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

American Visions, Feb-March, 1993 by Ronald Walters

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.