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I had a close call like this back in 1980. One night my friends and I were out cruising in Kansas City. We were in an area that was kind of becoming the mew suburb for middle class blacks in Kansas City. We were all from the predominately white Johnson County and lived in Leawood, Mission Hills and Prairie Village.

We're driving south on Blue Ridge Blvd from 87th street. On the left hand side of the road we see a large crowd of people, as many as 400 or so in a convenience store parking lot. We pull up to the next side street park the car and walk over to check out what's happening.

Only people that have been victims of crime or a car wreck that experience that 'slowness of time' will understand this next part but we got to the edge of the crowd and look to the center of what's happening. I don't know if we were there for 5 seconds or for 30 but each second seemed like a minute once the danger became apparent.

What we see is some people in a car trying to accelerate and get away from the crowd but the car is surrounded and people are lifting the car up from all sides. The tires still have contact and are burning rubber and there's smoke but it's clear the car isn't going anywhere.

I then realize it is white people in the car and every one of the 400 people surrounding the car are black. Thankfully, we are at the outer edge and no one had really taken notice of us.

I turned to my friends and said "we need to get out of here... turn around and slowly walk back to the car, when I start running, you run too".

We began walking, got about 20 yards away and then ran the next 20 and drove off heading south.

I looked in the papers the next few days but never saw anything about it but it's pretty certain that the night didn't turn out well for those folks in the car.

We were just lucky that night.