Kansas Human Rights Commission

Thank you for taking the time to visit the web site of the Kansas Human Rights Commission. We appreciate your interest in human rights and hope that you will find the web site both informative and accessible.

The great technology highway has afforded us a valuable opportunity to reach a greater number of people with our message. The message is simply that discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations will not be tolerated in the State of Kansas. The employees of this agency believe in this message and work hard to fulfill the agency's mission, that being the elimination and prevention of discrimination across our great state.

Our agency has made great strides in both reducing our number of pending cases and the average processing time per case. In March 1995, KHRC had an open inventory of 2, 768 cases, a record high for the agency, and a 22-month wait for a complainant to await investigation of his/her complaint. At the end of FY 2004, this backlog was reduced to 564 open cases with an average processing delay time of six months.

This impressive improvement is attributed to a combination of statutory, procedural, and organizational changes and the addition of innovative programs, such as the Kansas Legal Services mediation project, investigator accountability and streamlining administrative procedures. The education program also serves as a proactive measure to reduce future complaints.

We encourage you to share in our agency's mission as it will sustain the opportunities of generations to come. This is not only our right but our obligation.

William V. Minner, Executive Director

William V. Minner

William V. Minner has dedicated his life to the advancement of civil and human rights for all human beings and to the abolition of discrimination of all forms in our society. Following his graduation from Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma, he joined the Kansas Human Rights Commission as a Field Investigator in 1972. He has been with the Commission for twenty-seven years, working up to his present position as Executive Director in 1997. In the year 1997, Mr. Minner conciliated a discrimination complaint obtaining a $200,000 settlement for the aggrieved party, the largest monetary settlement in the history of the Kansas Human Rights Commission or any other local human rights agency in the entire State of Kansas.
Mr. Minner has received many awards during his years of public service, including the U.S. Department of Justice Community Service Award in 1981; the Outstanding Public Service Award presented by the Coordinating Committee of the Black Community in 1987; the Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Award presented by the Living the Dream Committee; the Martin Luther King, Jr. Governor's Award presented by the Honorable Governor Bill Graves in 1995; and most recently, the national Overall Human Rights Award presented by the National Association of Human Rights Workers in 1998. Morgan Chilson, reporter, Topeka Capital Journal, in a news article dated January 16, 1995, wrote, "Bill Minner takes prejudice from a distant realm of something that happens to other people and makes it a clenching in the pit of your stomach."

Mr. Minner is currently featured in an online civil rights exhibit created by the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress documented Minner's account of an act of discrimination that he was subjected to as a child. To read that account please access the below link.

William V. Minner Library of Congress Feature

Bill Minner resides in Topeka with his wife, Janet, and their two children, Mira and Lance.