Standing up in America's heartland - 1950s' civil rights movement history in Wichita, Kansas

Forget the tales of John Brown and the Kansas that bled to keep slavery out of the state - that was the 1850s. In the 1950s, Wichita, Kan., was a midsize city of more than 150,000 people, of whom only 10,000 were black. Agribusiness and defense industries were its economic base; farmers and defense workers, its social foundation. Isolated in the middle of the country, with an ascetic religious heritage and a tradition of individual farming, its people were genuinely and deeply conservative. Kansas, the family home of war hero and president Dwight Eisenhower, was the most Republican state in the nation.

Social and economic progress in these years was exceedingly difficult for Wichita's small, closely knit black community, a product of turn-of-the-century migration. We faced an implacably cold, dominant white culture. Blacks in the 50s attended segregated schools up to high school and were excluded from mixing with whites at movie theaters, restaurants, nightclubs and other places of public accommodation, except for some common sports events. Even though the signs "Black" and "White" were not publicly visible as in the South, we lived in separate worlds, just as blacks and whites did in the Southern states. Still, there was no small amount of the status that went with being "up South." We often considered ourselves better than Southerners, and the original blacks of Wichita even disdained the migration into their midst of the more Southern and country "Okies" from Oklahoma.

As a young man I worked in downtown Wichita at various jobs. Because I had the use of a car, I could eat with relatives, at home or elsewhere in the black community, while my friends and others complied with the local folkways and ate at segregated lunch counters.

In the spring of 1958, 1 started a new job without a car, which anchored me to the downtown area for lunch. I remember going to F.W. Woolworth one day for lunch and standing in line with other blacks behind a 2-foot board at one end of a long lunch counter. Looking at the whites seated at the counter, some staring up at us, I suddenly felt the humiliation and shame that others must have felt many, many times in this unspoken dialogue about their power and our humanity. Excluded from the simple dignity of sitting on those stools, blacks had to take their lunch out in bags and eat elsewhere. Bringing lunch from home thereafter was only quiet acquiescence to what I had faced in that line.

No flash of insight led me to confront this humiliation. It was, like other defining moments in that era, the growing political consciousness within the black community, born of discrete acts of oppression and resistance. That consciousness told me that my situation was not tolerable, that it was time at last to do something.

The Civil Rights Movement during the Eisenhower years, 1953 to 1961, was truly national - not merely in that it was an expression of African Americans, but also in its geographical breadth. However, what have emerged in popular history as the origins of the movement are the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 56, which propelled Martin Luther King Jr. into prominence, and the "first" sit-in in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960, which launched the Southern student movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

This Southern interpretation of our history, due in part to our image of the South, underplays its national character. The South was always regarded by everyone - black and white, North and South - as the most dangerous territory in America for blacks: Look at the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, at the violent resistance by white Southerners to school integration after 1955, at the events surrounding the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 and 58. just as other mobilizations were sparked by these regional events, the Greensboro sit-in may have been, to some extent, derivative of the lunch counter sit-in, in Wichita, Kan., in 1958.

As head of the local NAACP Youth Council and a freshman college student, I knew a range of youths who might become involved in a protest against lunch counter segregation. I talked about the problem with my cousin Carol Parks, the treasurer of our youth council and the daughter of the local NAACP secretary. Carol invited me to her house to meet Frank Williams, a lawyer who was West Coast regional secretary of the NAACP. He described how a group of students at either the University of Southern California or the University of California, Los Angeles, had fought the segregation of a campus restaurant by filling it with students reading newspapers and thus occupying it that way for hours. With this information and the strong support of Chester Lewis, also a young attorney and the head of the local NAACP, we began to plan.

We targeted Dockum drugstore, part of the Rexall chain, located on Wichita's main street, Douglas Avenue. Because any action here would swiftly attract attention, we tried to anticipate what we might encounter. In the basement of the Catholic church to which Carol belonged, St. Peter Claver, we simulated the environment of the lunch counter and went through the drill of sitting and role-playing what might happen. We took turns playing the white folks with laughter, dishing out the embarrassment that might come our way. In response to their taunts, we would be well-dressed and courteous, but determined, and we would give the proprietors no-reason to refuse us service, except that we were black.

We were motivated by the actions of other people in the struggle, especially by the pictures of people in Little Rock and King's Montgomery bus boycott, with which we were generally familiar. Like others who would come after us, we held a firm belief that we would be successful simply because we were right; but our confidence was devoid of both the deep religious basis of the Southern movement and the presence of a charismatic leader.

Our effort also lacked external support. We had received a telegram from Herbert Wright, national NAACP youth secretary, saying that the contemplated sit-in was not regarded as an NAACP tactic and that therefore we would not receive the benefit of legal coverage from the national office in the event of lawsuits - a strange response from someone who would later lead a team of NAACP lawyers in providing legal assistance for the wave of sit-ins in the South. Nevertheless, unknown to us, at that time the NAACP national office was ambivalent about what it called the "Montgomery model" of direct action and probably would not have become involved later on if its own youth councils had not taken action.

Although we were not daunted by the lack of support from the NAACP national office, we did not wish to act in isolation. We felt an obligation to ask not only for the permission but also for the involvement of adults, who had so much to gain from our victory. However, Lewis could not secure the backing of the adult local chapter. Faced with our boldness and the prospect that they would be vulnerable to white retaliation, the adults appeared as intimidated as our sisters and brothers in the South.

Ten of us began the sit-in on Saturday morning at 10 a.m., July 19, 1958. We decided to take the vacant seats one by one, until we occupied them all, and then to just sit until whatever happened, happened. It was the prospect of being taken to jail - or worse - that led some parents to prohibit their sons and daughters from taking part in the protest.

Although we were admittedly nervous,, our fears were overcome by a a sense of solemnity that arose from our attempt to accomplish something outside of ourselves and our group-something historic that would benefit every black person in the community. And even though I felt the same anxiety as others, I also believed that I had to at least appear unafraid and purposeful.

The sit-in went as planned. We entered the store and took our seats. After we were settled, the waitress came over and spoke to all of us, saying, "I can't serve you here. You'll have to leave." Prepared for this response, I said that we had come to be served like everyone else and that we intended to stay until that happened. After a few hours, the waitress placed a sign on the counter that read, "This Fountain Temporarily Closed," and only opened the fountain twice to accommodate white customers. This was what we were hoping for - a shut-off of the flow of dollars into this operation.

When we showed up a few days later, filling all of the seats, the waitress waited an hour and then made a telephone call. After a while, a white male appeared and asked, "What's the problem here? I thought she told you to leave." I repeated our position. He stared at us, confused and angry that his mild attempt at intimidation had had no effect; then he retreated to his office.

By the second week of the protest, we felt that we were winning because we were being allowed to sit on the stools for long periods. Surely the store was losing money. As we sat, we seldom spoke to each other, but many things crossed my mind. How would I react if my white classmates came in? How would they react? Would my career in college be affected, and would I be able to get another job? What did my family think about what I was doing? How would it all turn out? Were we doing the right thing after all? I am sure that the others were thinking the same things, but they never wavered. I was proud of our group.

Gradually, the word went out that there was something going on in Dockum drugstore. The store soon filled not only with shoppers but also with the curious and the hostile. The press came in, and I was interviewed by radio and newspaper reporters, but they were never to return. Then, one evening during the second week into the protest, the store began to fill up with tough young whites, members of a motorcycle gang, who were visibly disturbed and who had come to make a demonstration of their own. I remember one of them saying, "Wait until the rest of us get here. We're really going to have a pair. "

I had always vaguely known that the situation could become dangerous, but since none of us could anticipate what form it would take, we did not know how to prepare, except to be lawful. About 15 or 20 men gathered in the store, and the proprietor was nowhere around. I became concerned for the safety of our group, especially for the two young women, and I asked one of our young men to call the police.

When the police arrived 15 minutes later, they looked around, and an officer said, "I don't see any disturbance taking place." I replied, "OK, so you want to wait until those people over there start trying to beat us up, and then you arrest us. I understand." At that moment, the manager also begged for some intervention by the police, fearing that his store would be wrecked, but the officer said to him, in tones not meant for all of us to hear, "I have orders to keep our hands off of this." And with that the police left.

I felt that we had been abandoned to the mob, so I had to do something dramatic. I called some friends on Ninth Street, the main drag in the black community. Talking as loudly as I could, I asked them to come down quickly; we were in trouble. Then I went back to my seat, and the young whites began to threaten us. The taunting continued, getting bolder. It seemed like forever, but in only a few minutes, cars began pulling up out front. Were they ours or theirs? I didn't have to wait for the answer, because the young whites bolted toward the back exit. When they were clear, I went out front, hoping to intercept my friends before there was an excuse to put us out. As I thanked them and the three carloads of others, I noticed clubs, one pistol and some knives at the ready. It was a high-stakes gamble, even somewhat foolish, that barely paid off.

Once clear of the prospect of violence from white gangs, and despite the fact that some whites spat at us and used racist taunts, we kept the pressure on as the movement grew. it became a popular movement among youth, especially from Wichita University, and at least two white students came down to participate. What had begun as a two-day-a-week demonstration escalated into several days a week. just as we were realizing our success in generating a mobilization, I began to worry because school was approaching, and it would be difficult to maintain the pressure with school becoming our main priority.

Then suddenly, on a Saturday afternoon, into the fourth week of the protest, a man in his 30s or 40s came into the store, stopped, looked back at the manager in the rear, and said, Serve them. I'm losing too much money." This was the conclusion of the sit-in - at once dramatic and anticlimactic.

Chester Lewis later called the vice president of the Dockum drugstore chain, Walter Heiger, to confirm the new policy and learned that Heiger had instructed all of his personnel to provide service to all people, regardless of race.

What happened in the aftermath of our sit-in was completely typical: blacks and whites were served without incident, giving the lie to the basic reason for our exclusion-that whites would cease to patronize the establishment. We also received considerable acclaim from our community. Even Herbert Wright, from the NAACP national office, who visited Wichita a few weeks later, lauded our accomplishments as he endured our criticism.

Not wanting to rest on our laurels, we targeted another drugstore lunch counter, across from East High School on Douglas Avenue, and there segregation was even more quickly ended. Other lunch counters in the city followed suit. Apparently, the owners had learned from the damage inflicted by our first sit-in. The Douglas Avenue sit-in was our last action, as school closed in quickly and our attention turned to other things.

The Dockum sit-in was followed in a few days by the beginning of a much longer campaign of sit-ins in Oklahoma City, Okla. This protest was also initiated by the NAACP Youth Council, under the leadership of the courageous 16-year-old Barbara Posey, now Barbara Jones. The Oklahoma City demonstrations were longer, beginning in September 58 and covering the greater part of 1959, and they were more violent than our comparatively brief experience in Wichita. The Oklahoma City NAACP Council was fortunate to have support from the adult chapter.

These sit-ins were followed by other protest demonstrations in the Midwest, such as the one in St. Louis, Mo., begun on February 14, 1959, by the NAACP youth group and led by William Clay, now a United States congressman. Later that year, the college chapter at the University of Chicago protested discriminatory hiring at a local restaurant; at the University of Indiana, they dealt with discrimination in barber shops; and at Ohio State University, they fought against discrimination in student housing. Then, on February 1, 1960, came the well-known sit-in in Greensboro.

The link between the Midwest actions and the Greensboro sit-in was more than merely sequence. Ezell Blair and Joseph McNeil, two of the four originators of the Greensboro protest, were officers in Greensboro's NAACP Youth Council. It is highly unlikely that they were unfamiliar with the sit-ins elsewhere in the country led by their organizational peers. indeed, at the 51st Conference of the NAACP held in 1960, the national office recognized its local youth councils for the work they were doing in breaking down lunchcounter segregation.

In his speech at that conference, Robert C. Weaver, the United States' first black cabinet official, said, "NAACP youth units in Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma City started these demonstrations in 1958 and succeeded in desegregating scores of lunch counters in Kansas and Oklahoma." NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins paid tribute to the sit-in movements as "giving fresh impetus to an old struggle," and "electrif[ying] the adult Negro community, with the exception of the usual Uncle Toms and Nervous Nellies."

By summer 1960, the NAACP Youth Council-inspired protests had occurred in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, West Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky and Mississippi. There was one ironic historical twist: On July 21, 1960, the Woolworth Company in Greensboro began to serve everyone without regard to color, nearly two years to the day after the beginning of the "first" sit-in in Wichita.

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