KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Protests and marches in Kansas City, Missouri, have gone from peaceful to violent and back again during six straight days of demonstrations, including a planned march Wednesday aimed at uniting multiple factions from the community.
That's one reason why local pastors suggested a Unity March, which is set for Wednesday night near the Country Club Plaza, with KCPD officials and officers as communities across the country have been engulfed by protests against police brutality in response to George Floyd's death last week at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
In addition to police and more than 75 religious leaders, Kansas City Fire Department and city council members are expected to join the march, which is slated to begin at 6:30 p.m. at South Moreland Park adjacent to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Pastor Darryl Burton with Church of the Resurrection will be among the clergy marching for unity,
"We just look for justice," he said.
Justice for black people with respect to law enforcement and the entire criminal justice system is a personal mission for Burton, who had his own serious run in with police and prosecutors in 1984.
"I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison and I nearly served 25 years as an innocent man in prison," Burton said. "That was police, the initial investigators who created that whole what we call fabricated and manufactured evidence."
After Burton's murder conviction was overturned, he followed a new path and eventually became a pastor at Church of the Resurrection.
Rather than be hardened by his experience, he wants to help bring about something better in the Kansas City community.
"I'm thinking hope and forgiveness," Burton said. "None of us is without sin, but, if we learn to forgive our past and our past sins, we know a lot of us weren't born during a time of slavery or Jim Crow and other things like that, but we are here now."
Pastors from local churches gathered earlier Wednesday outside City Hall downtown to demand change within KCPD, including the return of local control and body cameras for officers among other things.
Marching and protesting is one thing, but it will be meaningless in the end without real change to the systems that create oppression in the first place.
"From what I understand, the point of the march tonight is really just to bring the community and the police department together," St. James United Methodist Church Rev. Emanuel Cleaver III. "So, a march is a good, but it is only a small start."
Burton said this march is not just for people of color. It's for every person who values life.
"It is important for all of us," he said. "This pain is felt by everyone. It's bigger than just the church. It's bigger than just the black community or the white community or Asian or Hispanic. It's all of us. We are all part of this human fabric."
