The Unknown Sit-In

Imagine growing up in a city and never knowing of a historic event that people you knew from church participated in during their youth.  You work for a major TV network and yet...you never knew.

Or....

Imagine living in a city and working in its downtown for three years in the 1970's and never knowing of a historic event that happened in a building you passed twice a day on the way to and from work.

It's hard to imagine.  Or is it?

The history of African-Americans in our United States is a story of so much hidden, so much buried.  So much needs to be uncovered.  

Sheinelle Jones  grew up in Wichita, Kansas and has deep roots in the black community of Wichita.  But she did not know about the Dockum sit in in downtown Wichita, Kansas in July of 1958, until recently.  Ms. Jones just happens to be the host of the 3rd hour of the Today show, a morning show on our NBC network.  Today, she did two segments on this historic sit in.

And that person who lived in Wichita in the 1970's when her spouse was stationed at the local Air Force base and passed by the building (now a hotel with a Starbucks) twice a day?  That was me.  I had no idea, either.  No historic marker.  No write up in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon (now, the Wichita Eagle) newspaper that I can remember.

I was absolutely amazed to watch this Today show segment.  You may be, too.

Many people associate segregation with the American South.  Not so.  In 1950's Wichita, segregation was alive and thriving.  Black children could not swim with whites in the municipal pools.  Nor could they go into Dockum's Drug Store (a Kansas chain), sit at the lunch counter, and have a refreshing soda. Why?  Because of the color of their skin. 

Students decided to change that, to peacefully protest by sitting at the counter all day, day after day, until the owner gave in and served them.  It took three weeks.

Other sit-ins are more famous.  Nor was the Wichita Dockum Drug Store sit-in of 1958 the first sit-in  action taken by black students.  But it was the first successful student led sit-in. After those three weeks the Dockum Drug Store chain (and Rex-All drugs) integrated its lunch counters.  

How this segment of the Today show came to be was even more amazing. The granddaughter of the Dockum owners, who was a baby when the sit-in occurred, was moved by the nationwide protests this past summer, and moved to act by her Christian faith.  She decided to apologize and meet some of the protesters, but the pandemic prevented her doing that in person.  Instead, she did a zoom call, organized by a local TV station, and apologized to seven of the protesters.  They talked for a bit.

The granddaughter of the Dockum store owner in Wichita calls the sit in protesters "heroes".

I like to tell my readers that history is not a dry collection of dates to memorize.  It is living, breathing.

It is our story, history, for good or for bad.  To learn from and improve going forward, or not.

Irises #AtoZChallenge

The simple iris taught my spouse and I a lesson, a long time ago.  I'd like to share that lesson with the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, on I day.


There are so many kinds of irises.  Some are sweetly scented, like my Kool-Aid irises.

 Early spring irises, taken last month by an in law who lives in New York City.

 More early spring irises.

Now, for our story.

When my spouse and I were in our 20's, we bought our first house.  My spouse was an airman in the United States Air Force.  We didn't think we could ever be homeowners, but the couple who sponsored us in spouse's first duty posting were homeowners, and they encouraged us.  We bought a small brick two bedroom home in the South Central neighborhood of Wichita, Kansas.  It had a large, fenced yard.  We imagined our garden there and went to work dreaming of when spring would come.

Spring came, and with it, a bunch of plants with fan shaped leaves started to come up along the fence.

Spouse looked at the line of leaves with his brow furrowed.  "I know what those are", he said.  "I saw these growing in some vacant land behind my childhood home.  We don't want them."  With that, he took his shovel, and dug them all up.  And there were a lot of them- it was a long fence line.

But a couple of more erupted after the dig out.  We left them there, busy with other projects.  One day, they flowered.

They were beautiful bearded irises.

My spouse had dug up a long line of expensive, beautiful, bearded irises because he made an assumption and didn't have the patience to wait to see what the plants would do.

We learned our lesson.  We never did anything like that again.  We think first.  We wait to see what will come up.

Life is like that - a series of learning from your mistakes.

So are the days of our lives.

Kansas

K day at the Blogging from A to Z Challenge brings me back to a memory of long ago.

So far I've had such a fun time crafting posts for each letter of the alphabet, in order, using my theme of America the Beautiful

It's time to talk about a state almost at the center of the United States - Kansas.

Not long after I moved to Kansas in 1977, due to my husband being stationed at McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita, Kansas, this song came out.

"Dust in the Wind" by Kansas.
All we are is dust in the wind.....

When I found out I was to be living in Wichita, Kansas, I was less than happy (to put it mildly).  I was hoping to go to graduate school to become a librarian, and the nearest library school to Wichita was in Emporia, some 90 miles away.  This was long before the days of the Internet and today's type of distance education.  And, as someone who grew up in New York City, I just knew that Wichita was part of the Western Frontier, complete with tumbling tumbleweeds and wild cowboys smashing up saloons on Saturday night.  OK, maybe not the cowboy part, but I was convinced Wichita was an archaic cowtown filled with wind, dust and tornadoes.

I had obviously watched too many Westerns while growing up in the 50's and 60's.  Although the wind part is true.

Wichita was a total surprise to me.  It was literally love at first sight.

Once I  found the Mid-America All-Indian Center, and attended my first Wichita River Festival, I was hooked.  For the first six months I lived in Wichita, I lived in walking distance of the Mid-America All-Indian Center.

This print (?) by the late Native American artist Woody Crumbo still hangs on my wall

What symbolized Wichita for me (besides discovering the works of Woody Crumbo) were the works of Native American artist Blackbear Boisin.  One of these works was a statue called the Keeper of the Plains that stood at the confluence of the Arkansas (pronounced by Wichitans "ar-KAN-sas") and Little Arkansas rivers.  When planning this post, I wondered if the statue still existed.

It does, and, after recent renovations, it is more breathtaking than ever.

There is even a mystery surrounding my first few months in Wichita I have not yet solved.  Wouldn't it be great if one of my readers could give me a lead?

Perhaps, one day, I will return and see how Kansas has become in the over thirty years since I lived there.

Goodbye Boeing

Some 35 years ago, I lived in Wichita, Kansas with my spouse due to his job.  We lived there about 4 years, and for this native of New York City, it was a unique experience indeed.  I enjoyed Wichita in many ways (although this was during the era of the BTK Strangler, as we called him then) and in some ways was sorry to leave.


After we moved to Binghamton, we saw IBM (the "king" of industry when we came here) go downhill.  We saw many people we knew laid off, scrambling to find jobs in other industries.  Many never enjoyed the prosperity of their IBM jobs ever again.  Their lives turned out totally different (and sometimes better, I have to admit). 

Wichita called itself the Air Capital of the World for good reason.  There were three major aircraft companies located in Wichita at the time we lived there:  Cessna, Beechcraft, and the largest one - Boeing.  These companies were to Wichita as Endicott-Johnson Shoes, and later, IBM, were to the Binghamton, NY area.  People strove to work for the aircraft companies.  At my job in Wichita (not aircraft related), almost every spouse worked for an aircraft company. The aviation industry ruled this city of about 280,000.

No, the Wichita I knew was not a dusty cowtown inhabited by tumbleweeds.  It had a wonderful River Festival every May.  It had a lot of green trees, a wonderful bicycle path along the Arkansas River, the Mid-America All Indian Center,  a historical Wicihta recreation called Cowtown, and was a good place to raise a family. (At one point in time, I lived on the edge of downtown, and was able to walk to work for one of the few times in my life.)  But the summers could be wicked hot, and after the summer of 1980, it was time for a change.

Times do change.  And now Boeing is leaving Wichita for good.

When I read about this in early January, it brought back a lot of memories.  One may wonder why I would care about a city that I have not set foot in for almost 30 years and....well, I knew some of their employees socially.  I wonder how many of those people were there at the end.  I was shocked to find out that only about 2100 people were still working for Boeing Wichita plant.  My memory may be vague, but I think there were some 15,000. people working there when I lived in Wichita.

If your grandparents fought in World War II, it is possible they flew in an aircraft made in Wichita.  Your parents may have flown in a passenger plane made in Wichita.

It's the American story, repeated so many times....and it does make me sad.

I don't know if I will ever have the chance to visit Wichita again.  If I do....it will be a very different place. In more ways than one.