A People's History of Kansas City

Kansas City composer Dana Suesse was behind some of the most popular American music of the 1930s. Nicknamed “the girl Gershwin,” Suesse’s songs like “You Oughta Be In Pictures” and “My Silent Love” were performed by stars like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. As Classical KC’s Lilah Manning reports, Suesse blazed a path on Tin Pan Alley in a music scene otherwise dominated by men.

In 1976, Kansas City, Missouri, was the unlikely host of a drama-filled Republican presidential convention that ended up defining the conservative agenda for decades to come. Incumbent President Gerald Ford found himself in a heated battle with then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan to win over delegates and obtain the party’s nomination. WFAE’s Ben Bradford tells the story of how this “shoot-out” shaped the modern GOP. (This episode comes to us from the podcast Landslide.)

The Veiled Prophet of St. Louis is an organization shrouded in mystery, an elite white secret society behind lavish parties, business developments and racist practices. As St. Louis Public Radio’s Chad Davis reports, the story of those who worked to unveil the Prophet directly laid the path to the Ferguson Uprising. (This episode comes to us from the podcast We Live Here.)

Armed with a tape recorder, Kansas City librarian Irene Ruiz cataloged the evolving history of the Westside and made the library a more welcoming place for the Mexican immigrants and Latinos who lived there. Today, the Westside branch of the Kansas City Public Library — featuring the robust Spanish language collection that Ruiz began — is named in her honor. Mackenzie Martin traces how Ruiz brought her activism and sense of community across all the chapters of her life.

The 19th-century American dance craze "the cakewalk" began as a form of resistance by enslaved Black people — a showy promenade concealing a mockery of slave owners. One of the most charismatic and famous cakewalking champions was Kansas City’s own Doc Brown. KCUR’s Julie Denesha reports on a modern movement to recognize Brown’s stamp on history.

Fifty years ago, thousands of people took over the small town of Sedalia, Missouri, for a party full of nudity, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll music that is often remembered as Missouri’s Woodstock. People still talk about the lore from that hot wild weekend. Local filmmaker Jefferson Lujin walks Suzanne Hogan through how it all went down. Depending on what side of the festival fence you were on it was three days of heaven — or three days of hell.

Most of Kansas was once covered by an ocean of grass and wildflowers. But that diverse prairie biome is collapsing, partly because of our obsession with trees. Humans have unleashed an aggressive “Green Glacier” that’s swallowing the Great Plains, and for these ranchers, saving the environment means being a tree killer — not a tree hugger. (This episode comes to us from the new KCUR Studios podcast Up From Dust, reported by Celia Llopis-Jepsen and David Condos.)

70 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in its landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education. But the case may have played out differently if it hadn’t been for a tenacious group of women in Johnson County, Kansas, who led their own integration lawsuit five years earlier. As Mackenzie Martin reports, the case centered around a two-room schoolhouse and included a lengthy boycott, big-shot NAACP lawyers, FBI surveillance — and six very brave children.

Cassette tapes could have remained a relic of the 1970s and 80s. But against all odds, they’ve survived the eras of CDs and streaming to win over music lovers of a new generation. That’s in large part thanks to the National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri, the largest cassette manufacturer in the world. Suzanne Hogan shares the story of how this proudly analog format found a new life.

Oreo is the best-selling cookie in the world today. But few people remember the product that Nabisco blatantly ripped off: Hydrox. A creation of Kansas City’s Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company, Hydrox was billed as the “aristocrat of cookies,” with a novel combo of chocolate and cream filling. So why, more than a century later, is Hydrox still mistaken as a cheap knockoff? Producer Mackenzie Martin documents the rise and fall of America’s first chocolate sandwich cookie.