Kansas City Chronicles by David W. Jackson

Author:David W. Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Kansas City Chronicles: An Up-to-Date History
ISBN: 9781614232025
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.

A nanny and her charge in 1918. Courtesy Jackson County Historical Society 002730S.

The Steptoe neighborhood from the 1925 Atlas of Kansas City. Courtesy Jackson County Historical Society.

According to ongoing research by local historian JoeLouis Mattox, who helped to bring Steptoe’s legacy to the forefront, Steptoe’s origins date to at least 1857, when Henry Clay Pate, publisher of the Border Star newspaper and postmaster of Westport, paid $3,900 for a pasture outside Westport‘s southern boundary. “Pate’s Addition to the Town of Westport” included three east–west streets named Pate, Clay and Steptoe (Forty-third Terrace today in 2010) that were bounded by Broadway on the east and Summit on the west. Like many other Kansas City streets, the name “Steptoe” was once spelled out in blue and white ceramic tiles in the pavement at each corner.

Eventually, the African American population in Pate’s Addition grew. Penn School (formerly located at 4237 Pennsylvania), founded in 1868, was the first school west of the Mississippi established for the expressed purpose of educating black children. The St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was organized in 1879. Another neighborhood church, St. James Baptist Church, located at 508 Pennsylvania, organized around 1883; services are still being held there today.

The tiny, segregated hamlet became a collection of neat clapboard houses tucked along narrow streets. Many residents became chauffeurs, maids or cooks who worked in white neighborhoods surrounding Steptoe, but there were also railroad porters and cooks, plumbers, gardeners and other professionals. Though there were segregationist attitudes, there was little racial tension. Longtime residents called their community “a little island” and talked about having white, Jewish, German, Italian, Hispanic and Swedish people for neighbors, declaring it “the best colored neighborhood in the city.”

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