Excerpted from the book "Dissent In Wichita" by Gretchen Cassel Eickwith permission by author |
THE JULY HEAT moved upward from the sidewalk in waves, and the humidity kept most people inside shade-drawn rooms, somnolent and miserable despite the futile droning of fans. A dozen black teenagers dressed in church clothes entered the Dockum Drug Store on the corner of Broadway and Douglas late Thursday afternoon, quietly made their way to the lunch counter, and sat on the stools, waiting, silent, hearts pounding, courage marshaled. They had practiced for this moment. Some of their parents were standing across the street, anxiously awaiting the response of the staff and management to these teens' request for service. They were not in Greensboro, North Carolina, and it was not 1960. They were in the middle of the continental United States, in Wichita, Kansas, and it was the summer of 1958.
In 1958, the place to shop in Wichita was still downtown. On Thursday nights, the stores stayed open until nine. The students began their sit-in on Thursday so it would attract the attention of the evening shopping crowd. Dockum's was part of the Rexall Company, the largest drugstore chain in Kansas. Along with the other variety stores clustered downtown on or near the corner of Douglas and Broadway—Woolworth's, Grant's, and Kress—Dockum's was one of the places to stop for a Coke and rest your feet while shopping. But if you were black, there was no resting allowed inside the stores; a Coke, once purchased, had to be consumed outside. Each store had an area about a yard wide at the back of its lunch counter, near the kitchen, where African Americans waited three or four deep to place orders for carryout food and beverages. Seats at lunch counters and in restaurants were reserved for whites.
The teens were members of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth group that had met for about two years at various locations, depending on who the advisor was for that particular year. While Samuel Cornelius was their adult leader, they met at the black Hutcherson YMCA, where he was director, or at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. By 1958, with Rosie Hughes as their advisor, they were meeting at St. Peter Claver Roman Catholic Church. Their numbers varied from week to week, as they did for most groups of teens. Friday night "Do Drop In's" at the new St. Paul AME Church brought out as many as forty; in the summer of 1958, as they practiced for the sit-in, about half that number had been showing up. Although initially a high school group, high school graduates who had stayed in Wichita continued to participate, as did those home from college for the summer. Those attending Wichita University (now Wichita State University) sometimes met on campus in a semi-separate group. Consequently, when they all came together, as they did in the sit-in, they were of varying ages. Peggy Hatcher, fifteen, was the youngest; Robert Newby, twenty-two, the eldest.
Hatcher had moved to Wichita from Parsons, Kansas, a month or so earlier. She brought with her vivid memories of a field trip to Pittsburgh, Kansas, with her junior high school. Their bus had stopped at a restaurant for lunch, but the owner refused to serve the four or five black students in the class. Her teacher ushered the entire group back on the bus rather than accept those terms. When a new friend invited Peggy to come along to the Dockum sit-in, she remembered that incident and said she was ready, going without fear and without telling her parents.
Although Peggy Hatcher's father, a railway mail clerk, was not involved with the NAACP, the parents of many of the students sitting in during that hot summer afternoon and evening had either participated in the NAACP or had protested the second-class citizenship to which black Wichitans were subjected. Both Prentice Lewis's mother, Mary Ellen, and Robert Newby's mother, Elvora Belcher, frequently attended school board meetings to advocate an end to Wichita's dual school system and to protest the board's gerrymandering school boundaries and its plans for new construction that would enlarge and perpetuate all-black school facilities. The father of Janice and Dwayne Nelson, Curtis Nelson, had served on the NAACP board for several years. Carol Parks's mother had attended national NAACP conventions and served as president of the Wichita branch of the NAACP in 1956. Carol was vice president of the youth group and had gone to the national conventions with her mother, Vivian. Her cousin Ron Walters, at twenty the president of the NAACP youth group that conducted the sit-in, was an exception. He did not come from an NAACP family, although his family had a history of protesting unfair treatment.
The idea for the sit-ins at Dockum Drug Store had germinated for at least two years. It was spawned during a late-night conversation that Carol and Ron had with the NAACP's western region director, Franklin Williams, two years earlier. In 1956, Williams, a young lawyer who radiated competence, had come from his California office to speak to a citywide NAACP conference that Vivian Parks had organized. He stayed in her home because other than a disreputable, rundown place that doubled as a brothel, no Wichita hotel accepted blacks. Williams told Carol Parks and Ron Walters about the sit-ins that the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had organized in the 1940s. He returned to Wichita for additional speaking engagements over the next two years and talked more with the youths, helping them think about what they wanted to do locally to fight racial discrimination. Then, one evening in the summer of 1958, Joyce Glass, sixteen and on her way home from her summer job downtown, stopped at Dockum's and tried to order something to drink. When they refused her service, she complained to her older sister Lequeatta about it. Lequeatta Glass, the secretary of the NAACP youth group, took Joyce's story to the group. In the black community, Dockum's was reputed to be the worst of the downtown variety stores because it refused service to blacks waiting at the take-out counter if whites sought service at the lunch counter. The youth group discussed the situation, and Carol and Ron shared what they had learned from Franklin Williams about the "sit-downs" that CORE had organized in the 1940s.
A number of times during the 1950s small groups of Wichitans had publicly opposed segregation in Wichita's movie houses and restaurants. In 1952, black youths from the black YMCA and white Unitarian youths attempted unsuccessfully to order coffee while they sat together at the Continental Grill downtown. A CORE group that included Friends University students had picketed the Safeway over its policy of hiring only whites. Several times during 1956 and 1957, young people had attempted individual and sometimes group sit-ins, taking seats in the "whites only" ground floor in movie theaters or at "whites only" lunch counters in downtown stores. Ron Walters had once requested service at Kress. Although the waitress seemed sympathetic, she had told him that she had to enforce store policy and could not serve him. The experience taught him that the source of the problem was not the servers but the owners. To stop segregation in public places would require changing their minds.
During the spring of 1956, about twenty of Prentice Lewis's friends from the NAACP youth group had taken seats at Hollebaugh's Drug Store lunch counter. When a white high school classmate started to serve them, an older waitress intercepted her, informing her that the store's policy was not to serve black people. Their classmate had bagged the food they ordered and passed it to them at the take-out counter. At graduation that year, Prentice Lewis, Curtis McClinton, Jr., and some North High athletes, dressed in their caps and gowns, ordered ice cream at Randall's Drug Store. Refused service, they said they would not leave until served. The manager eventually turned out the lights and said he had called the police; the graduates were to wait for them outside the store. The police never came, and the spontaneous sit-in failed. McClinton would attend the University of Kansas on a football scholarship, then attain fame as a Kansas City Chiefs football star and as a singer, and then become a civic leader known for his work with entrepreneurial and self-help organizations in Kansas City. Despite occasional protests, white-owned establishments in Wichita, except for Wichita University's cafeteria and snack bar and the YWCA cafeteria, did not serve blacks.
Consequently, that summer of 1958, Ron Walters and Carol Parks proposed that the youth group conduct a sustained sit-in at Dockum's. They would politely and quietly enter the store in teams and sit at the lunch counter, ordering Cokes or hamburgers. If refused, they would remain, waiting for service. Theirs would not be a one-time effort.
They discussed their plan with Chet Lewis, the president of the Wichita branch of the NAACP. Chester I. Lewis, Jr., was a talented lawyer who in his five years in Wichita had repeatedly challenged segregation in dozens of places and with considerable success. Lewis responded positively. He told Ron Walters that he thought a sustained student sit-in would be effective and promised to bring the proposal to the NAACP executive committee, which endorsed the action.
The students made plans. A sit-in maintained for however long it took would embarrass the owners and perhaps diminish their business activity, hurt their pocketbooks, and produce a change in policy. They began recruiting students from the university and from East High School and organized training sessions. Vivian Parks met with the Roman Catholic Bishop of Wichita, Mark Carroll, who was supportive of the NAACP. At her request, he agreed to allow her daughter's NAACP youth group to use the basement of St. Peter Claver Roman Catholic Church to plan and rehearse the sit-in. They role-played various scenarios they might encounter as they violated the way things were done in Wichita. They also organized teams and scheduled times when each would take a shift at the lunch counter. In addition, they went to McKinley (now McAdam) Park to recruit other young people who were not part of their NAACP group to join them. Among the twenty or more participants were Carol Parks, Peggy Hatcher, Daisy Blue, Joan Smith, Arlene Harris, Carol Jean Wells, Janice Nelson, Joyce Glass, Lequeatta Glass, Betty Shorter, Harold Beasley, Billy Alexander, Dwayne Nelson, Robert Newby, Prentice Lewis, Galen Vesey, Gerald Walters, and Ron Walters.
The day before the sit-in was to begin, Lewis and his predecessor as president of the Wichita branch of the NAACP, Carol Parks's mother Vivian, sent a telegram to the national NAACP staff, informing them of the plan. Alarmed, Herb Wright, the youth secretary, wired back his opposition to direct action. The NAACP at the national level did not endorse sit-ins and other forms of direct action. "These are not NAACP tactics," Wright said. Vivian Parks then telephoned Gloster Current, the national director of branches, and Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP. They both told her they would not give approval for the sit-in. Local branches were to stick to litigation and not initiate direct action.
Lewis convened an emergency meeting of the Wichita branch board to decide what to do, caught as the branch was between the intention of its young people and the opposition of its national leadership. Vivian Parks recalls that the board decided, on Chester Lewis's advice, to defy national's directive and support the youths. Curtis Nelson spoke in support of the youth group, moving a majority of the board not to veto its plans, Jackie Lewis Gilbert remembers. Youth president Ron Walters interpreted this as a cautious, minimalist position, ambivalent at best, because a number of the board members refused to allow their children to participate. But the branch executive committee had endorsed the students' sit-in, and Chester Lewis volunteered free legal services. Some parents and the group's advisors, who had been helping the students practice for the sit-ins, agreed to transport them each day of the protest.
They planned to start with Dockum's and then move their protest to another of Wichita's downtown chain stores. One of the oldest drugstore chains in the city, Dockum's had nine stores in Wichita and had been in business there for fifty-eight years. Robert Dockum, its president, presided over his family's drugstore empire. Dockum employed a few African Americans in the 1950s, but one of them, Don Brown, remembered that a Dockum son had informed him that blacks could not eat at the lunch counter because "that's the way things are in Wichita."
That Thursday afternoon, Castella White stood on the sidewalk with Vivian Parks, watching Vivian's daughter, Carol, get into her yellow Chevrolet and drive away to Dockum's for the first day of the sit-in. Carol had graduated from high school the year before and come home for the summer from Seton Hill College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed her freshman year. Nineteen-year-old Carol and three other young women were the first to enter the drugstore. Twenty-year-old Ron Walters and a dozen other students filed in behind them and took seats at the counter. The waitress at first served Carol a Coke, probably not connecting her with the others because Carol had been away at college and was not a regular customer at downtown stores. Then, noticing the group of young African Americans sitting all along the counter, the waitress asked Carol, "Honey, you're not colored, are you?" "Yes, I am," Parks answered. After that, the waitress ignored the students. They remained quietly, respectfully on their stools and facing forward. The Wichita Beacon would later report that "both boys and girls were well-dressed and orderly. There appeared to be no attempts by either side to force the issue."
The merchandise manager for Dockum, Wayne Williams, said the sit-in had taken the firm by surprise, and he could not comment "on such short notice." Management shut down the fountain and put out a sign ("This Fountain Temporarily Closed"), although twice during the evening the fountain was reopened to accommodate white customers. At closing time the students left the store, nervous but feeling triumphant. When the fountain was closed, Dockum's management lost money. The students would be back on Saturday and again on Thursday and again on Saturday for as long as it took to change store policy. Almost four decades later Ron Walters recalled what happened next:
This is 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 of what I was doing? How would it all turn out? Were we doing the right thing after all? I am sure the others were thinking the same things, but they never wavered. I was proud of our group. Gradually, the word got 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.
Ron's younger brother Gerald Walters remembers riding to the drugstore in three or four cars and trucks driven by supportive adults. Some youths picketed outside while seven or eight at a time sat at the stools inside. Sometimes the group at the counter was all female. Rosie Hughes, who had a photography business with her husband, once stood outside and took pictures. Parents stood across the street to monitor the response to their children's bravery and tenacity. Maxine Walters, who had two children involved in the sit-in, felt angry as she noticed some African Americans leaving Dockum's with food from the carry-out window, a disregard of Chester Lewis's request that people stay away in support of the students. Whites constantly came in, and some made rude remarks, for example, "Why don't you niggers just get out of here!" But white resistance was not organized. On each shift, the students designated one person who, if necessary, was to go to the pay telephone and call for assistance to a black-owned drugstore at Ninth and Cleveland, their base camp. Additional young people would then be sent to enlarge their forces. If they were running low on volunteers, someone would go to McKinley Park to recruit additional participants.
At one point, the radio station sent someone to the store to interview the students. Lequeatta Glass was asked how she would feel if her grandmother came into Dockum's, tired and hot, and wanted a drink but could not get one because the teenagers were occupying all the seats. "My grandmother and great-grandmother experienced that situation all of their lives," she replied.
The sit-in appears to have begun on July 19. The following week, a full-page advertisement ran in the Wichita Eagle, listing all nine Dockum stores, their locations and managers, and reminding the public that Dockum's had faithfully served Wichita since 1900. According to Chester Lewis, "The downtown white business community was so terrified that the Wichita two daily newspapers as well as the other news media refused as a matter of unanimous decision to print or report the sit ins.... However, the A.P. and the U.P. wire services reported it nationally. [Reading about it,] John White, who was the Oklahoma NAACP State Youth Director, called me from Oklahoma City requesting procedure particulars. He was quite excited and ecstatic." The Enlightener and the Mid-West News Press, both black-owned newspapers, covered the sit-in. Of the two local daily newspapers, the Wichita Eagle printed nothing about it, and the Wichita Beacon carried only one very small article.
The NAACP group sat quietly from before lunch through the dinner hour, two days a week—Thursdays, when downtown stores stayed open, and Saturdays—for more than three weeks. Their practice sessions trained them to sit facing forward as though expecting to be served. There was to be no reading or turning on the stools. The police arrived twice, on Thursday evenings. Forty years later Carol Parks Hahn remembered feeling their presence and glancing behind her to see three officers armed with billy clubs, standing as though they knew that she was in charge of reporting what transpired to her mother and Chester Lewis. One officer hit a billy club repeatedly against the palm of his hand, glowering and telling the youths to move off the stools. They shifted to the floor. The first time that happened Carol Parks telephoned Chester Lewis, who advised them to leave quietly, which they did.
On Thursday, August 7, the youths were sitting in when "[a]bout 7: 30 a group of white youngsters came in the store and attempted to start a brawl. The police were called and upon their arrival the white youth departed," as Chester Lewis reported to Herb Wright. A story in the black press at the time reported that about twenty "white gang" members entered the store on a Saturday evening, presumably August 9, began to make antagonistic remarks to those sitting in at the eight lunch-counter seats, and destroyed their protest signs. "Wait till the rest of us get here. We're really going to have a party," one warned Ron Walters. Although Lewis had told the NAACP group to call him if there was trouble, he was out when they tried to contact him on this occasion. Daisy Blue felt vulnerable, frightened, and abandoned by Lewis; after the incident she stopped participating for a while.
The police arrived about fifteen minutes later. Ron Walters asked them to do something to prevent the confrontation with the white gang from blowing up. Store manager Wayne Williams also asked the police to intervene. "I have instructions to keep our hands off of this," an officer quietly replied, and the police left.
Anxious about what would happen without police protection, Walters went to the pay telephone, called a local youth hang-out on Ninth Street, and spoke loudly into the receiver. "This is Ron Walters. We're having some trouble down here at Dockum's. Could some of you come?" The level of tension was building inside the store, as was the amount of taunting. Then, three carloads of black teenagers drove up; the passengers piled out of the cars and entered the drugstore. Apparently, words were not necessary. The white gang left by Dockum's back entrance. As relief filled those sitting in, Walters realized that the black teenagers who had come to their rescue were armed with clubs, knives, and a pistol. The "rescue mission" could have proved disastrous.
That weekend, Chester Lewis called a mass meeting at New Hope Baptist Church for Sunday afternoon, August 10. Many of Wichita's African Americans had come to the city from the South, seeking jobs and bringing with them a collective memory of white terror. For them, the action the students were taking was very frightening, especially after the episode with the gang of white youths. Lewis felt it important to let the black community know more about the sit-in and the students' plans and also soothe concerned parents who feared their children would be arrested. The church was packed. Some participants narrated the story of the sit-ins at Dockum's and asked for community support. They had decided to expand the sit-in to additional days of the week. There were many questions from the audience and many concerns, but by the end of the meeting there was great unity and solidarity. The students left the meeting knowing that the community was behind them and proud of them.
The following day, Monday, Carol Parks took her seat at the lunch counter along with a few other early arrivals. Ron was out of town for Army Reserve training, and Lequeatta was working as a lifeguard, not assigned to sit in until the afternoon shift. Carol saw a white man in his thirties or forties enter the store, glance to the back of the store where Wayne Williams stood, and say to him, "Serve them. I'm losing too much money." Stunned and exhausted, she and the other students drank a victory Coke at the lunch counter. Then Carol went home to tell her mother the news. Someone called Lequeatta at the pool, telling her that she need not come to the sit-in. Dockum's owner had changed the policy.
After Williams announced that they were to be served, Chester Lewis confirmed by a telephone call to the vice president of Dockum's "that he had instructed all of his managers, clerks, etc., to serve all people without regard to race, creed or color." The following day, Lewis wrote to Herb Wright, "On Monday, August 11, 1958, I held a conference with Walter Hieger, the vice president of the Dockum Chain Drug Stores and he agreed to abolish all discriminatory practices as of Monday morning, at 10: 00 a.m. August 11." The youths had won. The largest drugstore chain in Kansas had desegregated not only its Wichita stores but also all Rexall Drug Stores in Kansas.
Inspired by the Wichita success, eight days later, on August 19, NAACP-sponsored young people under the leadership of sixteen-year-old Barbara Posey and their adult advisor Clara Luper initiated sit-ins at the Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City. Other towns in Kansas followed suit. In Winfield, students at Southwestern College staged a sit-in in 1959 because Winfield barbers refused service to a black professor. According to a participant, they were very aware of the Dockum sit-in. This sit-in, too, was successful, as were the civil rights activities of black students in Coffeyville who became politically active about the same time.
At the end of August, Herb Wright wrote to Chester Lewis, "The Oklahoma City youth have followed your lead and are really doing a bang-up job." Wright came to Wichita in early September for a youth career conference, listened to the young people criticize his lack of support for their direct action two months earlier, and praised them. In general, however, the NAACP's national leadership did not acknowledge its misjudgment, nor did it publicize the stellar achievement of the Wichita youths who had violated national's instructions and crafted the first student sit-in victory of the modern civil rights movement. Although the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, published two photographs of the Wichita youth group in its December 1958 issue, the photographs cited them for a career conference rather than the successful July and August sit-ins they had conducted in violation of the national's instructions. Ironically, that same issue included a story by Barbara Posey, president of the Oklahoma City NAACP branch's Youth Council. She wrote about the Oklahoma City sit-ins, which had begun the week after the Wichita sit-ins had concluded.
The national NAACP board minutes included nothing about the Wichita sit-ins. At its September 8 and December 8, 1958, meetings, by contrast, the national board of directors praised the Oklahoma City youths and their sit-ins. There are a number of possible reasons for this discrepancy. First, the national staff had advised the Wichita NAACP branch not to sit in, although they did so anyway. Second, Chester Lewis, writing to tell the national youth secretary about the sit-ins, seems to have misdated the beginning of the Wichita sit-in. He wrote that they began on August 2 and concluded on August 11, although the actual dates were July 19 to August 11. His error may have made them appear less significant. Third, the national NAACP's board of directors included Jimmie Stewart, who was from Oklahoma, but no one from Kansas. Fourth, the Oklahoma City Youth Council conducted a membership campaign alongside their sit-ins, a brilliant strategy that brought in two thousand new members and made it the largest youth council in the nation—an impressive achievement by any measure. The NAACP's national board minutes for December 8 reported that, due to the lack of support for their sit-ins from several branch presidents, "many of the young people have become dejected and have resigned their memberships in the organization." In other words, such phenomenal membership growth was threatened by the NAACP's lukewarm response to the courage of those who conducted the sit-in. At their state youth conference in December 1958, branch presidents agreed to allow youth members to participate in sit-ins "as long as they are properly planned and coordinated by the chairman of the Youth Work Committee of the adult branch."
Almost a year after the Dockum sit-ins, at its June 1959 annual convention in New York City, the national NAACP gave one of its Thalheimer Awards and $50, the second prize for branches without paid staff, to the Wichita branch for effective local work during the previous year. Ron Walters and Carol Parks had heard that national would be giving them an award for their successful sit-ins, but they could not attend the annual convention. Chester Lewis received the award as president of the local branch. The Thalheimer Award citation stated that the Wichita branch had (1) desegregated the golf course; (2) filed seventeen complaints against two aircraft companies and one against Kansas State College for employment discrimination; (3) organized a letter-writing protest against Bell Telephone; (4) negotiated with a privately owned bus company to hire a black driver; (5) drafted a public accommodations ordinance for the city and a comprehensive civil rights bill for the state legislature; (6) issued regular press releases; (7) "secured" three television programs; (8) intervened with the state insurance commissioner on behalf of African American policy-holders; (9) fought discriminatory hiring practices by the board of education and post office; and (10) "advised [the] Youth Council in [its] protest against Dockum Drug Stores."
The following year, 1960, as sit-ins swept the South, Gloster Current was the keynote speaker at the Kansas State Conference of Branches. The sit-in movement had begun, he said, when:
The NAACP Youth Council in Wichita, Kansas, during the summer of 1958 sat down in the Dockum Drugstore for one week and desegregated the lunch counter. As a result, integration of lunch counters took place elsewhere throughout the state of Kansas. Of course, there are still some places in this state and city which refuse to accommodate Negroes. The sit-ins spread to Oklahoma City, where since 1958 our Youth Council members have been victorious in over ninety establishments, and [to] St. Louis, Missouri, in February 1959, where the Washington University NAACP College Chapter integrated a restaurant, though five students were arrested in the process and charged with trespassing. Lunch counters in 112 cities are desegregated, so we are informed by an announcement from the chain stores recently.
With the NAACP virtually silent about the Wichita NAACP youth group's achievement in its communication with its national constituency, the Dockum sit-in never achieved national visibility. Few scholars of the civil rights movement credited the Wichita NAACP youth group with initiating the first sit-ins of the modern movement. Neither the sit-in in Wichita nor in Oklahoma City is mentioned in most scholarly literature on the civil rights movement, although they preceded by two years the February 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in that is popularly credited with beginning the modern sit-in movement.
