Edgar Snow’s Midtown Roots Form Lifelong Kansas City-Chinese Bond

This week, a delegation from China will tour Midtown sites in the Volker, Valentine, and Hyde Park neighborhoods. This is all part of an ongoing relationship between China and Kansas City created by journalist Edgar Snow.

The Chinese dignitaries will be in Kansas City for the annual Edgar Snow Symposium. Kansas Citians Mary Clark and E. Diamond Gray founded the Edgar Snow Memorial Foundation in 1974 to honor their friend, and the symposium, begun in 1984, alternates between Kansas City and Beijing. Its mission centers on “advancing the legacy of Edgar Snow by cultivating deeper and enduring relationships between the peoples of the U.S. and China through cultural, economic, and educational collaboration.”

This year, the symposium invited residents from Snow’s neighborhoods to share a meal and converse with the Chinese delegates. It’s possible that the Chinese visitors will know more about Snow than his former neighbors.

In China, Kansas City is well-known as the birthplace of Snow, the author of Red Star Over China, a 1937 account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s. As Snow biographer John Maxwell Hamilton puts it in Snow’s biography, Snow “literally discovered the Chinese communists, cut off for nearly ten years from Western observers.” His account and other writings are now viewed as “essential reading,” Hamilton says.

However, Snow’s work was not only widely read in the United States. Hamilton called Red Star Over China “an event in modern Chinese history,” becoming a primary source that also introduced the lives of Mao Tse-tung and other Communist leaders, the Long March, and Communist guerrilla strategy to the Chinese people. Even today, the Chinese read Snow’s work in grade school.

But in Midtown, only a few people realize that Snow was born and educated here. His stay didn’t last all that long; by the time he entered college at the University of Missouri in Columbia, dropping out after a year to start his world adventures, Snow had no intention of returning.

“I am determined to raise my head above the crowd and amount to something in a larger way than at present seems possible in Kansas City,” Hamilton quotes Snow as saying in a letter to his father around 1926.

However, his biographer also credits his hometown with shaping Snow’s character, quoting another lifelong friend who said Snow “was always from Kansas City, Missouri.”

Snow’s home at 3811 Mercier in the Volker neighborhood.

Snow’s legacy in Midtown includes:

• Snow’s birthplace: 3811 Mercier in the Volker neighborhood.
• Snow’s high school home is at 3925 Charlotte in Hyde Park. Hamilton says Snow’s mother, Anna, loved to cook at home, and her children enjoyed playing tennis on nearby courts and croquet in the backyard.
• Snow attended grade school at the Norman School in Valentine. He stayed in touch with principal Lucy Smoot, “a tough taskmaster,” for years after he left Kansas City.
• Westport High School, where Snow started a newspaper and attended dances and debates.  During those years, he also hung out listening to music with his friend, Buddy Rogers, who became a drummer and even formed a musical group called the Blue Bell Jazz Band.