Biographer Robert Farnsworth discusses his new eBook about the life, death, and legacy of Leon Jordan, a one-time police officer and educator who founded Freedom, Inc., and became Missouri’s most powerful black politician before being gunned down in a 1970 assassination outside his Kansas City tavern.

Farnsworth is professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has authored biographies of two other noteworthy Kansas Citians: African American poet Melvin B. Tolson and Edgar Snow, the journalist who introduced Mao and modern China to the West.