Amid redistricting fight, KC pastors accuse lawmakers of giving 'authority' to DC

Matthew Kelly, The Kansas City Star on Sep 11, 2025

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A day after thousands of people descended on the Missouri Capitol to demonstrate their outrage over congressional maps aimed at minimizing Kansas City’s voting power, the mood inside St. James Church on Thursday was solemn.

Emanuel Cleaver III, senior pastor at St. James and the son of longtime Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, began the news conference with a short prayer.

Then he and other members of the Greater Kansas City Pastors’ Association took turns speaking to what they described as a moral imperative for Missourians to reject Gov. Mike Kehoe’s plan, their voices rising and falling with emotion.

Cleaver accused GOP lawmakers of “willingly giving their power and their authority away to D.C.” — a line that elicited murmurs and interjections of affirmation from several dozen attendees in the pews at the front of the church.

“The way the maps are drawn, you could be a parent with two children, one in elementary and one in middle school. And you could drop your elementary school child off in one congressional district off and then go drop your junior high kid off in a completely different congressional district,” Cleaver said. “That’s a problem, and it does not allow fair representation.”

Darron Edwards, lead pastor of United Believers Community Church in south Kansas City, said no representative is equipped to protect and advance the interests of all residents in any one of the three new sprawling congressional districts that Kehoe’s map would divide Kansas City between.

The 5th District, which Cleaver’s father has represented since 2005, would be stretched to central Missouri, including residents in Jefferson City and rural counties as far east as Maries County and Osage County.

“No true champion will be in the 5th District when you have complicated, separated voting interests,” Edwards said. “Having been a lead pastor in the rural, the urban and the suburban, I’ve learned that we all want the same things but we don’t achieve them the same way.”

The new districts could create unnecessary tension and stoke mistrust between Missouri’s diverse constituencies, he said.

“Even when you vote, many people are still losing hope,” Edwards said. “This is not just about changing the lines. They’re really trying to change our minds. This is not only voter suppression. But we’re dealing with voter depression.”

Ben Mtundu of Kansas City, who attended the news conference, rose to ask the pastors “what actions outside of the box” they were willing to entertain to halt the gerrymandering effort, urging them against “playing nice with some folks who don’t care about us.”

He invoked Martin Luther King Jr., noting that civil disobedience was crucial in turning the tide toward racial justice during the Civil Rights Movement.

“We don’t want to televise the whole game plan yet,” said Bishop Ben Stephens, president of the Greater Kansas City Pastors’ Association.

One likely option for challenging the new map, Cleaver said, will be to collect enough voter signatures across the state to trigger a statewide veto referendum vote. Doing so would require more than 106,000 signatures, but he said to make sure that threshold is met, organizers should aim for 160,000 voter signatures.

“If we get those, it will allow the people of Missouri to vote, so that’s what’s next,” Cleaver said, noting that the Missouri NAACP has sued over the state’s redistricting plan, and other lawsuits will almost certainly follow if the map is approved by lawmakers.

Kansas City residents, Cleaver said, should understand that the gerrymander is being spearheaded by a president who doesn’t care how disruptive the new map would be for the city or understand the contours of the neighborhoods it would divide.

“Because these lines, we believe, were drawn in D.C., not here in Missouri, those in D.C. have no fault or no understanding of the significance of Troost being historically the racially dividing line in Kansas City — but maybe they did. I don’t know,” Cleaver said.

Residents on the east side of Troost Avenue would find themselves in the drastically altered 5th District, and residents to the west of the historic dividing line would be siphoned off into the new 4th District, which would stretch to southern Missouri.

“I don’t want to make this, say it’s simply a racial thing,” Cleaver elaborated after the news conference. “But you can’t help but pay attention to the fact that it is Troost. And you can’t help but pay attention to the fact that it will divide the Black vote here in Kansas City the same way.”

Anita Maltbia, a St. James parishioner, said she finds it personally offensive that so many lawmakers who emphasize their Christian faith are backing the effort to divide Kansas City.

“This parading around pretending to be all about moral reasons and Christian values and at the same time looking to eliminate the voices of a whole sector of our population, is the height of hypocrisy. It really stirs me,” Maltbia said.