Why hide our history?’ — New markers tell origins of how JoCo’s Negro Creek got its name

The creek runs for about 6.5 miles between Overland Park and Leawood. Historical research uncovered the story of a man trying to escape slavery in the 1850s.

“What you run from pursues you, but what you face transforms you.”

The history of Negro Creek — a small stream through Overland Park and Leawood whose first known name was a racial slur — is dark. It likely involves a man who took his own life trying to escape enslavement.

It’s uncomfortable and inconvenient, said McCormick, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission.

But the civic leaders gathered Friday near Kingston Lake Park in Overland Park had decided not to run from it. Rather than choosing another name for the creek as originally considered, they rebaptized it “Negro Creek,” adding historical markers that tell the background of the grim history behind the name.

Negro Creek runs for about 6.5 miles from near Antioch Road and 151st Street on the west and Kenneth Road on the east before emptying into the Blue River across the state line.

Up until 2020, it was little known to Johnson Countians because it did not appear on many maps and did not have signs denoting it.

But around 2019 and 2020, people began to notice and ask questions.

A petition to change the name popped up on Change.org, boosted by a social justice group at the same time that the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis drew attention to a string of police killings of Black people.

County Commissioner Becky Fast began to get phone calls asking about it, and decided to start researching, eventually putting together an informal committee, she told the gathering of about 25 at Kingston Lake Park on Friday.

That committee’s work eventually drew the support from city and county leaders, local park departments and the county museum, as well as social justice advocates.

“I was hopeful this could be designated as an Underground Railroad site,” she said, adding she still believes it might have been.

But it was not to be. Documentation of Underground Railroad sites is notoriously sparse, and there was no evidence to back that up.

However, historians from the University of Missouri, Kansas City hired by the committee uncovered other evidence.

New signage installed along Negro Creek commemorates historical significance