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Kansas City streets in the early 1900s didn’t have traffic lights, speed limits, stop signs or even lanes.
Roads were governed like a public park: You could walk, you could bike, you could push a vendor cart, you could hop on the cable car — Kansas City’s was, at the time, one of the largest such systems in the United States.
“What this was reflecting was the fact that, from the point of view of a Kansas City resident, the street is for everybody,” says Peter Norton, a history professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.”
If there was a traffic dispute — like a car going too fast — it was enforced by the police officer standing at the corner. And more often than not, the pedestrians triumphed.
“ If you were going to do something like drive an automobile, it was on you, the driver, to watch out for people walking everywhere,” Norton says. “The car was the newcomer and the car was supposed to conform.”
At first, cars were moving a mere 5 to 15 miles an hour. But it didn’t take long for that speed — and traffic accidents — to ramp up.
“Once you have drivers driving cars that are going more than about 20 miles an hour, now you have the misjudgments,” Norton says. “And the misjudgments — whether it's the driver's misjudgment, the pedestrian's… or both — could have very serious consequences.”
In the 1920s, motor vehicle crashes caused more than 200,000 deaths in the United States.
It’s around this time that we see a new word gain popularity: “jaywalker.”
And not only was the term “jaywalker” invented in Kansas City, this was also the first city to make jaywalking a criminal offense. It was a consequential decision that, with the encouragement of the automobile industry, paved the way to our enormous, sprawling highway system, and our country being redesigned for the car — at the expense of the pedestrian.
The birth of jaywalking
The first known illustration of a “jay walker” (originally printed as two words) was published in the Kansas City Star on April 30, 1911. At first, the term referred to a pedestrian who didn’t know how to walk in a big city.
According to Peter Norton, the Kansas City region rightfully claims the origin of the word as a whole, too.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,” Norton says.
The important part of this neologism is “jay,” which, in early 20th century parlance, meant “idiot.” Jay was a pejorative term typically deployed against rural people, but it could also be attached to any noun.
No one showed up in the small town to see the traveling Shakespeare theater troop? Well, that’s because it’s a jay town. They’re not sophisticated enough to understand real art.
A country bumpkin is stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, looking into the store’s big show window? What a jaywalker.
“‘Jay driver,’ I find by 1904, a little bit ahead of ‘jaywalker,’” Norton says, “for farmers with wagons who are blocking street cars.”
Oddly enough, “jaywalking” doesn’t actually have anything to do with the jayhawk, the mascot for the nearby University of Kansas, a mythical trouble-making bird that was used as the moniker for the Kansas “free staters” during the Civil War.
When walking became a crime
In 1911, Kansas City implemented the first anti-jaywalking ordinance of its kind in the country. Carrying a potential fine ranging from $5 to $50, the law prohibited pedestrians from crossing anywhere other than regulated crosswalks.
While there were some earlier ordinances restricting pedestrians in cities like Boston and Minneapolis, Norton says none of those were ever really enforced, and none of them used the term “jaywalking.”
Norton says Kansas City’s effort was influenced by the amount of automobile-related traffic accidents at the time — although it wasn’t solely based on concerns for pedestrians.
“There was a more specific concern about who was gonna be liable in the case of somebody getting injured or killed,” Norton says.
“Automobile clubs, which represented car drivers and insurance companies and dealers, were all very anxious that every time a driver in Kansas City injured or killed a pedestrian, they were held liable for it. Because the street at that time was for everyone,” Norton continues.
“They couldn't say, ‘Oh, well that person walked right out into the street.’ Because the judge would say, ‘Well, that person was entitled to walk out in the middle of the street.’”
Once Kansas City had this new law, it fell to policemen to train pedestrians on who really had the right of way on the street.
The first person to ever be arrested for jaywalking was Samuel Hebel. He got caught on Jan. 25, 1912, at the corner of 10th and Main Street.
The Kansas City Star reported that his name was “enrolled on the illumined scroll of martyrs sacrificed to the advancement of mankind.”
Kansas City’s pro-automobile approach was so novel that it made the national newspapers in places like Washington D.C., New York, and Chicago — and soon, other cities followed suit with similar ordinances.
“Kansas City… believes that the ‘jay walker’ is a menace to traffic in a busy city and will not permit him to stray all over a street,” read an excerpt of The Survey magazine in 1912.
Even at the time, however, many people pushed back on the idea that their personal freedoms should be restricted to benefit motor vehicles.
“It is to be hoped that Kansas City will be progressive enough to prescribe the strictest possible regulations,” jested a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune in June 1912.
“The pedestrian should be compelled to wear two fenders, one before and one after… and he should be provided with a horn which will give a loud, clear note so that express wagons and freight trucks may have plenty of warning and ample time to get out of the way.”
Kansas City pedestrians didn’t take to this new law too kindly, either. When officers would attempt to stop them from jaywalking, pedestrians would sometimes demand that they stand aside.
“We have one report, at least, where police officers try to stop women on a sunny day crossing the street,” says Norton. “And according to this report, the police officers were struck by parasols.”
Norton says Kansas City relaxed enforcement after incidents like that.
“The lesson to the car interest groups was, ‘Okay, we're gonna look terrible if we just plop these laws down. We have to have an education period first.’”
America’s complicated love affair with the automobile
As cars became more affordable and widely available in the 1920s, city streets started becoming even more congested and dangerous — especially for children.
And the public’s anger about these traffic crashes was mounting.
According to Norton, automobiles were referred to as “death cars,” personified in newspaper cartoons as the Grim Reaper. Their drivers were nicknamed “speed demons,” “road hogs,” and “joy riders.”
Cities would honor kids killed by cars with monuments, parades and the tolling of church bells; their moms were “white star mothers.” “Kind of like how we still recognize deaths of soldiers, as a public loss to be grieved publicly,” Norton says.
In fall of 1923, 42,000 people in Cincinnati, Ohio, decided they were fed up with car-related deaths, and they signed petitions demanding that the city physically force cars to slow down.
“And that took the form of a ballot initiative,” Norton recalls, “for a city ordinance that would require every driver with a car licensed in Cincinnati to equip that car with a mechanical speed governor that would make it impossible for that car to go faster than 25 miles per hour.”
All of this bad press, and resulting threat of regulations, posed an existential crisis for the auto industry — which included not just manufacturers but also auto clubs, dealers and oil companies, plus other businesses with a serious financial stake in cars, like road builders, contractors, taxi cab companies.
Back then, for simplicity, they were known under one collective term: “Motordom.”
In response to the ballot effort in Cincinnati, Motordom formed an organization called the General Citizens’ Committee, running a campaign on the importance of preserving personal freedom — and it worked. Cincinnati voters rejected the speed control proposal at the polls.
But this was just the first political fight of many to come.
The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce decided to deal with the problem of pedestrian deaths not as a safety issue, but as a PR problem. So they took control of the narrative.
”That ingenious plan was, ‘We will invite all of the newspapers of the country to send us whatever records they've gotten from their coverage of injuries and deaths on their streets,” Norton recounts. “‘We'll collect all their reports. And then we will use them to write up professionally copywritten articles that they can run in their journals for free.’”
Starting in 1924, articles blaming pedestrians’ carelessness for traffic injuries and deaths appeared in print all over the country.
“They tried the term, ‘reckless pedestrians.’ It got ridiculed in the newspapers. So they pivoted,” Norton says. “They switched over to jaywalker primarily as the term of abuse.”
To convince lawmakers and everyday people to demonize, and even criminalize, these jaywalkers, Motordom needed an on-the-ground campaign too. So they turned to the Boy Scouts.
“All over the U.S., Boy Scouts would be issued these little cards, and these cards had printed on them things like, ‘Did you know you were jay walking?’ ‘Here's what jay walking is, and why jay walking is no longer acceptable,’” Norton says.
“When you are up town today, Mr and Mrs Citizen of Kansas City, and thoughtlessly you attempt to round a corner and get outside of the prescribed lines for pedestrians marked on the pavement,” read the Kansas City Journal in May 1917. “Do not get offended, or ‘peeved’ if a little Boy Scout turns you in the right direction.”
Motordom also went into the schools, putting together a public safety curriculum to start teaching children these car-centric perspectives.
“They said, ‘We’ll give them posters. We’ll give them textbooks,’” Norton says. “And all of this stuff, free to the schools, will be committed to convincing the child that the street is a place that they should not enter except under the most limited and controlled circumstances.”
In 1925, Detroit schools assembled 1,300 children to watch the mock trial of a 12-year-old accused of jaywalking. (The student jury sentenced him to wash school blackboards for an entire week.)
A young Texas student, a few years later, got caught for the same crime and was ordered by his peers to write an essay titled, “Why I Should Not Jay Walk.”
The national criminalization of jaywalking
On Jan. 24, 1925, a new anti-jaywalking ordinance took effect in the city of Los Angeles. It was similar to the one passed in Kansas City more than a decade earlier, but LA’s ordinance had more nefarious goals.
That’s because it didn’t really come from a place of concern for Los Angeles pedestrians.
“The Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance,” Norton says, “was not written by a bunch of policy experts or lawyers. It was written by a man working directly for a Studebaker dealer. He said, ‘I wanna sell cars and therefore I want a traffic ordinance in Los Angeles that prioritizes drivers so that if a pedestrian is hit, the driver isn't automatically blamed.’”
The Los Angeles City Council implemented the ordinance over the veto of the mayor. But after seeing what happened in places like Kansas City, the Los Angeles Police Department didn’t arrest many people for jaywalking.
Instead, they made it more of a public shaming effort — one that continued on for decades.
“[They] realized that what people dread above all is looking stupid in front of other people,” Norton says.
That meant officers whistling and pointing to people walking across the street — and for women, even physically picking them up and carrying them to the curb.
“Which was frightening and humiliating,” Norton says, “ so people on the sidewalk are thinking, ‘I don't want to be like her. I don't want to be that person.’”
Once Motordom was able to convince America that cars deserved the right of way on roads, Norton says, it was able to lay the groundwork for the highway system we have today.
Over the next few decades, the U.S. would experience a massive expansion of privileges and space for car owners, at the expense of pedestrians.
“ By 1927, a version of the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance was the model ordinance for the whole country, backed by Motordom,” Norton says. “And it's the ancestor of all of our municipal traffic ordinances in the USA today.”
A version of Kansas City’s original jaywalking ordinance stayed on the books for more than a century — until city leaders, inspired by George Floyd’s death and the widespread protests against law enforcement and racial profiling, took a closer look at the consequences.
This is the first of a two-part series about the history of jaywalking laws in Kansas City Look out for part two in February.
If you have a local jaywalking story that you think we should know about, email us at peopleshistorykc@kcur.org.
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced, and mixed by Mackenzie Martin with editing by Suzanne Hogan and Gabe Rosenberg.
