Bernard Powell

Bernard Powell (1947–1979) was a Kansas City, Missouri civil-rights and youth organizer who joined the NAACP at thirteen, marched at Selma as a teenager, directed the local Congress of Racial Equality chapter, and in October 1968 co-founded the Social Action Committee of 20 (SAC-20), an East Side organization built around leadership and job training for young Black Kansas Citians.¹²³ He was shot and killed in 1979 at age 32 at a social club at 27th and Indiana.³⁴ The Bernard Powell Memorial Fountain in Spring Valley Park, funded by SAC-20 and topped by a life-size bronze of Powell, stands across the street from his childhood home.⁵⁶

Biography

Early life and first organizing

Powell was born March 5, 1947, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of twins — his brother Burnele was born five minutes later.¹² He joined the NAACP at thirteen.¹²³ After graduating from Central High School in 1965 he traveled to Alabama to take part in the Selma-to-Montgomery march alongside Martin Luther King Jr.³⁴

CORE and the Social Action Committee of 20

In the mid-1960s Powell served as regional director of the Kansas City chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.¹²⁴ Following King’s assassination, Powell and a group of associates founded the Social Action Committee of 20 — commonly written SAC-20 — in October 1968.²⁴⁶ The organization’s stated purpose was to teach leadership and job-training skills to Black youth on Kansas City’s East Side.⁴⁶ Powell’s slogan for the neighborhood-improvement work SAC-20 pursued was “Ghetto or Goldmine — The Choice is Yours.”⁵

Powell also sat on Missouri’s Governor’s Advisory Council on Comprehensive Health Planning and was involved with the Urban League of Kansas City and the city’s Model Cities board.¹² He received the National Junior Chamber of Commerce “Outstanding Man of the Year” award and a national Jefferson Award for public service.¹²⁶ Contemporaries recorded that he intended to run for governor of Missouri, which would have made him the state’s first Black governor.²³

Death

Powell was shot in the head and killed in 1979 at Papa Doc’s East Side Social Club, at 27th and Indiana in Kansas City.³⁶ He was 32.¹⁶ Sources agree the killing was not racially motivated; accounts identify the shooter as Jackie Robinson, described as a former public-relations worker connected to SAC-20 — a characterization Powell’s widow later publicly disputed in the comments of one of those accounts.³ The month of death is reported inconsistently across sources (see Open Questions).

The memorial

The Bernard Powell Memorial stands on the east side of Spring Valley Park at Brooklyn Avenue and East 28th Street, directly across from the house Powell grew up in.⁵⁶ SAC-20 raised roughly $170,000 for it over the years after his death.⁵ The work is a five-foot hexagonal pyramid over which water bubbles up and cascades down the sides, topped by a life-size bronze figure of Powell in casual dress with a beret and an earring, facing his childhood home; the sculptor was Eugene “Bud” Bortner.⁵ The City of Fountains Foundation dates the fountain and plaza dedication to August 15, 1988, with the bronze installed in 1991; a local television account instead dates the fountain’s installation to 1985 with the statue added in 1991.⁵⁶ A time capsule buried at the memorial is scheduled to be opened in 2041.⁵⁶

The Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce presents an annual award named for Powell.¹

Significance to Kansas City

Powell belongs to the generation of Kansas City Black leadership that came up after the legal victories of the 1950s and turned toward economic self-determination — jobs, training, and neighborhood investment — in the years around and after 1968. SAC-20 was one of the more durable East Side vehicles for that work, and its members’ two-decade fundraising campaign for the memorial is itself part of the story: the organization outlived its founder long enough to build him a monument. The fountain is among the few works in Kansas City’s fountain inventory that commemorate a Black civil-rights figure, and its placement in Spring Valley Park opposite Powell’s boyhood home ties the memory deliberately to the neighborhood he organized.⁵

Sources

Footnotes

1. African American Registry — “Bernard Powell, a Frontline Activist.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Wikipedia — “Bernard Powell.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Racism in Kansas City: A Short History — “The Murder of Bernard Powell.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. Kansas City Black History — “Bernard Powell.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. City of Fountains Foundation — “Bernard Powell Memorial Fountain.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

6. KSHB 41 Kansas City — “Bernard Powell Memorial Fountain sits across from his childhood home.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹