In the summer of 1958 the Dockum Drug Store stood on the southeast corner of Douglas and Broadway, in the middle of downtown Wichita, with a soda fountain and a lunch counter. Black customers could buy food there, but they had to order it at the end of the counter and take it away. "When you were served anything, it was in disposable containers," Carol Parks-Haun remembered. "We never knew what it was to just sit there and have a glass and dishes."
Parks-Haun was nineteen. Her cousin Ron Walters was twenty, a graduate of Wichita North High School and president of the city's NAACP Youth Council. "It was Mississippi up north," he said later. The two of them trained the council's members in nonviolent protest for weeks before they began, and they chose Dockum on purpose. It was part of a chain in the Rexall network, and, as Walters put it, "we felt if we could do something there in the heart of town, it might have a consequence."
The center stool
On July 19, 1958, Parks-Haun took the center stool and asked for a Coke. The waitress served it, looked at the students coming in behind her, and leaned forward to ask, "You are not colored are you, dear?" When Parks-Haun said she was, the waitress pulled back. Store policy was not to serve them. For the next three weeks the students came back every day, neat and quiet, filling the stools in shifts and sitting for hours, ordering soft drinks they were never brought. Some white customers cursed them, and a few threatened them. Others walked in, saw what was happening and backed away from the empty seats.
Serve them
They had little help. The adult branch of the NAACP gave moral support but did not take part, and the national organization did not yet endorse sit-ins. The city's two daily papers printed almost nothing. On August 11, the owner came to the door, looked at his manager and said, as Parks-Haun told it, "Serve them, I'm losing too much money." The chain told its stores to serve everyone, and other Wichita businesses slowly began to change.
After Wichita
Eight days later, NAACP Youth Council students in Oklahoma City who had been in touch with Walters sat down at the Katz Drug Store counter there, led by Clara Luper. Those lunch counters were desegregated quickly too. The sit-ins that made the national news began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, a year and a half after Wichita, and for decades the history books started there.
Walters went on to Fisk University, earned his doctorate at American University, and chaired the political science department at Howard. He was a campaign manager and consultant for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. In a 1996 article in Great Plains Quarterly he argued that the civil rights movement had been written about almost entirely from the South, and that the first modern sit-in may have been in Wichita. Wichita honored the students in October 2006, and the city did so again on August 9, 2008, for the fiftieth anniversary. Walters died in 2010, at seventy-two.