Dockum Sit-In for Restaurant Desegregation

“If your hands are in the dish, people do not eat everything and leave you with nothing”
To sit and take space
while they hate
is a tough thing.
They broke the trend back then by sitting in
so we could choose where to eat.
Maybe today we should stand up and leave.
Why should we spend where they don’t want us to breathe?
Stop eating and shopping in places where they treat us as if our money isn’t just as green
as if our Black hands aren’t just as clean…
Refuse to be unseen!

- Ellamonique Baccus

"It takes two to oppress: someone to oppress and someone to accept oppression." Chester I. Lewis, Jr.

If you wanted to get a coke or eat out in Wichita and you were a Black person, you could not sit at the lunch counters but had to take your food and drink outside and eat it on the street. All stores with lunch counters like Woolworths, Kress, Grants, and Rexall (called Dockum in Wichita) followed this policy. But in the summer of 1958, 30-40 Black youth challenged the unfairness of excluding Black people by sitting at the counter for hours waiting to be served. This was called a sit-in.

They were high school and college students, and they sustained their sit-in for three weeks at the Dockum Drug Store at Broadway and Douglas.

Dockum had 9 stores in Wichita and belonged to the largest drug store chain in the U.S. and Kansas. (think Walgreens today).

The students practiced for their sit-in at St. Peter Claver Catholic church. Their advisor was Mrs. Rosie Hughes. The students would remain nonviolent, even when people threatened them. They went in teams for two-hour assignments led by Carol Parks (Hahn) and Ron Walters. Chester Lewis was their lawyer and inspiration.

When the national NAACP told Wichita’s chapter not to allow the sit-ins, Lewis encouraged the local branch to support the students. It did.

After 3 weeks, when they decided to expand the sit-in to every day of the week, the owner told the manager to go ahead and serve them; he was losing too much money.

Chester Lewis phoned the owner: Are you desegregating all 9 stores in Wichita?

Yes.

All Rexall stores in Kansas?

Uhhhh…Yes.

It was the first successful sustained student-led sit-in. Lewis flew participants Ron Walters and Robert Newby in his plane to Oklahoma City, Topeka, and Kansas City to meet with NAACP youth and share what they had accomplished. Sit-ins spread to Oklahoma, Missouri, and by 1960, across the South. The Greensboro, NC sit-ins took place one and a half years after Wichita’s Dockum sit-in.

Under Chester Lewis’s leadership, the NAACP continued protests and sit-ins at the other stores that did not desegregate. Some white students and members of the Wichita branch of the NAACP joined the protests. It took 5 years for the other chain stores to change their policy.

Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the National NAACP commended the students for their sit-in.

For more information, visit the Wichita Public Library's page on Chester I. Lewis.

Follow this link for more resources on the Dockum sit-in.