Our view: Maya Angelou library naming flap shows how ludicrous city secrecy’s become

You’d like to think Wichita City Hall would learn from past mistakes.

Yes, you’d like to think that.

But . . .

The issue of the day is a proposal to rename the Maya Angelou library in northeast Wichita.

And the problem of the day is that City Hall fumbled the proposal by playing its usual cutesy games with the release of public information.

When the staff report came out on Thursday evening, here’s what it said:

“The City received a written request from a community member to rename the Maya Angelou Northeast Branch Library to reflect a local Wichita leader who has made a lasting impact in the community.”

It touched off a firestorm on social media because of what it didn’t say: Who made the request and who do they want to honor instead of Angelou, a Black female poet who rose above a hardscrabble upbringing of sex abuse and dirty jobs to become a literary national treasure and civil rights icon?

Anyone tuning in to the council’s Friday agenda meeting would have expected those answers.

The council talked about it at length, but nobody there managed to answer what the community wanted to know.

Instead, they talked about changing naming policies and went off on a weird tangent about naming something after Billy the Kid.

What’s actually going on here is that James Barfield, a longtime activist of Wichita’s Black community, wants to rename the Angelou library in honor of the late Billy Q. McCray, a former state legislator, Sedgwick County commissioner and local civil rights pioneer.

Barfield told The Eagle he’s not alone and will present letters of support when the time comes. He said his name was the only one on the original request because he wrote it and that’s what city policy says to do.

Barfield’s view is that the library should be named after a local notable rather than a national one with tenuous ties to Wichita (Angelou did act as a visiting lecturer at Wichita State University for a short time).

Agree or disagree, it’s a legitimate position.

The silver lining here is that nobody’s questioning whether McCray is worthy of being honored for lifetime achievement in fighting for equality in Wichita.

Mayor Brandon Whipple is proposing a compromise: Keep Angelou’s name on the library and find another appropriate facility to name after McCray.

That seems to be the most promising possibility, given what appears to be heavy opposition to renaming the library.

But the secrecy surrounding the proposal did nothing but spread bad feelings where none needed to exist.

And we’ve been down this road before.

When the city renamed the Linwood library, council members questioned naming it for civil rights pioneer Dr. Ronald Walters instead of former Mayor Carl Brewer.

It turned out there was a plan in the works to rename the McAdams Park Community Center for Brewer, but city officials kept that under wraps too, wanting to surprise Brewer’s family.

It was a surprise all right — so much so that Brewer’s widow had to go before the council on the day it was supposed to be voted on and ask for a delay.

Before Cathy Brewer made that request, other speakers at the council meeting questioned whether it would diminish the legacy of the late Emerson McAdams, a former police officer and park official who ran the park for 27 years.

It didn’t need to happen that way and it probably wouldn’t have if city officials were upfront with what they were doing in the first place.

We don’t like it, but at least we can sort of understand why City Hall tries to hide the ball when making a sweetheart deal with a favored developer, or when police SWAT team members share racist texts amongst themselves.

But playing informational keep-away on something as simple and routine as a library naming request makes no sense at all.

They just can’t seem to help themselves.

This story was originally published April 4, 2022 at 2:59 PM.