Does Renaming Help Anything?

In last Sunday’s issue of Kansas City Star, the editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Relics of racism belong in museums, not on Kansas City street signs.” That provocative piece called for renaming some of the major streets in Kansas City—but would renaming those streets help anything?

“Kansas City leaders must develop a plan to rid the city once and for all of street names, monuments and other public symbols that honor slaveholders and others who participated in the oppression of Black Kansas Citians and other minorities,” the editors declared.

There has already been some movement in that direction. As the editors wrote that three years ago “Kansas City took the bold step of stripping the name of prominent real estate developer J.C. Nichols from a parkway and fountain near the Country Club Plaza.”*

Now the target is historic—and infamous—Troost Ave., a major north-south street that has long been the dividing line between the affluent part of Kansas City to the west and the economically deprived and racially segregated part of the city to the east.**

The avenue is named after Dr. Benoist Troost (1786~1859), the first physician to reside in Kansas City and an outstanding civic leader. But according to the 1850 Federal Census Slave Schedule, Troost owned six enslaved men and women.

But is that sufficient reason to remove Troost’s name from the historic street?

It is rather ingenious that Truth is the proposed new name—but that reminds me of the rather untruthful social media platform known as Truth Social, so I don’t know if much would be gained by renaming.

June and I are graduates of William Jewell College (class of ’59), and most of our college classes were in Jewell Hall. Dr. William Jewell (1789~1852) was a physician in Columbia, Mo., and provided the bulk of the funds for the founding of WJC in 1849.

Construction on the first classroom building of WJC was begun in 1850, and it was named Jewell Hall. The first major remodeling was completed in 1948, and that is where June and I had most of our college classes. Recently, though, there have been strong suggestions for the name to be changed.

According to an April 28 article in The Kansas City Beacon, “A commission created to study William Jewell College’s historical ties to slavery recommends renaming Jewell Hall, its oldest building, to honor the enslaved people who built it.”

What would it help to rename Troost Avenue or Jewell Hall? I didn’t know when I was a student that Dr. Jewell had been a slave owner or that enslaved people had helped build stately Jewell Hall—and I don’t know that I would have been particularly upset if I had known that.

After all, that was more than 100 years earlier, before the Civil War. What I should have been more concerned about was the fact that there were no African American students at Jewell when we were students. (June and I were friends, though, with Gladstone Fairweather, a very black Jamaican.)

The first African American students at Jewell were not admitted until the early 1960s, and one of those was A.J. Byrd, who has become a prominent citizen of Liberty and was recently elected to a second term on the Board of Liberty Public Schools.

For decades, though, WJC was primarily a White school with just a few Black students. In recent years, however, the percentage of BIPOC students at Jewell has increased dramatically.

June and I are encouraging enrollment of Black students in Jewell with the establishment of the Leroy and June Seat Family Scholarship, which awards $2,500 each year to an incoming student who self-identifies as a person of color and an active follower of Jesus Christ.

Whether it is an avenue in Kansas City or the college here in Liberty, rather than renaming, seeking to change the past, it seems wiser to make changes in the present which will create a better future for those who belong to segments of society that have been unfairly treated in the past.

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* My 3/20/19 and 6/30/20 blog articles were partly about Nichols. You can access those articles here and here.

** The Wikipedia article gives helpful (and correct) information about Troost Avenue, including “points of interest.” One of those is Rockhurst University, located between 52nd and 55th Streets along Troost. For years I drove down part of Troost Ave. going to teach my weekly class at Rockhurst U. 

Hurting People Unintentionally

Two Thinking Friends wrote that they were “deeply disturbed” (which I took to mean “hurt”) by my June 30 blog post. Certainly, I did not intend to hurt anyone, but unfortunately, sometimes we hurt people unintentionally.  

Three Episodes

In reflecting upon hurting people unintentionally, I soon thought of the following three episodes that I remember with some chagrin.

1) Part of my July 10 blog post was about Magic Eye pictures, and I mentioned how in the 1990s I used such pictures in sermons a few times—and I remember one such time with some embarrassment.

As the guest preacher at a Japanese church, I talked at some length about magic eye pictures and had some on hand to show during the sermon and for people to look at afterward.

After the service, a woman came up to me and said that she was visually impaired (=blind), so she was not able to get much out of the sermon. I was embarrassed that I had unintentionally hurt her by not realizing that there could be someone present in the service who was unable to see.

2) This month I have read the slim and powerful book The Cry of the Poor (2010). In the first chapter, author Eduard Loring quoted all four verses of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s powerful poem “Richard Cory.”

One Sunday at Ekron [Kentucky] Baptist Church, which I served as pastor while a seminary student, I taught the teenage boys’ Sunday School class, during which I read “Richard Cory” to them.

You can read all of that poem here, but the last two lines say, “And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

Just as soon as I read that last line, I realized that I had “goofed”: not long before, the grandfather of one of the boys in the class had committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot. I had potentially, but certainly unintentionally, hurt the boy in my class

Even though that incident was nearly 60 years ago, I still remember it with some chagrin. It is embarrassing when we hurt people unintentionally.

3) Back in the 1990s when I was the part-time pastor of the Fukuoka International Church in Japan, one Sunday in December I was preaching about the great joy of the old couple Zechariah and Elizabeth when John, their first child, was born in spite of their old age.

In talking about the joy of John’s birth, I mentioned how happy my oldest daughter and her husband were when after several years during which it was uncertain whether they would be able to have children, Kathy gave birth to a fine baby girl. They named her Katrina Joy.

During the sermon, one young woman got up and left, seemingly upset. After the service, I found her outside, and she was still disturbed. Why? She said my talking about people being joyful at the birth of a child made her feel very sad because she was an unwanted child—and that made me sad.

Three Suggestions

1) Try to be sensitive when speaking to a group, realizing that there are many people who harbor hurts that can be exacerbated by insensitive remarks.

2) Try to speak with political correctness as much as possible, seeking to be aware of the feelings (and internalized hurts) of those who are BIPOC (the acronym that stands for Black, Indigenous, and [other] People of Color), LGBTQ, or any other discriminated-against group of people.

We don’t hear quite so much about it now, but “political correctness,” as I wrote in my 2/19/16 blog post, when used positively “describes the attempt not to use discriminatory or demeaning language about other people, especially about those who are ‘different’ from the one speaking.”

3) Don’t let fear of unintentionally hurting others curtail speaking a “prophetic” word when needed. Sometimes the attitudes, words, and actions of our friends and acquaintances, as well as our own, are injurious to groups of people such as mentioned above.

If our friends or acquaintances are offended when we advocate for the well-being of individuals in such groups, shikata ga nai.*

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* Shikata ga nai is an oft-used expression in Japan. It means “it can’t be helped.”