Tag: Kansas City, Missouri

Jason Kander is a former Army intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan and the former Missouri secretary of state, and he has announced he's running for mayor of Kansas City. Kander joins Morning Joe to discuss the move and his…

After fighting in the second world war as a Marine, Duncan made soldiers a focus of his work while shooting for Life magazine, beginning with an assignment during the Korean war ‘Born in Kansas City, Missouri, and knowing nothing about Picasso,’ said Duncan, ‘I had the audacity to knock on his door, became his friend and took thousands of photographs, of him, his studios, his life and his friends’ Alone in his hotel room, Nixon writes his acceptance speech as the Republican party’s nominee to fight the 1968 presidential election – which he went on to win and become the 37th president of the United States Of his work as a combat photographer, Duncan said: ‘I just felt maybe the guys out there deserved being photographed just the way they are, whether they are running scared, or showing courage, or diving into a hole, or talking and laughing. And I think I did bring a sense of dignity to the battlefield’ He spoke of wanting to give his readers an idea of what the soldier’s experience was: ‘His apprehensions and sufferings, his tensions and releases, his behaviour in the presence of threatening death’ Duncan’s work from Korea was published in the 1951 tome, This Is War!, to worldwide acclaim. To photographer Edward Steichen it was “the greatest book of war photographs ever published”

He became one of Kansas City's few black officers in 1954. They moved to Kansas City when his adopted father killed a white man in 1933 in an argument over a moonshine still. Brooks’s father shot back through a thicket, killing the man. When the police brought Brooks and his friends over to the neighbor’s house, she said they had gotten the wrong group of boys. The police officers jumped in the car and left,” Brooks said. “The game was, ‘How fast could we eat before the manager came by and told me to get out?’” he said. From there, he worked in the Kansas City school district's Department of Urban Education. Elected twice to the Kansas City council, he served from 1999 to 2007 as the representative for the 6th District At-Large and as mayor pro-tem at the same time. Last year, he stepped down as police commissioner to serve on the school board of Hickman Mills. Jen Chen is associate producer for KCUR's Central Standard.