helped his wife find work at a local hospital when they relocated, “a blessing.” Yarl’s father, he said, helped create the church’s initial marketing and social media presence. Together, they all built a life in KC.
“Many of us fled from our countries of origin looking for a better life in America. And for us to sometimes be viewed as … though we are slaves, is almost like, ‘it would have been better for us to stay where we were than to come here and be murdered,’” Jalarue said. “I don’t want to sound like America is a bad country. The best that I’ve ever had in my life came from America: my education … building up a family, all of that started right here. That’s where I go to know myself and experience who I was.”
Jalarue said he doesn’t plan to run from the Northland. It’s where his 10-year-old son rides bikes and shoots hoops with his friends, most of whom are white. He wants his son to continue playing with children from every race without thinking twice. Without an inkling or hate or fear.
He said the conversations around safety and racism need to be had, they just need to be in a way that doesn’t leave his son growing up feeling like he can’t be friends with white people, or marry a white person.
He wants to tell his son stories like that of the Eagle Scout who, like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, saw only a fellow human in need and stayed with Yarl after he was shot until help arrived.
He’s careful not to spread a message that white people don’t want Black people in the Northland, because he doesn’t believe that’s true for most people, and he fears it will worsen whatever division already exists.
“The bottom line: We want to live together in peace and unity,” Jalarue said.
A focus on empathy
As she was leaving Sunday’s protest, a woman approached Nicole Price.
“I know you’re on this empathy journey, but I can’t be empathetic this week,” the woman told Price, an author and owner of a leadership development company with a background in diversity and inclusion work. Price lives in the Northland and has a laundry list of racist experiences to show for it.
Price reflected on the statement. People often think empathy absolves others of wrongdoing, but she believes empathy instead demands accountability.
She tried putting herself in the shoes of the man now charged with two felonies, including first-degree assault, in the shooting.
Price’s Platte County address is very similar to another address nearby. She knows what it’s like for someone to mistakenly come to her home looking for someone else. She grew up near Kansas City’s racial dividing line, on the east side, and knows what it’s like to sometimes feel in danger as homicide counts in the area rose.
It’s because of this lens, Price said, that she can’t ever imagine she would have pulled the trigger once, let alone twice.
She fears, depending on how the case unfolds, that it could play into the stereotypes that the Northland is white “and it needs to stay that way,” she said.
“Kansas City, as the heart of the nation, can be an example of what empathy looks like to the world, and that includes instituting the law justly and fairly,” she said, adding” We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
