by Murrel Bland
Chester Owens Jr. received a telephone call in about 2005 (he can’t recall the exact date) telling him that many artifacts of Sumner High School were about to be destroyed. He quickly rescued these historic items, storing many of them in the basement of his home.
This is one of several stories that Owens told Sunday afternoon, March 20, at a quarterly meeting of the Wyandotte County Historical Society at the Wyandotte County Museum in Wyandotte County Park, Bonner Springs. About 50 persons attended.
Today, there is a history room at Sumner Academy of Arts and Sciences displaying many items including the rescued artifacts.
Owens, a dedicated historian of Sumner High School, came to Wyandotte County with his family from Ashdown, Arkansas, in 1946. He became a sophomore at Sumner.
Owns told of how Sumner became the only segregated high school, by law, in Kansas. On April 12, 1904, a very popular white youth, Roy Martin, was shot and killed in Kerr Park. Charged and convicted was Louis Gregory, a Black youth. Throughout the years, Black historians have argued that Gregory was trying to defend himself. The white community was up in arms. The solution was to segregate schools—all Black students would attend Northeast Junior High and Sumner High School.
Kansas Gov. E.W. Hoch was reluctant to sign the bill that made Sumner a segregated school; he did it only after being assured Sumner would be of the same quality as other buildings in the Kansas City, Kansas, School District. The law also guaranteed that Sumner faculty members would be paid as well as their white counterparts. These factors attracted faculty members from all over the United States.
The name of the high school was chosen honoring U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an abolitionist.
Owens told several prominent graduates, faculty members and administrators of Sumner. They included:
• William Foster, president of the American Bandmasters Association and board member of the John Phillips Sousa Foundation.
• Fernando J. Gaitan Jr., senior U.S. Court Judge for the Western District of Missouri.
• John McClendon, first Black head coach of any professional sport.
• Leon Brady was band director at Sumner. His jazz band raised $25,000 from private sources so the band could attend international competition in Paris—they called the event “Sumner in Paris.”
• Col. Vernon Coffey was appointed as the U.S. Army aide to President Richard M. Nixon.
The Historical Society named Owens the “Historian of the Year.”
Murrel Bland is the former editor of The Wyandotte West and The Piper Press. He a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wyandotte County Historical Society.