Kansas City Park Honoring LU Alumna Reopens After $3.2 million in Improvements

Kansas City named a park for Lincoln University alumna Yvonne Starks Wilson eight years ago, a tribute to an educator and legislator who spent more than half a century working to open doors for Black children across Missouri, from classrooms to the floor of the Missouri Senate. This week, the park finally caught up to the honor.

The Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners adopted a resolution in September 2018 renaming Liberty Park for the former Missouri state senator, making it the only park in the Kansas City park system named for a Black woman. But the park itself remained sparse for years, with little more than a playground and a small shelter house.

That changed Monday, July 13, when Kansas City Parks and Recreation held a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the completion of more than $3.2 million in improvements. Work began with a groundbreaking in January. The park is at East 34th Terrace and Stadium Drive in the Leeds-Dunbar neighborhood, where Wilson was raised by her grandparents.

Wilson earned a bachelor's degree in elementary education from Lincoln University in 1950, and the university awarded her an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree in 1991. She went on to spend 35 years with the Kansas City school district as a teacher, principal of William Rockhill Nelson Elementary School and, finally, director of elementary education before retiring in 1985. Along the way, she became the first Black woman to serve as president of the Missouri Association of Elementary School Principals.

Her second career began at age 70. Wilson won a special election to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1999, then moved to the Missouri Senate in 2004, where she represented the 9th District until 2010. She served on the Appropriations, Education and General Laws committees, among others, and in 2001 co-authored a National Black Caucus of State Legislators report on closing the achievement gap for Black children. Education was the through line in everything she did. She died in October 2019 at age 90.

The park's history runs parallel to her own. It opened in 1922 as Liberty Park, created so Black residents could enjoy recreation without the threat of the racial tensions that shaped Kansas City in the 1920s. Facilities such as Swope Park were segregated at the time, so Liberty Park offered families in Leeds and Dunbar a place of their own, with a merry-go-round, playgrounds, a ball field and concession stands. Wilson was born seven years after it opened and grew up in its shadow.

The improvements are substantial. The parking lot was repaved and expanded from 25 spaces to 70. Crews built a 2,500-square-foot inclusive playground, a basketball court and a large multipurpose recreational field with sports-grade lighting and bleachers. The park also gained a new restroom building, picnic shelter and more than 2,000 feet of paved concrete trail. New site furnishings include bike racks, benches, picnic tables, trash receptacles and a drinking fountain.

Perhaps the most fitting addition is the interpretive signage along the trail, which tells the story of the park, the surrounding neighborhoods and Wilson herself. A woman who spent her life teaching now has a park that teaches.

The park originally opened because Black families in Kansas City built a place of their own when the city would not give them one. It reopened this week as the kind of park they should have had all along. Wilson spent her career closing the gap between what Black children in Missouri were given and what they deserved, in classrooms and in the statehouse alike. It is fitting that the park bearing her name closed one more.