The KC CALL

Remembering Ms. Lucile H. Bluford On Her Day

By Eric L. Wesson Sr. Managing Editor THE CALL

On July 1, Missourians will have the opportunity to learn about one of the state’s foremost Civil Rights pioneers, Ms. Lucile Bluford.

Ms. Bluford dedicated over 70 years of her life to the struggle for Black America’s independence as a reporter, editor, managing editor, publisher and eventually owner of the Kansas City CALL newspaper. The issues she wrote about we quite complex for her early years as a journalist.

She was born Lucile Harris Bluford on July 1, 1911, in Salisbury, North Carolina, to parents John and Viola. She always she always said. “Reading was the key to life stating there is nothing that you can do that does not require you to be able to read. It doesn’t matter whether you are a college professor, cook, dishwasher, mechanic or street sweeper you have to be able to read to be able to do you job correctly,” she would say.

She learned reading as an important part of her life from her father, a pro

fessor at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical university, she would remember that he read the newspaper “from cover to cover everyday,” and as a child Miss Bluford would “sit out on the swing. . . and. . . read all day long.”

Her mother died in 1915 at an early age and she went to live with her grandmother, Mrs. Mariah Harris when she was 4 years old, while her brothers John, Jr. and Guion moved in with other relatives.

In 1921 the family reunited after moving to Kansas City where her father taught Science at Lincoln High school for the next 25 years.

Miss Bluford attended Wendell Phillips Elementary and Lincoln High. She demonstrated an early passion for journalism and civic engagement as a member of her school newspaper and yearbook staffs, the student chapter of the NAACP, and the student council. After school she often spent time on 18th and Vine Streets at THE CALL offices.

Racial discrimination in Missouri’s public universities prevented Miss Bluford from going to the University of Missouri in Columbia’s prestigious journalism school. Instead, she enrolled at the University of Kansas in September 1928 and quickly proved her talents as a reporter and editor. Miss Bluford always credited Ms. Marie Ross, the first minority student to graduate from KU’s School of Journalism and a future CALL section editor, with helping white students and teachers understand the importance of the Black press. Though Miss Bluford’s classmates supported her and even nominated her for membership in the KU chapter of the journalism honor sorority, national officials denied her admission based on her race.

Miss Bluford worked at

THE CALL each summer during college, but after graduation in 1932 she moved to Atlanta and began writing for The Daily World.

Homesick and repelled by Atlanta’s strict public segregation, she soon returned to Kansas City, where she briefly worked for The Kansas City American before finally giving in to Mr. Frsnklin’s pleas to come work up the street at

THE CALL. She began as a club reporter.

From the beginning she preferred writing hard-hitting news and political stories, and published many of her more controversial pieces under the pseudonym “Louis Blue.” The Great Depression of the 1930s left Call staff with little money to live on, but careful bookkeeping and the leadership of Chester A. Franklin kept the paper afloat. Miss Bluford’s tireless work ethic and devotion to THE CALL even in those hard times helped her move up the ranks to become managing editor by 1938.

In 1939, Miss Bluford applied to the University of Missouri’s graduate program in journalism. She had a successful career at THE CALL and didn’t need further training, but she saw an opportunity to challenge segregation in public universities. She had reason to hope for admission, since the previous year the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that the University of Missouri School of Law must admit St. Louisan Lloyd Gaines or establish a law school at all-black Lincoln university. Though the MU journalism program accepted Miss Bluford based on mailed transcripts, when she showed up to enroll officials saw she was black and denied her entrance.

With the support of the NAACP, Miss Bluford sued the university. In 1940, her case reached the Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled in State ex rel. Bluford v. Canada that the university had until February 1941 to establish a journalism program at Lincoln. She continued applying unsuccessfully to the University of Missouri’s superior program, and neither she nor Gaines, who disappeared one day and has never been seen since, chose to attend the new professional schools at Lincoln.

The courts may have upheld “separate but equal” education, but these cases received national attention as milestones on the way to educational desegregation. In May 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Mr. Franklin passed away in 1955, leaving Miss Bluford and his wife Ms. Ada Crogman Franklin who served as president and publisher until her death in 1983) to take on the position she would hold until the end of her life. From its founding, THE CALL had covered the struggles and triumphs of the African American community. Miss Bluford became editor at a pivotal moment in the history of the Civil Rights movement, and she maintained the paper’s original mission to draw people together in the fight against racism.

Over the course of the next five decades, Miss Bluford and the newspaper she led took a decisive stand on hundreds of important issues. Miss Bluford’s editorials supported the boycott of local department store lunchrooms that prohibited black patrons, mourned the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the subsequent civil unrest, and supported the election of Kansas City’s first African-American congressman, Alan Wheat, and first African-American mayor, Emanuel Cleaver II. Whatever the issue, black and white Kansas Citians knew they could find accurate information and thoughtful opinions in Miss Bluford’s words.

Ms. Bluford died June 13, 2003 and was succeded by her protégée or 40 years Ms. Donna Stewart who died in 2020. Upon Ms. Stewart’s death Eric L. Wesson Sr. took over as managing editor and publisher of THE CALL.

The Kansas City Public Library contributed to this article

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