Kansas City votes to remove King's name from historic street

 KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Kansas City voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved removing Dr. Martin Luther King's name from one of the city's most historic boulevards, less than a year after the city council decided to rename The Paseo for the civil rights icon.
Unofficial results vote showed the proposal to remove King's name received nearly 70% of the vote, with just over 30% voting to retain King's name.
The debate over the name of the 10-mile (16.1 kilometer) boulevard on the city's mostly black east side began shortly after the council's decision in January to rename The Paseo for King. Civil rights leaders who pushed for the change celebrated when the street signs went up, believing they had finally won a decades-long battle to honor King, which appeared to end Kansas City's reputation as one of the largest U.S. cities in the country without a street named for him.
But a group of residents intent on keeping The Paseo name began collecting petitions to put the name change on the ballot and achieved that goal in April.
The campaign has been divisive, with supporters of King's name accusing opponents of being racist, while supporters of The Paseo name say city leaders pushed the name change through without following proper procedures and ignored The Paseo's historic value.
Emotions reached a peak Sunday, when members of the "Save the Paseo" group staged a silent protest at a get-out-the-vote rally at a black church for people wanting to keep the King name. They walked into the Paseo Baptist Church and stood along its two aisles. The protesters stood silently and did not react to several speakers that accused them of being disrespectful in a church but they also refused requests from preachers to sit down.
The Save the Paseo group collected 2,857 signatures in April — far more than the 1,700 needed — to have the name change put to a public vote.
Many supporters of the Martin Luther King name suggested the opponents are racist, saying Save the Paseo is a mostly white group and that many of its members don't live on the street, which runs north to south through a largely black area of the city. They said removing the name would send a negative image of Kansas City to the rest of the world, and could hurt business and tourism.
Supporters of the Paseo name rejected the allegations of racism, saying they have respect for King and want the city to find a way to honor him. They opposed the name change because they say the City Council did not follow city charter procedures when making the change and didn't notify most residents on the street about the proposal. They also said The Paseo is an historic name for the city's first boulevard, which was completed in 1899. The north end of the boulevard is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The City Council voted in January to rename the boulevard for King, responding to a yearslong effort from the city's black leaders and pressure from the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization that King helped start.
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a minister and former Kansas City mayor who has pushed the city to rename a street for King for years, was at Sunday's rally. He said the protesters were welcome, but he asked them to consider the damage that would be done if Kansas City removed King's name.
"I am standing here simply begging you to sit down. This is not appropriate in a church of Jesus Christ," Cleaver told the group.
Tim Smith, who organized the protest, said it was designed to force the black Christian leaders who had mischaracterized the Save the Paseo group as racist to "say it to our faces."
"If tonight, someone wants to characterize what we did as hostile, violent, or uncivil, it's a mischaracterization of what happened," Smith said. "We didn't say anything, we didn't do anything, we just stood."
The Rev. Vernon Howard, president of the Kansas City chapter of the SCLU, told The Associated Press that the King street sign is a powerful symbol for everyone but particularly for black children.
"I think that only if you are a black child growing up in the inner city lacking the kind of resources, lacking the kinds of images and models for mentoring, modeling, vocation and career, can you actually understand what that name on that sign can mean to a child in this community," Howard said.
If the sign were taken down, "the reverse will be true," he said.
"What people will wonder in their minds and hearts is why and how something so good, uplifting and edifying, how can something like that be taken away?" he said.
But Diane Euston, a leader of the Save the Paseo group, said that The Paseo "doesn't just mean something to one community in Kansas City."
"It means something to everyone in Kansas City," she said. "It holds kind of a special place in so many people's hearts and memories. It's not just historical on paper, it's historical in people's memory. It's very important to Kansas City."

Here’s the Waiver Colin Kaepernick Was Asked to Sign to Get Back on the NFL’s Plantation

Photo: Carmen Mandato (Getty Images)

Shortly before the NFL held a sham one-man slave auction combine for Colin Kaepernick, the league presented the embattled activist and quarterback with a waiver that essentially torched the prospect of Kaepernick participating in the public relations hoax reportedly concocted by Jay-Z, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, and NFL owners.

To be clear, this was a publicity stunt.

NFL teams are free to evaluate, work out and sign players at their discretion. But after reaching out to every team in the league, there hasn’t been a single team interested in even talking to Kaepernick or watching a workout. Yet last week, without any prompting, the NFL’s front office suddenly demanded suggested that the teams who, again, had shown no interest in the former 49er QB—and who had to pay him millions in a grievance settlement—should head to Atlanta less than 24 hours before game time to watch Kaepernick exercise.

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“I’m a little bit pessimistic because I’ve talked to all 32 teams,” Kaepernick’s agent Jeff Nalley said to CBS. “I’ve reached out to them recently, and none of them have had any interest. I’ll tell you this: No team asked for this workout. The league office asked for this workout.”

Aside from the suspicious timing, ESPN’s Howard Bryant notes that the league also prohibited Kaepernick’s team from filming the workout, a stipulation that is almost unheard of.

The issue that led to the impasse was the NFL’s insistence that Kaepernick sign an “unusual” waiver. Kaepernick has reportedly been mulling a collusion lawsuit against the NFL. Contrary to popular belief, Kaepernick has never challenged the NFL in a court of law. While news outlets have called Kaepernick’s previous settlement a “lawsuit,” it was technically an NFL Players Association grievance that was settled through arbitration, as required by the NFLPA union contract.

ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio, who is also a lawyer, reports:

The three-page, 13-paragraph documents contains several specific provisions that could be relevant to the question of whether the NFL was trying to parlay the waiver into a release of any claims for collusion/retaliation that Kaepernick could make as a result of his ongoing unemployment by the league since settling his first collusion case in February…

If I were representing Kaepernick, and if the goal were to have a genuine workout aimed at enhancing his chances of being signed by an NFL team, I would have asked immediately for the document to be revised to specifically clarify that any and all potential employment rights would be preserved. If the league had refused, I wouldn’t have signed it, because the language leaves the door sufficiently ajar for a subsequent defense to a collusion/retaliation case that signing the waiver extinguished the claims.

Here is the document in full:

According to Sports Illustrated, rapper, NFL partner and heralded capitalist, Jay-Z was “disappointed with Colin’s actions and believes he turned a legitimate workout into a publicity stunt.” Of course, Sports Illustrated didn’t name its “sources” but some have speculated that the quote came from the Official Entertainment Minstrel of the National Football League: Shawn Corey Carter.

While NFL insiders have said that Kaepernick looks as good or better than many of the 115 quarterbacks who have signed contracts to play in the NFL since Kaepernick was whiteballed, the signal-caller remains unsigned.

ESPN blowhard and Great Value Jason Whitlock, Stephen A. Smith, who explained that Kaepernick worked every day and spent his own money to show off his skills because Kaepernick wanted to be “a martyr,” remains a fucking joke.

Some people will undoubtedly take issue with the implication that Kaepernick was, or is, a slave. But that’s not how analogies work. For instance, if I called Stephen A. Smith the Michael Jordan of sellouts, that does not mean that I think Shuck and Jive Hall-of-Famer Stephen Asswipe Smith (I’m pretty sure that’s his real name—or at least his rap handle) is a great basketball player.

But if I did compare the NFL to a plantation, then Jay-Z would probably insist that working for Massa is better than freedom.

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