Banking on KC - Alvin Brooks
The links clicked within the podcast player window and the links below will take you to a site other than Country Club Bank’s.
Listen above or read the transcript below. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify as well as watching on YouTube!
Joe Close: This is Joe Close. President of Country Club Bank, our guest today, Alvin Brooks, is a true Kansas City icon whose leadership and dedication to public service have left an indelible mark on our community. From his early days overcoming racial injustice, to his roles as a former mayor pro tem, Founder of the ad hoc group against crime and civil rights leader, Mr. Brooks has been at the forefront of shaping Kansas City's history. In this episode, he shares the pivotal moments that defined his path, the challenges he faced, and his ongoing vision for the future of our city. Whether you know him from his activism, his time on the police force, Today's conversation with Alvin Brooks will take you behind the headlines to the heart of a man whose work has transformed lives and helped set a new course for Kansas City.
Stay with us for an inspiring conversation with one of Kansas City's most influential leaders.
Kelly Scanlon: Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kellie Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Alvin Brooks, the former mayor pro tem of Kansas City, president of the Police Board of Commissioners, founder of the ad hoc group against crime, civil rights leader, and community activist. He's here to discuss some of the pivotal moments of his life that shaped his commitment to public service, his perspectives on leadership, and his vision for the future.
Welcome, Mr. Brooks.
Alvin Brooks: Kelly, thank you very much, and good to be with you.
Kelly Scanlon: We're so happy to have you here. I want to take you back a little bit, reflecting back on your early life in North Little Rock, and then your journey to Kansas City. Talk to us about some of the pivotal moments that shaped your commitment to public service and to civil rights.
Alvin Brooks: Well, Kelly, I'm not sure how much Mary, you shaped me for this moment, but I was adopted by the Brooks’s. Thank you. My mother was 14, my father was 17, my father never knew that he had a son. The Brooks’s adopted me when my mother went to live with them, and my mother went to go back to Memphis, Tennessee, where she could finish high school.
The Brooks’s came to Kansas City after my father killed a white man over moonshine steel. And although the judge and the sheriff had won my dad's payroll, so they told him he had to get out of town. Otherwise, he'd be charged with murder in the state of Arkansas. So that's how we got to Kansas City, and that must have been about 1933.
I was born May of 32, and I think I was walking at the time.
Kelly Scanlon: Yeah, I was going to say, you were a little boy.
Alvin Brooks: My parents were not church going folks. Hardworking. My dad worked under the Roosevelt, New Deal, and the WPA. And I never shall forget, he'd come home in the wintertime with the gloves that had the leather palms.
And he couldn't take them off because they'd pull the skin off. So, he'd come home, and we had, my daddy built a home right across from where the Veterans Hospital now is in the eastern part of the city. And we didn't have any inside water, no inside lights. No inside toilets, of course, and so we'd have to, when he came home in the evening, I'd have to get this, this wash pan, and warm some water, and, and put some witch hazel in it, and he would hold, first hold his gloves over the stove until they relaxed and the leather did, and then he'd take, and, and the balls of his fingers were just blood, and he'd soak them, and I'd, I'd re soak them, and I'd put, dry them off, and he told me never shall forget this.
He told me, I must have been, so we're talking about 19, probably 38, 39, and he told me, he said, boy, you see this? He said, you've got to get an education because you don't want to do this. And so education, although neither of my parents were high school graduates, told me the importance of education in this society.
And he also talked about race, and he said, because if it was a black kid, you would not have the same opportunities for a long time. That your white counterparts will have, so you got to get an education, you got to be better educated. He didn't say a better person. And so, as I up through that and then I'm going to all black elementary schools, high school, first two years of college, all black junior college, we couldn't go to the white junior college at 39th and McGee.
And this was pre May 17, 1954, Brown versus Board of Education. And so that time, I, I just began, good friend of mine, who I learned more about Judaism than I did Christianity from Fred Sachs, we were the same age, and somehow we got connected as 15 year olds and stayed connected until he passed about 12 years ago.
And we became involved in Fellowship House, had a youth group in Fellowship House, which was a multi racial, multi-cultural group of adults, but they had a youth component. And we got involved in that. We had this game where we would go to the cat's drugstores and the crown drugstores that had fountains, because I couldn't eat and they would, they would, they couldn't sit and eat.
And they would order for me and then when it was came out, we had a game, how much could we, Eight before the manager came and said I had to get out. So that's when it gets to having the whole movement start. I guess I've been conscious, if you will, of race and religion and gender kind of discrimination in my early years and then participating in it at that time and never stopped.
Kelly Scanlon: And in some ways that was almost a frivolous question because of course you felt it and of course you experienced it, but you've taken action. one of the first Kansas City. Missouri, black police officers. Why did you decide you wanted to join the Kansas City Police Force? And then how did the experiences on the force influence your approach to community relations and crime prevention later in your career?
Alvin Brooks: You know, Kelly, I'm asked all the time, why did you join the police department? Because as a kid, and you'll have to read my book, Binding Us Together, as a kid growing up from six or seven years old, as you're reading my book, we moved into our house, burned down, And the, where we lived, as I described, my dad built the house, and we had to live in a barn for about 7 to 10 days, actual barn.
And then we moved in a real poor white neighborhood. And after calling each other's names and fighting, we became friends, blood brothers, because every time we would fight, get into what we thought was trouble, we'd find a piece of glass and prick our fingers and blood all over the house. So I don't know whether my friends, five of them, are still living, but they, they don't know whether their DNA got some black blood in them.
I guess they have some white blood in me also. But how the police treated me. As opposed to my white friend, we'd get picked up for something, we'd get stopped for something, and we had, my dad always had horses, and I had a horse, and police stopped us, and, and called us the N word, and, and the, the, we'd all, these are the black kids, my cousins.
So, I have to be treated like, and in fact, when I told my dad, my wife and I, Carol, my late wife, and I just turned 21, and I said, I think I want to go in the police department. That's it. That's it. And she never asked why, she said whatever you want to do, okay. And, you know, I'll support it. So, she said, you haven't said anything to your dad?
I said, no, I haven't said anything to him. She said, well, you better go talk to your dad. So I called him sober. And I said, Dad, I'm thinking about going to the police department. First thing he said, why do you want to join that mess? You know how they treat us. And I couldn't give him a good answer.
I didn't really respond to it. But he didn't know that I already made the papers out and taken the test and was supposed to start in the January class of 1954, but I wanted to finish my second year of college in junior college and get my A. A. degree and got in the June class of 54. And after that, I mean, he accepted the fact.
And so, as I say, I don't know, some people say, well, maybe you can, you can beat him so you join him, that'll probably, but no, I just did and, and, I, I saw racism from a different vantage point. From an institutional vantage point, I'd seen it individually. I knew in all black school, we, we talked about slavery and, and, and indigenous people and the founding of this nation and Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and all those things, 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment, we learned that because we had black teachers who taught, wanted us to know what the history was and where we were and what we had to do beyond how we prepare ourselves.
So, that's the only response I can give to what I became because I really don't remember the challenge. It just, for some reason, it wasn't carrying a gun and having authority. It was just that I felt that maybe I could make a difference.
Kelly Scanlon: How did what you learned there on the department shape your approach to community relations?
Alvin Brooks: Well, you know, as a black officer we were relegated to ride in just two districts, of the number of districts in the city of Kansas. We hadn't done a lot of annexing then, north of the river and all like that. Some, but not much. There was no police station north of the river, so there were only, only headquarters and, and what they call Sheffield, Independence, and Bennington, and then 63rd Street.
And so the black officer were relegated to work just out of the headquarters station. It wasn't Locust, but then we could only ride two districts. You couldn't, the whites could ride our district, we couldn't ride. And I think I saw those challenges. I was, I think, sophisticated enough that I could deal with that without being a rebel, without a cause, because of the rebel with a cause.
But I knew I, with God's help, and although my cluster in Estelle Brooks, my adopted parents were not church going folks. For some I went to church with the Armstrong's. Mrs. Armstrong would take me to Sunday school and all. And, and then as, as a teenager, I say Fred Saxon, I became very close and Judaism, I stayed to find the Christian faith.
But I began to see things and do things and then in the community. There were only two black high schools at the time, eight white high schools public schools. And R. T. Cole's a vocational in Lincoln High School, which still stands, 2111, now it's called Lincoln Preparatory Academy.
And so you knew people and you knew the social trends, you knew the President of the NAACP, you knew the president of the Urban League because they live in the same area, and Mr. Carl R. Johnson, who became the first black municipal judge, had a good relationship with him, and with Ms. Lucille Bluford, who was the managing editor of the Kansas City Call. She wasn't then, but she, she was a reporter but became managing editor. And as a 18 and early 20s developed because I was president of the youth group, the NAACP youth group, where Neal Shevkin went to Omaha and met not only Roy Wilkins, but also Thurgood Marshall.
So all those kind of things, you know, and with older people and hearing going to those meetings, it became a part of my life. It was natural.
Kelly Scanlon: One of the major things that you did was in 1977, you founded the ad hoc group against crime, and it really is a cornerstone of your legacy here in Kansas City in particular.
So what inspired you to create it and how has its role evolved in Kansas City over the last several decades?
Alvin Brooks: Well, my police background helped. I left the police department in October of 1964 after 10 years and went with the school district. My relationship with the schools, although it was post 1954, there's still segregated schools and so going with the school district, having police departments, so I was known throughout the district.
And then in 1977, I think between March and June of 77, there were 10 women who were killed, who were ladies of the evening, or prostitutes as known. Went nine black, one white. All of them were unsolved. The black community was very upset because they thought there was a son of Sam in New York, New Jersey, that was killing prostitutes.
Yes. And they felt that there was sort of like a son of Sam here. And either it was police officers killing the prostitutes, or Johns. And so, Alfred Lomax, one of my protégés, I had been assigned the task force of police officer to work on these cases. And as Al and I set out, although I left the police department, I went through all ten of these cases, and we concluded that there was no serial killer involved.
And we looked at it, it was either killed by a john, either killed by a, pimp, or killed by a dope dealer. Most by dope dealers. One or two were different and so I, Ms. Bluford then, who was managing editor of The Call, we're talking about now, 1977, and I discussed with her, I said, Ms. Bluford, here's the information.
She said, well, why don't you convene a meeting? So, on the 30th of November, and I had brought across sections of black leadership, not only the politicians and ministers, but people in the neighborhood. Two presidents. And that meeting was called the 3rd of November 1977. Several hundred people there.
And the media there, oh my god, people just got with the camera. You know, some people before the camera, they just show this is my cameo appearance. And I'm like, best I can. The next meeting was less, less, when we wanted to go over these 10K, say, hey, this is not serial, here's what it is. But so actually in December of that year, the next meeting was less people.
January, the early part, the next people. And then in January, we made a presentation to the Board of Police Commissioners. We had nine request of them. Recommendations to hire more black police officers. Promotion opportunities and all these kind of things. Different relationship with the black community.
And then we had 21 things that we as a group would work. And it started out to be a long name, I think it was the Ad Hoc Group of Community Leaders and Representatives of the Black Community. And the media said, hell, that's too long. Let's call it the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime. So that's how it was narrowed down.
And we began to work with the police department. And, we raised 30,000 that May of 1978. We began to publicize it, put out posters and everything. And we helped the police department solve most of those 10 unsolved homicides, as well as other crimes, as well as other homicides that were not a part of that 10.
And then when the crack cocaine came to Kansas City in about the early 80s, we began to attack that. We Developed marches against crack dealers. We sat on undercover with undercover people and watching crack houses. And we had people call in giving the address and the name and modeling and make and nice number of cars.
And it was interesting at the time, 50 percent of those who frequented the people were white person made up from Johnson County coming down to buy crack cocaine. And so, we marched on those, and we closed crack houses, over 300. That's what brought George H. W. Bush to Kansas City. First Bill Bennett, the drug store, and then George H.W. Bush. And we became nationally, internationally known. We had people from Canada, people from the UK to come and march with us on these crack houses and this kind of thing and the president appointed me on the President's Drug Advisory Council, 32 member group of multi racial, multicultural, and bi partisan to serve and be advice to the President as well as the Congress and subcommittee on narcotics and trafficking.
So, that's how the Anti-Crime Group got started. And, we appeared on the front page of USA Today and Black Men Together. That was a group of black men, about 50, 60 black men, who marched on this crack house.
Kelly Scanlon: Yeah, and just to be clear, it was President George H. W. Bush who appointed you to the National Drug Advisory Council at that very critical time, and it's shown quite a spotlight on Kansas City as well.
Now the Ad Hoc group has evolved. It is working with families of crime, of violence, and it's also trying to get at some of the root causes. Talk to us a little bit about, bring us up to date to where it is today.
Alvin Brooks: Well, I've been gone for 10 years, and I try to stay out of my successors way.
Damon Danger, a very bright young man, I try to stay out of his way. And I think it's a group too that needs support, community support from foundation. They're trying to build a building. And I'm certainly an encouraged person to contribute to that.
Kelly Scanlon: As all of our listeners who've grown up here in Kansas City, they know you've held many leadership roles, Mayor Pro Tem of Kansas City, as I mentioned earlier, you're the president of the Police Board of Commissioners, founder of the Ad Hoc, so many different roles.
How were you able to navigate the different leadership challenges?
Alvin Brooks: I'm a person who has deep faith roots. I talk to God daily and nightly. I wake up at night and I talk to God and ask for guidance and direction. That I'm on the right track in what I'm doing to give me the strength and the intelligence to do what he would have me to do.
I give him the credit. But sometimes I wonder, this little black boy from North Little Rock, Arkansas who also I didn't mention earlier that I was not supposed to live beyond age six because I had an ailment that no one knew what was, I couldn't keep anything on my stomach. And someone told her, an old herb doctor told my dad after my mother Stelbrooks took me to St. Louis where, because I couldn't get treated in Arkansas because of segregation. But they told me that, told her they know what they could do because I would end up dying from malnutrition because, you know. But my dad bought a goat, a Samian goat, G O A T, goat, ha ha, and um, put me on goat's milk.
And I'm here at 92 years old in a few months, and I was on goat’s milk until my junior year, until I finished my junior year in high school. So, God has been a part of that in life for me. And as I said, try to say, this little black boy that grew up under those conditions, segregation, treated very racist, even on the police department, even after I came to the city.
And when I was director, first black director in the city, Department of City and Human Relations, 10 weeks after the riot in 1968 Things have been to Africa and on special projects in Southeast Asia, Singapore and Malaysia the late Steve Derwood Father's found the MC theaters, went to go and study to see what happened with drug trafficking there with a group of eight persons and something called Martin the Gaia study.
The food and water resources been to the Middle East twice Israel and then the Egypt Jordan, and to international conference of Muslim Christian Jewish relations. Been to Rome. All these were not vacations, but they were someone else paid the tab and had the part of the mission and recognized by the president both.
President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and Obama, I was Obama's spokesperson for Western District of Missouri, and at that cold 20th of January 2009, I was there among those many, many people. So I don't know, Kelly, and to your listening audience, I don't know why me, and sometimes I say, why me, oh Lord, and I think the Lord says, why not you?
And I think that's the calling that we have as human beings, to serve each other. I'm a believer and I don't think we as Christians do this enough. And in two of the great books, both the Torah as well as the Bible, of course the first five books of the Bible is the Torah, but it says, In the beginning, after God created heaven and earth and everything therein, the creatures that crawled, the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, then decided to make humankind.
And that's interesting. The Creator did all that. Why didn't the Creator make humankind first? But He made everything else first. We were the ones who were supposed to protect that. Not only protect all those fish in the sea, the fowl in the air, the creatures that crawl. The environment was our responsibility.
We've done a poor job. But at the same time, It says that we all meet in the likeness and image of the Creator. I don't care who you are, I don't care where you live, there's not only 230 million people in the United States of America, but there's 6 billion people on the, on Earth, planet Earth. And, and most of the nation, I guess, profess to be Christian.
There's certainly Jewish and Muslim and other faiths. The dominant faith in America is Christian. I wonder if any of Christians, do we ever read that part of the scripture that says we're made in the likeness and image of the Creator? Because if we did, that means there's a connection that we have to each other, brothers and sisters, regardless of whether we want to be or not.
And the question I always raise is, when are we going to act like we are Christians? Because if we're Christians, then we see our Jewish and our Muslim brothers and sisters and other faiths as our brothers and our sisters, regardless of their faith. And I've become very cynical and critical when I hear the divisiveness that's taken place between people who consider themselves to be Christians and even got into the politics of the day.
Kelly Scanlon: You talk a lot about this, too, in your autobiography, about your faith in they're binding us together, autobiography. And then the documentary that you mentioned was just released on Juneteenth at the heroic true life adventures of Alvin Brooks
Alvin Brooks: Doesn't that sound that sound intriguing and it does.
Kelly Scanlon: True life adventures.
Alvin Brooks: I love it. They produce the writer producing of that is Kevin Wilmot who's a Academy Award winner for his writing, for his producing in the Black Klansman with Spike Lee. I came up with that and I asked him, when he sent it to me, he says, how does this sound? I said, great! Great, great, great!
And he said, I was just trying to make sense, it's intriguing and challenging, and it is when you say, true life adventures. Right. Oh my God.
Kelly Scanlon: I don't think anybody would disagree that your life has been anything short of an adventure. Oh my God. That's for sure. Yesterday's been. How do you hope the film will impact younger generations and those who might not be familiar with your work?
Alvin Brooks: Well, the film is 90 minutes, but it's animation in it. You've probably had about 2, 000 people to see, well, pretty close to that, see. A number of screenings. The premiere. Yeah, the premiere, and then after that, and then Lawrence, and then we did four here in Kansas City, five in Kansas City. But the animation in this is done by a professional.
It's so great, and it really ties it together. And I think that President can see that and say, God, here's this interesting life that this person has.
Kelly Scanlon: It's not just interesting, though. It's impactful. There's a difference.
Alvin Brooks: Well, I'll let you say that.
Kelly Scanlon: Yes, impactful.
Alvin Brooks: That's good. It's better you say that than me.
That's like self-serving, I'm this and this. But it's challenging also, this little black kid who at about seven, eight years old, the kind of things that's happened to him and us. Who were my young black friends and my white friends because they were impacted when I was called the n word by police officers when I was refused to be able to sit and have a coke at a drugstore When I went the old velvet freeze ice cream when I my wife and we moved I said what we ought to go around and collect potpots.
You get two cents a piece for potpots at the time. And we take, we get a nickel, we go to the 31st and end down at the Velvet Freeze. And so it was my first time being there. So we walked up there from where we lived by the Veterans Hospital, five of us, four or five of us together. And so as soon as we got there, When I got in, the manager, who was a white kid senior at Central High School, prior to Brown vs. Board of Education, he stopped me at the door and said, you can't come in. I said, why? And he said, because you're an N. And I said, what? And that was my first, that was about, so, that must have been about 1939 or 40. So I was 89 years old. And at first I resented being called N word. But then my, so what I had to do was give my white friends my nickel to bring my two dips of ice cream back out to me. And the youngest of the group was Bobby. And Bobby was, he was the young, he was about six years old. But Bobby would tell everything. Although we did the blood test, Bobby would tell it. So he told my mother what happened. And my mother tried to explain. My mother never used the term racism. You know, segregation.
She talked about that, discrimination. And she was trying to explain to my white friends what all that meant. That we were, we were all the same. My mother was not, as I say, she was a religious woman but never attended church. I only remember her going to, yeah, I only remember her attending church one time with one of her best friends in the past.
Kelly Scanlon: She lived a religious and spiritual life,
Alvin Brooks: Yeah. My dad, I don't remember at all, except when my mother passed. But, after they left, she talked to me after my white friends left, because my mother fed everybody, all the kids in the community. I was the only black kid. All the white kids would come.
She always had bologna and cheese and peanut butter and jelly and all that, and they would, they would eat, eat together. So after they left, she said, it's time for y'all to go home. And she said to me, so I came, and she had me to get down on my knees. It was the first time she had done that, but she did it a number of times after when I was discriminated against.
She had me get down, she had an old green line rocking chair, and, she had on one side was the Bible, other side was a group, a stack of this, Monday and, and, Evenings Kansas City Stars, Kansas City Times, and she was a great reader, and she would sing a little of the song, Precious Lord, Take My Hand, and then she would, she would read a little bit from the Bible, excuse me, and she would pray this prayer, and I can hear her momma now, God. Help my baby to become the kind of man that you want him to be, and I often say God, I hope I please you and my mama after 92 years, but that gave me the strength. And, and how many times, Kelly, how many times did my mother have to call me? Even when I was 11 or 12 years old, when things would happen, and, and I never got home and told my mother what happened. It was always someone else to tell, one of my white friends.
God maybe, God maybe said it that way. Because I don't know where I had the strength or got the strength or the courage to speak out and act out against these kinds of injustices. I was on the Board of Regents at Central Missouri State University, and the ones that always came to me about injustice were white kids.
I'll never forget, a couple of white girls came to Kansas City for our birthday party, but they got lost. So, they had a curfew to get back in the dorm, so what they did, they drove their car up to the back of the dorm and went to sleep, and the security got them, and they got expelled. And their parents came to me.
I was the only black member of the Board of Regents. And I told them, I said, this is crazy. You know what to say, so I got him back in school. I had teachers to do the same thing. Not black students, but white students. So, that's my life. I served three years on the Hickmanville School Board.
Kelly Scanlon: You just recently got elected in April to another term, another one year term.
Alvin Brooks: You see, I promised my daughters, I served 10 years, Jay Nixon appointed me to the Board of Police Commissioners, and I promised my daughters, I have five beautiful daughters, I promised them that the police department was my last public hurrah. I lied. You did. I lied. And so the school, some of the school board members and the Administration, Teachers Union, and others asked me to run for a one year term, and I did, and now I'm serving since, since April.
Kelly Scanlon: Speaking of schools, the new community center at Rockhurst University has been named after you. Do you have an update on its progress? I know it's been pushed back a couple of times.
Alvin Brooks: Yes, we had groundbreaking in December of 2021. It didn't get started until this fall. I think we will be announced next month is when we'll have some ribbon cutting and you see I've said this when we spoke back in December 21. Please for God's sake and I pray God this all the time. I don't want anybody saying Daddy's looking down on us from heaven. I want to be right there cutting I mean; I don't want to let the heaven be right there when I cut the ribbon Because one of my best friends just passed Thursday. And he was 91, Chester was from Kansas City, Kansas, the first black city council president in Kansas.
We were both with CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, during those 60s and early 70s, marching, sitting in, and protesting. And he passed away, and I'm just a year older. I think about, this story was told, these two old fellas who were great baseball players, and they played on the same team. And they'd be reminiscing about who knocked the most home runs, stole the most bases, who got them into the pennant in the World Series, and everything.
And so, one of them said one day, he said, I wonder if there's baseball in heaven. I said, that's a good question. He said, whoever dies first, come back and let the other one know. So, one of them died. And he came back, and he said, oh my God, you're back. He said, I got to ask you this question, is there baseball in heaven?
He said, well, there is baseball in heaven. He said, but I got some good news and bad news. He said, which one you want first? He said, the good news. He said, now there is baseball in heaven, but you're up for bat tomorrow.
Kelly Scanlon: Oh no! You want to be holding the scissors at that ribbon cutting. You don't want to be
Alvin Brooks: I don't want to find out, are there universities in heaven?
Kelly Scanlon: Yeah, right, right. Oh, that's, that's a great story. Again, you have a legacy that spans more than 70 years. You've talked about some of the profound changes that you've witnessed, but where do you see the city heading in the future?
Alvin Brooks: Charlie, I'm an optimist, but I'm a realist also. And the situation that's happening in America today.
With our politics, with our role of religious institutions and our people, the threat of me in general. I see so much divisiveness based on race, ethnicity, the things of homophobia and racism and bigotry and Xenophobia and all those things that divide us. And now we live in different camps.
We're red or blue or purple. And that bothers me. And Kansas City is a microcosm of what all that's about. It's no different. And when you have that occurring, when it gets into the faith community, I always saw the faith community, regardless of which one of the faiths, as being the vanguard for righteousness.
I saw it as being the moral conscience as well as the moral compass of who we are as human beings. We've gotten away from that. We, we're one issue oriented people. We've become that. It's either this or that. But it takes all of that to make us what God wants us to be. We become one dimensional, we become, this is it, and the rest doesn't make much difference to us.
So, a long way of, so I'm not, I'm not too optimistic for the future. When I hear and see what's happening, whether you're listening to CNN or MSNBC or FOX or whatever, you see that there's so much division. If I'm right, or partly right, one percent right, that our faith, the faith community, the leadership of the faith, sees us, sees its role as being the moral conscience and the moral compass to where we go.
The way we get there. We make, there was an old African proverb that says, If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
Kelly Scanlon: True. Heard that, yes.
Alvin Brooks: But so, we ought to know where we're going, so we can see on a common road. We get there different ways, but at the end, we're all together. You're much younger than I am.
I have kids that are older than you. And I'm not going to tell your age at all. That's up to you. But I have kids that are both. And my youngest is 47. My daughter of five. And I have, there are 74 descendants of Alvin and Carol Brooks. We're good Catholics most of the time.
And lovely wife Carol Rich Brooks has been gone, transitioned 11 years ago, the 21st of July. And as I talk to my daughters and my grands, and my great grands who are teenagers, and my great greats who are teenagers, they had the Brooks reunion here the 21st or 23rd of June, and there were all but ten of our descendants could not come for, for various reasons.
But as I talk with them, they're so, even the youngest ones. They don't realize what's going on, to a great degree. When Grandpa sat down, great grandpa, great great grandpa sat down with them, and they were just amazing. That happened to you, then you get mad, then you want to fight, then you want to. But they don't realize that they may experience some of the same things that I, in 2024, that I experienced in 1930s, and the 40s, and the 50s, and the 60s, and the 70s.
Kelly Scanlon: So, how do you want to be remembered? For What do you want your legacy to be?
Alvin Brooks: Well, I'd like, and I don't want to plagiarize, you know, what Dr. King and others said, you know, who've gone before me, great men and great women. But I just that, Alvin Lee Brooks was serious about trying to improve the lot of his race.
And the connection between his race and God's creations, and that he saw people as, as fellow brothers and sisters. And he tried to teach his kids and his grand and those great and great great that he was able to come in contact with, that they were no better, no worse than anybody else. But you be the kind of person that the Creator created you to be.
Kelly Scanlon: What advice would you give the next generation of leaders? As you pass the torch, which I suspect is going to be burning brightly until, you know, they've said the final prayers over you, but until that time, I mean, what the next generation of leaders, what would you advise them?
Alvin Brooks: I have a number of protégés, but young black males and females, and then my own family.
I'm working with a group of young black men and young black women, who I think have their heads on right in politics and civic affairs, involved in their respective congregations. Becoming aware of what's going on in the world and how that relates to their everyday lives in this city or in this metroplex, all of them are in Kansas City.
I'm very involved in my church, St. Monica of Africa Catholic Church, 17th of Paseo, working with a young black man there. Trying to make sure that they're part of the programs and sometimes we as adults forget that there's some, there's a group called young folks and their own kids or grandkids are great.
So, make them a part of what's going on and I espouse it all the time. So that's what I'm doing. That's why I preach and teach, going to theological seminary, anything like that. But it comes from my heart. I hope I've gained over these 92. Years plus months, some respect from a lot of people.
I don't want to be egotistical. I don't want to think that I'm the only show in town. I'd much rather be in the background helping the next generation, than be out front. You don't have to give me any accolades or any editorials. It's just something I think that God has given me the wisdom and the knowledge and the guidance to do.
And I always say, whatever your faith, realize that there's a God, that you're not totally in control. There's someone else that is. Direct your destiny and learn, learn who that is and try to live up to what that is, regardless of what your faith is.
Kelly Scanlon: Mr. Brooks, I will say it for you again. Your life has been very impactful.
I firmly believe, sitting here across from you today and seeing how vibrant you are, that even at 92, we haven't seen the last of that impact. And we thank you, though, for that. For everything that you've done and to make not just Kansas City, but the country a better place.
Alvin Brooks: Thank you. I attribute it to God and my late wife, I owe so much to Carol Laverne, Rich Brooks. Carol, I owe you so much, along with God and everybody else.
Kelly Scanlon: Thank you so much. We owe a lot to you too, Mr. Brooks. Thank you.
Alvin Brooks: Thank you, Kelly. Thank you.
Joe Close: This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Alvin Brooks for joining us on this episode of Banking on KC. Mr. Brooks life story is one of unwavering commitment to civil rights, justice, and the well-being of our city, especially our youth. His leadership has not only reshaped the landscape of Kansas City, it continues to inspire future generations to unite us for common good.
At Country Club Bank, we honor the legacy of leaders like Alvin Brooks. Those who stand up, speak out, and drive real, real change. His impact on our community is immeasurable, and it serves as a powerful reminder of what one individual, guided by purpose and a love for his fellow human beings, can achieve.
Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you, Kansas City, Country Club Bank, member FDIC.