In her telling of Kansas City history, writer Karla Deel made room for people and topics she says wouldn't have a place in other history books β "vulnerable voices that are often hushed," she calls them. But Deel notes that it was a group of women β even more than a federal charge of tax evasion β that finally unseated him. Thousands of women formed a division of something called the United Campaign Committee to speak out against him before the city election in , she writes.
And then, on election day, 8, of them fanned out over the city to ensure the integrity of the of polling places. A Joplin native, Deel first fell in love with Kansas City history after she moved to the metro about 12 years ago, and later created a website called Squeezebox City to share her discoveries.
Those events include tours of spots like the 8th Street Tunnel or panel discussions about especially juicy bits of local lore. One preson who doesn't make it into many accounts of the area, she says, is Sarah Rector , whose story might seem juicy to many. Rector was among a handful of black millionaires in the United States in the early s. She was commonly referred to by the media as "the richest black girl in the world. Rector was 11 when the barren-looking plot of Oklahoma land she'd been given in the Dawes Allotment Act of turned out to be rich with oil.
She moved to Kansas City as a young adult and purchased what became known as the Rector Mansion at 12th and Euclid, which still stands, though in a state of disrepair.
Her research also revealed plenty about one of Kansas and Missouri's earliest border wars. Kansas went dry long before federal Prohibition laws cut off its neighbor's alcohol supply. Deel writes that one reporter called Kansas City, Kansas, "the cleanest city morally of all the cities in the whole world," in contrast to Kansas City, Missouri, "which was referred to as a little less than a modern Sodom.
