Alvin Brooks on 70+ Years of Civil Rights, Public Service, and Speaking Up

A Life in Many Hats
BW: Mr. Brooks, this interview—and the blog in general—was created to give high school students like myself a deeper insight into future career paths they may want to pursue. With you, a man who by no overstatement has worn many hats, I have a unique opportunity to explore several career paths at once.
Instead of spoiling the fun myself, could you briefly sum up some of the careers you’ve had in your lifetime, and what you’re involved in today?
AB: Well, first of all, what year are you in school?
BW: I’m a junior.
AB: Good, good. Well, first of all, I’m 91 years old—and I know I don’t look a day over 110.
My career really started in civil rights as a teenager. That’s what set the stage for who I am today, some seventy-plus years later.
I belonged to an organization called Fellowship House. You’re not old enough to remember some of the phrases people used back then, but your parents and grandparents might. When people talked about Jews or Black folks, they’d say, “Some of my best friends are Jews,” or “Some of my best friends are Black.”
Well, in my case, one of my very best friends really was white. His name was Fred Sacks. He and I were the same age—he was born in March, I was born in May of 1932—and for some reason we just clicked at Fellowship House. There were maybe a dozen or so kids, and we kind of sorted ourselves out into groups. Fred and I gravitated toward each other.
That’s where we started doing things that challenged the system, even as teenagers.

“How Fast Can We Eat Before They Kick Me Out?”
AB: I’m talking about 1946. We were juniors in high school. Back then, Black folks were prohibited from eating at the lunch counters downtown.
Here was the “game”: my white friends would sit at the counter and order. I’d walk around the store for a while until my hamburger or hot dog came up. Then I’d sit down next to them—and the game was, “How fast can I eat before the manager comes over, kicks me out, and scolds my white friends?”
Fred and I kept up that kind of thing for years. His wife has been gone about ten years now, so this was probably twelve years ago when we last talked about it. We stayed close even as adults. I married young, and Fred and my brother-in-law Maurice became very close too.
I kept following that path—pushing, protesting—and my wife joined me. She worked with organizations that fought racism and organized protests for public accommodations, housing, and fairness.
When I joined the Kansas City Police Department at age 22 in 1954, I had to formally step away from that public activism—but my wife continued. A lot of the strategizing and planning, the “subversive” stuff, took place at our dining room table.

From Police Officer to City Hall and the AdHoc Group Against Crime
AB: When I joined the police department on June 1, 1954, I had to step back from direct protest work, but the movement didn’t stop.
Later on, I left the police department because I could see I was limited in how far I could go. Promotions were few and far between for Black officers. I didn’t want to stay there, end up bitter, and retire from the same patrol spot I’d started on.
Before the police department, I’d worked for the Ford Motor Company for two years in 1952. Even though they had a federal contract making B-47 bomber engines, we still couldn’t get on the production line. We were all custodians and janitors. We jokingly called ourselves “sanitation engineers.” That was as high as we could go.
From the police department, I went to the Kansas City public school district, which was in transition because of Brown v. Board of Education and the Supreme Court’s decision that public education must be integrated “with all deliberate speed.”
I was there when the riots broke out after Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The next week there were marches in Kansas City. The police used tear gas—even tear-gassed one of the Catholic churches where kids had gone after a march.
Shortly afterward, I was appointed Director of Human Relations—the first Black person to hold a director-level job in city government. I set up the Human Relations Department and spent the next several years trying to mend fences, bring communities together, and build strong relationships with civil-rights groups—Jewish organizations, Protestant and Catholic organizations, and others working on human rights.
From 1968 to 1972, I served as Director of Human Relations. After that, I became an assistant city manager in Kansas City, Missouri.
At the same time, in 1977, I started a group called the AdHoc Group Against Crime. It’s still around today, with a somewhat different focus, but the mission of addressing crime and its root causes continues.
I retired from city government in 1992, but AdHoc had already brought national attention to Kansas City. It even brought President George H.W. Bush to Kansas City in January 1990 to see what we were doing.
I’ve had a lot of jobs—a lot of career “hats”—and I’ve enjoyed every moment. Some of them were painful and troublesome. They showed me just how far our society still is from providing opportunity and inclusion to everyone. But that’s the arc of my life’s work.

Growing Up Under Jim Crow—and Refusing to Accept It
BW: In your book Binding Us Together, you describe the systemic oppression and adversity you faced in your life. How did you overcome those hardships and turn your life into one of advocacy and inspiration? And what lessons have stood the test of time?
AB: That’s a very good question.
The struggle started early—literally months after I was born. I was born in Carlisle County, near North Little Rock, Arkansas, on May 3, 1932. I was adopted by the Brookses, Chester and Estelle Brooks.
As an infant, I had a serious stomach condition. I couldn’t keep anything down. Because of discrimination in Arkansas, we couldn’t get decent medical care as Black people, so my mother took me to St. Louis, Missouri. There was a health center there started by Dr. Homer G. Phillips, an African American physician who created medical facilities for Black patients in St. Louis.
They examined me and basically told my mother, “We don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but given his condition, if nothing changes, he probably won’t live beyond age six.”
My mother took me back home. A local country doctor came by and said, “Goat’s milk is good for an upset stomach.” You don’t hear that phrase much today, but that’s what they called it. My dad bought a goat, and I was on goat’s milk until my junior year of high school, when we moved to Kansas City.
I went to all-Black elementary and high schools because we couldn’t attend white schools. There were eight white high schools and two Black ones in Kansas City before Brown v. Board in 1954.
I really began to feel the weight of discrimination as a kid, eight, nine, ten years old. We moved into an area with poor white kids—poorer than we were. At first we fought, then we became friends. And because we were friends, some of them got labeled for associating with me.
We’d save pennies, collect pop bottles, and scrape together money. We’d go to the drugstore for ice cream. They would let my white friends go in and buy their cones, but they wouldn’t let me in. I had to hand my nickel to one of my friends, they’d buy my two dips of ice cream, and then I’d eat outside.
I also had an experience at the Kansas City Club downtown when I was about ten. I walked in by mistake—I should’ve gone to the Kansas City Athletic Club nearby. The way they treated me as a Black child is something I never forgot.
There was only one place downtown where a Black person could sit and eat: a lunch counter inside the Crest variety store, right off the alley. It wasn’t much, but it was the only option.
I remember asking my mother, as a ten- or eleven-year-old, “Why can’t we do what they do?” My mother never used words like “racism” with me. She didn’t have that vocabulary. But she talked to me about discrimination, segregation, right and wrong.
As I grew into my teenage years, she kept telling me: “You’ve got to do well. You’ve got to be better than your white friends, because people will judge you differently.”
I was a good student in high school, and I played sports, but we couldn’t compete against the white schools in Kansas City because everything was segregated. We played in the Negro Leagues of high school sports—traveling to places like St. Louis and across the region to play Black teams, while the white schools played each other.
Even as a Cub Scout, we weren’t allowed inside the main arena for certain events. We had to sit up in the periphery, watching other people come and go.
I never learned to accept it. I didn’t lash out physically, but I always stood my ground verbally.
Later, when my wife and I converted to Catholicism, I tried to transfer my credits from a previous college to Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University), a Catholic school. I had 68 hours of coursework with about a 3.45 GPA. The courses were the same ones they accepted from other colleges, but they didn’t want to give me credit for a full seven semesters. That wasn’t just bureaucracy—that was discrimination.
So I went over to the University of Kansas City—now the University of Missouri–Kansas City—and finished my degree there.
And here’s the twist: next month, God willing, they’ll break ground on a $7 million center on the Rockhurst campus called the Alvin Brooks Center for Faith–Justice. Sometimes life comes full circle in unexpected ways.

Alvin Brooks has spent more than seven decades at the center of Kansas City’s struggle for justice. A former police officer, civil-rights leader, director of human relations, assistant city manager, founder of the AdHoc Group Against Crime, and author of Binding Us Together, Brooks has worn more hats than most people will in several lifetimes. At 91, he still talks with the urgency of someone who believes America hasn’t yet become what it claims to be—and with the hope that young people can help it get closer. In this conversation for The Pathway Blog, Brooks reflects on growing up Black under Jim Crow, facing discrimination from childhood onward, building bridges between communities, and what today’s students can realistically do to push America toward its unfinished promises.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.