The Art of Organizing in Kansas City

During my time with KC Tenants, I have been focused on data-analysis during most of my day-to-day work. While I have organized and canvassed across Kansas City, I am generally at my computer researching for the organization’s various campaigns and policy goals. However, particularly when at base meetings and while canvassing, it is evident that while such data analysis is important in the grand scheme of the organization and its goals, there is a human connection that cannot be replicated or displayed within data. The emotional toll that eviction, housing insecurity, displacement, etc. has on human beings is overwhelming. Yet, the hope, compassion, camaraderie, and love displayed while organizing is just as powerful if not more so. 

 

These feelings come in waves at the organization. Organizers and leaders with KC Tenants feel anger and hope interchangeably, if not at the same time. KC Tenants prides itself on leaning into tensions and feelings after meetings in order to grow closer as a collective. This practice, particularly after heated discussions, can be enlightening on the human experience of tenants in Kansas City. 

 

Art is a crucial part of the organization. Poetry, graphic design, murals, drawings, etc. all play a crucial role to the function of KC Tenants, and often, it is leaders and organizers within KC Tenants that provide such art. This can be found on the organization’s website and social media. However, following one meeting with KC Tenants, an organizer read out a poem that struck me as crucial to the work KC Tenants attempts to achieve.

 

The meeting addressed affordability in Kansas City and the hardships tenants were facing with rising rent and a lack of affordable options in the city. Following the meeting, the organzier read out a poem by June Jordan titled, “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” which is displayed below. 

 

“1

I will no longer lightly walk behind

a one of you who fear me:

                                     Be afraid.

I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits

and facial tics

I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore

and this is dedicated in particular

to those who hear my footsteps

or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery

cart

then turn around

see me

and hurry on

away from this impressive terror I must be:

I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon

surrounded by my comrades singing

terrible revenge in merciless

accelerating

rhythms

But

I have watched a blind man studying his face.

I have set the table in the evening and sat down

to eat the news.

Regularly

I have gone to sleep.

There is no one to forgive me.

The dead do not give a damn.

I live like a lover

who drops her dime into the phone

just as the subway shakes into the station

wasting her message

canceling the question of her call:

 

fulminating or forgetful but late

and always after the fact that could save or 

condemn me

 

I must become the action of my fate.

 

2

How many of my brothers and my sisters

will they kill

before I teach myself

retaliation?

Shall we pick a number? 

South Africa for instance:

do we agree that more than ten thousand

in less than a year but that less than

five thousand slaughtered in more than six

months will

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

 

I must become a menace to my enemies.

 

3

And if I 

if I ever let you slide

who should be extirpated from my universe

who should be cauterized from earth

completely

(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the

terrorist degree)

then let my body fail my soul

in its bedeviled lecheries

 

And if I 

if I ever let love go

because the hatred and the whisperings

become a phantom dictate I o-

bey in lieu of impulse and realities

(the blossoming flamingos of my

wild mimosa trees)

then let love freeze me

out.

 

I must become

I must become a menace to my enemies.”

 

I found this poem incredibly relevant to the work of KC Tenants. In order to win “safe, accessible, and truly affordable homes” in Kansas City to the tenants that deserve such life outcomes, tenants across Kansas City must become a menace and disrupt the system that continues to displace and evict them.