Harold L. Holliday Sr. (1918–1985)

Harold L. Holliday devoted his career to advancing the cause of civil rights in Missouri. He spent twenty­-five years as either a member of the executive committee or as an officer, including president, in the Kansas City chapter of the Missouri National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. For ten years he served as an officer or as a member of the board of directors of the Urban League. He served twelve years in the Missouri House of Representatives, and he was a magistrate judge in Kansas City. His political strength came from his association with Freedom, Inc., an important Jackson County Black political organization.

Born on June 28, 1918, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Holliday moved to Kansas City with his mother and sister in 1920. He attended segregated public schools in Kansas City, graduating from Lincoln High School in 1935. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lincoln University in 1939 and a Master of Arts degree in economics from the University of Michigan in 1941. Drafted into the US Army in September 1942, Holliday gained the rank of second lieutenant before his honorable discharge in 1945. He applied for admission to the University of Kansas City Law School but was rejected because of his race. Working with an organization called the American Veterans Committee, Holliday gained admission in 1948 and graduated with honors in 1952, the first Black to receive a law degree from the school (which became the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1963). He became a practicing lawyer when he passed the bar in September 1952.

Holliday quickly challenged segregation in the Kansas City schools. Success came when he and attorney Lewis W. Clymer won a suit to allow Black students to attend Benton School, which later became D. A. Holmes School. In 1957 Holliday served as the general counsel for the Community Committee for Social Action in a suit to desegregate eating establishments in downtown Kansas City stores. When Bruce Watkins Jr. and Leon Jordan founded Freedom, Inc., in 1961, Holliday became a charter member and later served as chairman of the board of directors.

Running on the Democratic ticket with the support of Freedom, Inc., Holliday won a seat in the Missouri House of Representatives in 1964. Kansas City voters returned him to the legislature in each election through 1976, and he became known as an articulate voice for the poor and oppressed citizens of Missouri. He authored numerous laws, including one that ended the ban on interracial marriages in Missouri. In 1976, Holliday lost a Democratic primary race for a state senate seat. After leaving the legislature, he served as a magistrate judge in Kansas City and then as associate regional counsel in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. He retired from that position in 1983. 

Holliday died on March 21, 1985, after a lingering battle with prostate cancer. At a service attended by more than five hundred people, Robert Wheeler asked the mourners to “look deeper and beyond into Holly and his personality. If we look deeper and beyond, our vision will yield not only a portrait of a man of many accomplishments; it will also reveal the legacy he has bequeathed to us. He has blazed trails for us. He has accelerated the speed of the wheels of justice which turn so disappointingly ponderously. And, even in his death, Harold Holliday, characteristically, throws down a challenge to us.”