On a beautiful Saturday morning in July 1958, 19-year-old Carol Parks unexpectedly started a movement. She parked her yellow Chevrolet in downtown Wichita and walked through the revolving door of Dockum Drug Store. She took a seat at the lunch counter and ordered a Coca-Cola. She did this, she said, “as if I’d been doing it all my life.”
Only, she hadn’t. Not once. She was an African American woman and, at the time, lunch counters across the United States were segregated, with Black patrons relegated to takeout windows and standing sections.
Parks’s order was a small act of defiance, and the White waitress was flummoxed. Especially when she saw another young Black woman hop off a bus and sit down two stools away. Then another woman. And another. Ten young protesters — all members of Wichita’s NAACP Youth Council, of which Parks was vice president — occupying the counter’s seats. The store’s management put up a sign: “This Fountain Temporarily Closed.”
This was the start of the first successful student-led sit-in of the civil rights movement, a protest that would last three weeks. It led the popular drugstore chain, Rexall, to change its segregation policy across the state of Kansas, and started a chain of events that led to the Greensboro sit-in 19 months later. Still, few people outside Wichita — even many inside it — have any idea this happened. The story illustrates the gaps in our historical record, and how they come to be.
‘We lived in two societies’
“You have to right wrongs occasionally. And that’s what we did,” said Parks, now Carol Parks Hahn, 80. She organized the Dockum sit-in alongside her cousin, Ronald Walters, president of the NAACP Youth Council.
Walters was 20, a freshman at Wichita State University known for his charisma — friends joked that he’d carried an attache case since age 13. The idea for the sit-in didn’t come as a “flash of insight,” he later wrote, but developed over more than a year.
Segregation was technically illegal in Kansas — the state had passed a civil rights statute in 1874. This was a place that “bled” over whether slavery would be allowed, that was the origin point of Brown v. Board of Education, which in 1954 led to the integration of schools. Still, segregation ruled all.
“That’s the way it was in Wichita,” said Robert Newby, now 85 and then the oldest sit-in participant at 22, a drummer in the Wichita State University band. “Even though there were no Jim Crow signs, the fact is the racial rules were very clear.”