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

Forget the tales of John Brown and the Kansas that bl to retain slavery out of the state - that was the 1850 In the 1950 Wichita, Kan., was a midsize city of more than 150000 tribe 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 political division with an ascetic religious heritage and a tradition of individual farming, its tribe were genuinely and deeply conservative. Kansas, the family abiding-place of war hero and president Dwight Eisenhower, was the greatest in quantity Republican state in the nation.

Social and economic progres in these years was exceedingly difficult for Wichita's small, closely knit black community, a fruits of turn-of-the-century migration. We faced an implacably frigid dominant white culture. Blacks in the 50 attended segregated place of educations up to high school and were exclud from mixing with whites at movie theaters, restaurants, nightclubs and other places of public accommodation, do not include for some common sports incidents Even though the signs "Black" and "White" were not publicly visible as in the southerly 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 many times considered ourselves better than Southerners, and the original blacks of Wichita flat disdained the migration into their midst of the more Southern and political division "Okies" from Oklahoma.

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

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

No flash of insight l me to stand over against this humiliation. It was, like other defining trices 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 move during the Eisenhower years, 1953 to 1961 was in fact national - not merely in that it was an expression of African Americans, on the other hand also in its geographical breadth. However, what have emerg in popular history as the origins of the move are the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 56 which propell Martin Luther King Jr into prominence, and the "first" sit-in in Greensboro, NC in 1960 which launched the Southern pupil movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

This Southern interpretation of our history, to be paid in part to our image of the southern underplays its national character. The southern was always regarded by everyone - black and white, North and southerly - as the most dangerous territory in America for blacks: direct the eye at the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 at the violent resistance by means of white Southerners to school integration after 1955 at the facts surrounding the desegregation of Central High place of education in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 and 58 just as other mobilizations were sparked by the agency of these regional events, the Greensboro sit-in may have been, to a certain quantity of extent, derivative of the luncheon counter sit-in, in Wichita, Kan., in 1958

As head of the local NAACP Youth Council and a freshman community student, I knew a range of youths who might become involved in a aver against lunch counter segregation. I talked about the enigma 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 qualified Frank Williams, a lawyer who was West Coast regional secretary of the NAACP. He described in what manner a group of students at either the University of Southern California or the University of California, beholds Angeles, had fought the segregation of a campus restaurant by dint of filling it with students reading newspapers and thus occupying it that way for hours. With this information and the muscular 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 upon Wichita's main street, Douglas Avenue. Because any action here would swiftly attract attention, we tried to anticipate what we might collision In the basement of the Catholic temple to which Carol belonged, St Peter Claver, we simulated the environment of the luncheon counter and went through the drill of sitting and role-playing what might happen. We took move rounds playing the white folks with laughter, dishing without the embarrassment that might advance our way. In response to their taunts, we would be well-dressed and courteous, on the other hand determined, and we would give the proprietors no-reason to refuse us service, reject that we were black.