As Missouri Redistricts, the Career of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver Teeters

Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard winds through the East Side of Kansas City, Mo., where world-famous barbecue restaurants mix with empty lots. It speeds past Troost Avenue, the traditional dividing line of the Black and white sides of town. And it continues to the doorstep of the Country Club Plaza, home to lavish fountains, Spanish architecture and upscale shops.

But if Republicans get their way, Cleaver Boulevard will soon lie partly outside of Mr. Cleaver’s congressional district. And Mr. Cleaver, a Democrat who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor, could find himself out of a job after 11 terms in Washington and nearly half a century in politics.

The Missouri Senate approved the redrawn district lines on Friday and sent the legislation to the desk of Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican who supports redistricting and is expected to sign the new map into law. Missouri’s push to remake its congressional boundaries is part of President Trump’s national campaign to redistrict outside of the usual once-a-decade cycle — a strategy designed to help Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.

“It’s just like more gasoline on the fire,” Mr. Cleaver said, “that was burning down much of the progress that we had made.”

‘An Effort To Turn Back Times’

Thirty-four years ago, when Mr. Cleaver was running for a first term as mayor of Kansas City, a reporter asked whether he feared that white supporters of losing primary candidates would join forces against him in the general election.

“Race is not something I should be completely unaware of,” Mr. Cleaver, then a city councilman, told the journalist in 1991, “and there are still some people who say no Black can win a mayoral race in Kansas City. But to agree with that is to make a mockery of hope.”

Mr. Cleaver, a United Methodist minister who had led the local arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, won that election. In the decades that followed, he kept winning, serving a second term as Kansas City’s mayor before being elected again and again to Congress.

In both roles, he worked to bring jobs and roads to the East Side, where Black Kansas Citians celebrated having one of their own in office. But he also developed strong ties with business leaders and others, building support that helped him win decisive re-elections in a majority-white city and district, including by 24 percentage points last year.

The redrawn congressional map uses Troost, the city’s old racial line of demarcation, as one of its dividing points. Most East Siders would be in a district that stretches all the way to the middle of Missouri, while many Kansas Citians west of Troost would end up in a jagged-outlined district that pushes south into the rural, heavily Republican Ozarks.

“I see it as an effort to turn back times,” said Emanuel McNeal, who has run a dry cleaning business on Troost for more than 30 years and who is a longtime supporter of Mr. Cleaver.

Mr. McNeal, who is Black and a Democrat, said he worried that Kansas Citians would lose interest in politics and not vote as much if the new map takes effect.

“It’s just a thing to split people and make everything Republican,” Mr. McNeal said.

Calvin Backhus, an autoworker from Mr. Cleaver’s district, was among thousands of protesters who filled the statehouse rotunda on Wednesday in opposition to the Republicans’ new map. Mr. Backhus, who carried a homemade sign that said “Leave It To Cleaver,” said he was attending a protest for the first time.

Mr. Backhus said that Mr. Cleaver shared his values and that he appreciated the congressman’s support for the working class. But it was not just that.

“I’ve seen enough documentaries to see where we’re headed,” said Mr. Backhus, who like many protesters described the effort to redraw district lines as part of an accelerating erosion of democracy.

Missouri’s current congressional map, approved by statehouse Republicans just three years ago, includes six solidly Republican districts and two solidly Democratic ones, including Mr. Cleaver’s. By dicing up Kansas City, the state’s most populous city, Republicans hope to create a seventh right-leaning district.

“It’s not about any person for me,” said State Senator Brad Hudson, a Republican from rural southern Missouri who supports the new map. He said he wanted to “make sure that we send people to Washington, D.C., that will accurately reflect the values that Missourians hold.”

‘A Healing Figure’

The protesters who gathered along Kansas City’s Brush Creek in 1992 were angry. A California jury had just acquitted Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a Black man. In cities across the country, protests of the verdict were turning violent.

According to news accounts from the time, a speaker at that Kansas City protest suggested that if destructive action was going to take place, protesters should “go down on the Plaza and do it.”

Mr. Cleaver, relatively new to the mayor’s office, interjected.

“We aren’t going to the Plaza, we aren’t going to Westport, we aren’t going anywhere talking about violence,” Mr. Cleaver told the crowd of several hundred people, according to The Kansas City Star.

Reflecting on that episode this week, Mr. Cleaver, now 80, said averting violence that day helped “prevent something that would have been a scar on our municipal landscape for years and years and years.” And he said it might have also staved off some backlash to his leadership — the idea, he said, that “we’ve got an African American mayor, now we’ve got a riot.”

In the decades since, Kansas City has seen its share of tensions. High rates of gun violence and poverty persist in many Black neighborhoods, and alarming incidents, like the shooting of a Black teenager in 2023 by a white homeowner whose doorbell he rang by mistake, have forced painful conversations about bias.

Some have credited Mr. Cleaver with changing the way residents thought about political leadership, ushering in an era in which Black candidates have regularly been elected in Kansas City, where about half of the city’s 500,000 residents are white and a quarter are Black.

“I’m a strong believer in the fact that the first in Black politics, particularly in majority-white cities, meant a lot to telling the electorate that we aren’t crazy, we aren’t radicals, we aren’t just in it for our own community,” said Kansas City’s current mayor, Quinton Lucas, a Democrat who is the third Black person to hold that position.

Throughout his years in Congress, Mr. Cleaver has been a reliable vote for Democrats. He has also been an informal chaplain to fellow members and their staffs, making hospital visits, officiating weddings and giving eulogies at funerals, including one this year for former Senator Christopher S. Bond, a Missouri Republican.

“He has not allowed himself to be sucked into the confrontation,” said Representative Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, whose wedding was officiated by Mr. Cleaver. “He sees himself, and he acts, and people see him, as a healing figure, a calming figure.”

Democrats still have cards to play as they seek to keep the current map in place. A lawsuit filed in state court challenges the validity of the special session. More litigation is all but certain. And opponents of the law have said they will try to force a veto referendum, which allows for a newly passed law to be paused and put to a statewide vote if a certain number of signatures are gathered in two-thirds of the state’s congressional districts.

But whatever comes next, the redistricting fight and Mr. Trump’s policies have left Mr. Cleaver and other Missouri Democrats feeling uneasy about the country’s future and their place in it.

“Over the last few months, sadly, I have witnessed the return of some things I thought were dead,” the congressman said.

Mr. Cleaver described the current era as a “time of fear” that is “threatening all of the progress that we made toward establishing a multicultural and a multiracial society.”

Asked to describe the state of American democracy, he settled on one word:

“Shaky.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research. Zach Levitt contributed reporting.