In Kansas City, Sept. 9 was designated “Happy Red Friday Day.” I was first made aware of the event when I drove by what is now called the Spirit of Freedom Fountain and saw that the water had been dyed red. In Kansas City’s promotional literature, the fountain is the city’s most distinctive symbol. The J.C. Nichols family installed it in 1951, dedicated it to their founding father in 1960, and funded an extensive renovation in 2014. In the wake of the George Floyd mania in June 2020, an ungrateful city stripped the Nichols name from the fountain as well as from the street that runs past it. Nichols’s sin was that a century ago, some of the extraordinary neighborhoods he was developing had ethnically restrictive codes. Those codes were normative at the time.
Normative today are codes that compel companies to make hiring decisions based on the nebulous principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Curiously, the company Red Friday celebrates, the company on whose behalf the fountain flows red, openly flouts those norms. As to the racially sensitive civic leaders who dethroned J.C. Nichols, they lead the Red Friday celebration.
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