About those downtown lunches

When I was looking at the postcard of downtown Kansas City in 1951 for this week’s “Where is it?” I remembered a conversation I once had with jazz singer Queen Bey. The conversation seems especially significant after last week’s inauguration.

Queen and I had eaten dinner downtown one night and passed by the corner of 12th and Main, where the big Kresge’s five-and-dime stood for most of the 20th century.

Queen became nostalgic for the chili dogs served at the store’s popular lunch counter — but her nostalgia was tempered with some bitterness. As a young girl in the 1950s, she was only permitted to sit at the “colored counter” in that store’s luncheonette.

“Black people had to sit at the back in the downtown store. And at the Kresge’s in Kansas City, Kansas, the white people sat up front and the section for black people was at the very back, near a door to the alley.

“Blacks weren’t allowed to use the bathrooms in the department stores,” she continued.

I asked about the movie theaters up and down the street.

“We couldn’t sit any fucking place there! We had to go to our own theaters. The Gem in Missouri and the Princess in Kansas City, Kansas. This city was so segregated then, it’s one of the reasons I had to get the hell out of here.”

Bey did return in the 1980s and lived and performed here until permanently moving back to California several years ago. “These young kids today can’t even imagine a restaurant being segregated into two parts for blacks and whites and that’s a good thing,” she said. “But I’ll never forget it.” 

I didn’t have to live through it, but I promise I won’t forget Queen’s story.