Uniform-clad students filed somberly across the parking lot from their classrooms Monday morning at Christ the King elementary, on their way to the church. They took their places in the pews, where they’ve gone to pray many times.

This gloomy morning, though, they were there to say goodbye.

In February 1920, the owners of eight independently owned black baseball teams met in Kansas City at the Paseo YMCA and the Negro National League was born. It was not the first all-black baseball league, but it's the one that modernized the negro leagues and it was the last before integration.

The Negro Leagues Baseball centennial is being celebrated this year all over the country. But if it weren't for a Kansas City man who grew up in the same neighborhood as a handful of former players for the Kansas City Monarchs, we might not even know this history.

With less than four months remaining in the school year, a teary-eyed Amanda Coffman explained why she would no longer be in the hallways to greet students at the morning bell.

The Indian Woods Middle School teacher stood before the Shawnee Mission School Board and announced her resignation – effective immediately.

Coffman expected to receive feedback from her community and her parents in Michigan, but said she didn’t expect the video of the event to go farther than her parents' house.

Listen to this episode of A People's History Of Kansas City, a new podcast from KCUR 89.3. For more stories like this one, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play.

Last July, Frank Sereno, who lives in Kansas City, Missouri's Waldo neighborhood, gathered his neighbors and threw a three-month anniversary party for a pothole, complete with birthday cake.

He was fed up. He had reported this specific pothole, which was outside his house, to City Hall's 311 Action Center three months earlier to no avail. After the story of the pothole birthday party went viral, the pothole was fixed almost immediately.

Before Cassius Clay took the name Muhammad Ali, he was a 22-year-old who’d been rechristened “the champ,” the greatest boxer in the world.

Long-time Life magazine photojournalist and renaissance man Gordon Parks was assigned to cover the young man twice, once in 1966 and again in 1970. What Parks found after many meetings was a 24-year-old with bruised fists looking for approval — a side of the superstar the public hadn't seen.