When the Citizens Association began in 1934, it likely would not have welcomed Stacey Johnson Cosby, a Black woman, as a member.
Today, she's leading a group of neighborhood residents, community activists and people who have never been politically engaged to reshape the Citizens Association in something different that the white, male reflection of Kansas City's power elite it was for generations.
“If there is baggage, we’re pushing it to the side, because we’re in a new day,” she said. “We’re bringing new voices to the table, people who may not have felt comfortable being engaged before but who have good ideas about what we want from City Hall.”
At one time, an endorsement from the Citizens Association was considered a prerequisite to winning an election in Kansas City, Missouri. But in recent years, a lack of good leadership, the city’s sprawling geography, changing demographics and the emergence of new media platforms that provide political campaigns with immediate, targeted messaging abilities, have rendered the Citizens Association irrelevant.
The Citizens Association still technically exists, maintaining its legal standing as a political action committee. But state financial records indicate there has been little use of funds in recent years.
Dan Cofran, an attorney and former Kansas City Council member, who left the organization’s board in 2016, keeps its legal status up to date. “There are certainly funds to reactivate the membership to maintain non-partisan council candidates,” he said.
That’s what the Citizens Association has tried to do at a dozen candidate forums this year, said Joanne Collins.
Collins, now 87, was a 3rd District-at-Large councilwoman from 1973 to 1990 — the first Black woman elected to the city council.
Collins said the city’s demographics and geography began to change in the 1970s and ‘80s. She had more voters north of the river, she said, because she was a “very partisan” Republican at the time, and less popular in parts of her community more highly populated by Black voters. South Kansas City also had developed and gained political power.
Collins said it has become harder and harder to enforce nonpartisan elections.
“You have to have all levels of individuals invested to balance out the political, the business community, that union and partisan leadership,” she said. “It makes a difference when the citizens get involved.”
Booting Boss Tom
The political group was established in the early 1930s to root out the patronage and corruption of the Pendergast years.
Boss Tom Pendergast was an alderman for only four years, from 1911 to 1915, but he consolidated political and economic power as chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Party. For the next 25 years, Boss Tom rewarded friends with government contracts and bribed police to allow alcohol and gambling in spite of Prohibition. He helped candidates — including Harry Truman in his rise to the U.S. Senate — by vote-rigging and fraud.
In 1940, working with several other reform organizations, members of the Citizens Association recruited and elected a slate of non-partisan reformers to the city council.
Having achieved its goal, the coalition of groups disbanded.
But there was a consensus among organizers that the city needed an ongoing entity to ensure honest and nonpartisan elections, to encourage independent candidates to run for office and to oversee administrations once they were sworn in.
The Citizen’s Association took up the mantle through the ’40s and ’50s. The group successfully backed bond issues, the acquisition of voting machines, and the purchase of the Blues Stadium to attract a major league baseball team.
“The Citizens Bulletin,” a newsletter, informed voters in July 1948 that in the upcoming primary election, “those voters who cannot write may make their mark. A responsibility is placed on the Register Judges to make an honest effort at identification of these marks.”
But in the ’50s and ’60s, the organization began to atrophy as the crusade for government reform diminished. The original founders aged or died. Others turned away from Kansas City politics as they moved to Johnson County, Kansas.
The organization’s influence has ebbed and flowed ever since.
What it was like
Anita Gorman became well acquainted with the Citizens Association when she worked on the campaign of Mayor Ilus Davis in the early 1960s, and again when Mayor Dick Berkley appointed her the first woman to the parks board in 1979. She served until 1990, including as president her last five years.
Now 91, Gorman recounted a Citizens Association meeting at which she suggested the group solicit community input on the name of a new park.
“And this nice big business man put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Honey we know how to name things, you don’t need to worry about it,’” she recalled.
She also remembered when the Association admitted Black members in the 1960s. Collins, and Lincoln High School principal Earl D. Thomas, were among the first.
The group likely was motivated to invite members of the Black community by the formation of the Black political club Freedom, Incorporated, in 1961.
Gorman said it was important for the Citizens Association to expand its membership.
“There wasn’t any question that it helped us with the Black community,” she said. “They felt we needed to believe in them, which we did, and there is no question that it changed things.”
Another expansion
The Citizens Association held another of its forums at the Mohart Center, on Linwood near Paseo on March 21. Forty or so people dotted the auditorium seats.
A group from the housing advocacy group KC Tenants Power was at the front, wearing their recognizable yellow T-shirts, ready to record the candidates’ positions on affordable housing.
Ron Swopes, 72, said he’d just joined KC Tenants Power.
He said the Citizens Association will only be successful if its members realize they’re not bringing in new voices — just voices that have been ignored in the past.
“You’re talking about organizations made up of mainly white men,” he said. “They don’t go into marginalized communities. I hear this all the time: ‘It doesn’t matter who’s elected. My life doesn’t change.’”
Stacy Johnson Cosby and others point to the diversity of their newly re-formed Citizens Association as evidence they’re addressing this disillusion.
The group has endorsed a slate for the April primary, but recognizing there are almost three dozen candidates, Johnson Cosby said the group has encouraged all the candidates to continue meeting as many voters as possible.
“Yes, we’re endorsing non-partisan candidates, but this isn’t just about elections,” she said. “Whether our candidates win or not, we’ll still bring information about things going on in City Hall because we are the people, we’re the ones most impacted by what comes out of City Hall.”
