Mayday Over Wichita (13 page)

B
URGEONING
W
ICHITA

African Americans made up 5.5 percent of the Wichita population in 1880. This number crawled to 7.8 percent by 1960—eighty years later.
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And at a quick glance, Wichita appeared to be the ideal American city in 1965. Located one hundred miles south of the capital city of Topeka and just over fifty miles north of the Kansas/Oklahoma border, Wichita was every bit the cow town it so proudly claimed to be—as well as the “Air Capital of the World.” With its endless miles of flat terrain, clear skies and abundant farmland, Wichita flourished in two areas: aviation and agriculture. Promotional maps and posters throughout the 1900s boasted that Kansas was “First in Wheat,” a “Shrine for Education,” lived by the “open road” and offered “a great and promising future in America.”
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Wichita was home to a booming aircraft industry with Boeing, Hawker Beech and the newly built McConnell AFB in 1954.
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This came as no surprise considering Wichita produced “one-fourth of all commercially-built planes in the U.S., with over 25 aircraft companies” just twenty-five years after the Wright brothers first took flight.
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Apt to take part in Wichita's booming economic industry, the African American population further increased in the 1950s as Wichita expanded and more blacks established residence in the city.
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With a total population of 24,671 in 1900, Wichita had swelled to a whopping 254,698 residents by 1960—19,861 of whom were African Americans.
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R
ESIDENTIAL
S
EGREGATION AND THE
C
REATION OF
W
ICHITA
'
S
N
ORTHEAST
“G
HETTO
”

According to a 1960 census, there were nearly twenty thousand African Americans living in Sedgwick County. Of this group, 97 percent were living within the city limits of Wichita, mostly in the area of “21
^st
Street and east to Hillside” in what was referred to as a “tightly segregated” community.
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In fact, Wichita was one of the most compactly segregated cities in America in regards to residence, with “95.3% segregated residentially.”
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As evidenced in a report prepared by the Kansas Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concerning police-community relations in Wichita and Sedgwick County, it was understood that African Americans in the 1950s and '60s, usually not by choice, lived in their own distinct area of Wichita. The report found:

Racial isolation was perpetuated by the real estate industry, which during the period after 1955 allowed black families to move only into neighborhoods contiguous to the original black community. The Wichita Real Estate Board never answered a petition from local groups asking for its help to end this practice
.
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What's more, this area of Wichita, where African Americans resided in mostly $10,000 homes, was by no means considered an affluent area of the city.
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The northeast section contained malodorous stockyards, packing plants and refineries, which pelted foul-smelling odors into the neighborhood every time the south wind blew.
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But blacks had few options in prime real estate.

T
HE
W
RECKING
B
ALL

Urban Renewal began as a concept within federal housing legislation in 1949. This was a host of federally funded land redevelopment projects that adversely impacted Wichita's once-thriving black community in the 1960s.
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The best example of Urban Renewal's dislodging effects is the Calvary Baptist Church, located at 601 North Water Street. Built in 1917 in Neo-Classical Revival architecture by Josiah Walker—who was referred to as a “plasterer and architect”—Calvary Baptist Church was once the largest African American church in Wichita with a congregation of over five hundred members in the 1920s.
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But by the time the 1960s ended, it was one of the last buildings earmarked for Urban Renewal's wrecking ball and today is one of only two original buildings left standing in what was formerly Wichita's historic black business district.
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Before Urban Renewal, the flourishing black community encompassed a fifteen-block radius for over half a century, stretching from “West Third Street north to West Ninth Street, and Main Street west to Waco.”
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This area was the booming center for religious, cultural, social and business activities in the black community, with various shops, restaurants, hotels and offices. But when Urban Renewal came in the early 1950s and '60s, many blacks were displaced. So, too, were their buildings. As a result, Calvary Baptist Church and the Arkansas Valley Lodge building (also designed by Walker) at 615 North Main are the only remnants of that era. Calvary was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993 after Doris Kerr-Larkins, an active member at Calvary, led several initiatives to help preserve the church.
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Many other historic structures failed to escape demolition.

The construction of a new county courthouse in the heart of the black business district, the building of Interstate 135 and “block busting”—a practice in which real estate agents frightened white homeowners into believing their neighborhoods were being infiltrated by African Americans, thus causing them to vacate in order to sell the homes back to minorities at an inflated price—compelled many African Americans to move from the area of North Main and Water Street into the north and east sections of Wichita.
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Countless blacks were affected by Urban Renewal. Business owners left the district, taking their businesses with them. The once prosperous center was demolished. New buildings and parking lots for city and county workers now cover the site. Today, Calvary Baptist Church, refusing to surrender, is the Kansas African-American Museum—besieged by the Sedgwick County Jail built around it. A clearer picture of Urban Renewal's impact, there is none.

R
ESTRICTIVE
C
OVENANTS

Evident, too, in Wichita during the 1960s were the racially charged restrictive covenants, which kept black families isolated in the northeast, creating an all-black neighborhood seemingly overnight. A study by Angela Miller for the Kansas African-American Museum in 2000 contained several interviews of African American residents in the northeast who remembered well the restrictive covenants and their lingering effects. One such interviewee, Duane Nelson, whose family was one of the first to move into an all-white neighborhood north of 13
^th
Street (a racial boundary line at the time), recalled the state of affairs:

A black family couldn't buy a house in a white neighborhood. They wouldn't sell you the land…There was always one
[real estate agent]
who put profit over anything else, who would over-price the property, sell it to a Black and that immediately started white flight. Everybody started running
.
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Another lifelong Wichita resident, Jackie Lugrand, commented:

Before 1958, we lived on Seventeenth and Grove and we had two white families left but they were changing, all of them were trying to get out of there as fast as they could; and they would sell their homes to Blacks, and of course, selling to Blacks, they would up the price, get more money, and then they would move south or move out west to get away from Blacks…before you know it, it's an all-black community
.
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Some grew tired of the many barriers and difficulties faced when trying to integrate into white neighborhoods and gave up. Others refused to succumb to threats, which required great fortitude and perseverance. Holding one's ground was not easy, but some did. Duane Nelson's first home was rigged with dynamite by the Ku Klux Klan and blown up.
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He pressed on. Chester I. Lewis promptly received a burning cross in his yard, explosives in his mailbox and bricks through his windows after he solicited a white friend to purchase a home in an all-white neighborhood and then assign ownership to him and his wife, Vashti.
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The fiery and determined Lewis, who was the head of the local NAACP and a prominent attorney in Wichita, refused to move from his home.

Several other intimidations and heinous attacks occurred in Wichita (as in the rest of the nation) during this period, urging black families to remain in their neighborhoods and not to venture into white territory. In his illustrated book entitled
Wichita: The Magic City
, historian Craig Miner explained how “Wichita was in the 1960s, and had been since the 1890s, one of the most tightly segregated cities in housing in the United States.”
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The Fair Housing Ordinance passed in Wichita during 1965 “had no teeth,” said Miner, “other than threat of publicity.”
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Moreover, there were but a few blacks in positions of authority who could stand up to such harsh treatment. Statistically speaking, “50% of black families in Wichita in 1960 fell below federal poverty guidelines in income, and 20% made below $2,000 compared with 6% of whites at that level,” found Miner.
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In her book
Dissent in Wichita
, civil rights historian Gretchen Cassel Eick noted how, when compared to white neighborhoods, black neighborhoods in Wichita during this period were extremely diverse socioeconomically. According to Eick, “In the same area lived doctors, lawyers, dentists, veterinarians, teachers, porters, janitors, cooks, and the impoverished, underemployed, and unemployed.”
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And for the rest of Wichitans, there was “a sense of you don't go into that part of town if you're white,” which was “fed by real estate agents and common culture,” said Eick.
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The segregation in Wichita at the time was very real and unmistakable.
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Miner would comment, “It was also evident that there was housing discrimination, and that the ‘ghetto' was real” as well.
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Ultimately, the socioeconomic diversity observed in the African American neighborhood was due to residential segregation rather than choice of residence. African Americans who wanted to move outside of these areas into white neighborhoods were denied mortgages or, worse, forced to pay much higher costs than whites after being charged inflated interest rates and exorbitant down payments.
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Some, such as Chester I. Lewis, who earned enough money to make it out of black ghettos, were truly the exception. The majority of black Wichitans struggled in unskilled jobs that offered only meager wages in the 1960s. Wichita's employment inequality could be surmised by the National Urban League's study in 1965. This study described how “jobs of Negro workers were in classifications requiring less skills than those of white workers,” and in many occupations where whites were employed, “there were no Negroes.”
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Of the twenty-six employers who participated in the survey, the data collected revealed how 80 percent of blacks employed were working “in semi-skilled or unskilled capacities.”
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Despite the efforts of the local NAACP and of prominent African American leaders in the community—like Chester I. Lewis and Hugh Jackson—little could be done to close the gap of dismal job prospects for African Americans. A staggering 90 percent of black federal workers “were in Grade 5 or below,” and “only a few were in upper grades,” said Warren M. Banner in his
Review of the Economic and Cultural Problems of Wichita
for the National Urban League, published in 1965.
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With the destruction of the black business district, aside from manual and unskilled labor, employment opportunities were almost nonexistent for African Americans living in Wichita in 1965.
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The barriers in housing and employment for blacks during this period were vast. Some broke through the roadblocks, but most did not—especially those living on Piatt Street. Tract Number 7, where the plane fell, contained the poorest housing and two-thirds of Wichita's unemployed; the lowest achievement records for schoolchildren; the highest birth and illegitimacy rates; 20 percent of all criminal arrests; and very few community leadership positions.
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As the executive director of the Wichita Urban League, Hugh Jackson, found, “[t]he segregation of and discrimination against the Negro” was the primary problem in Wichita.
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An article written a few months after the crash in the
Beacon
offered “solutions” to the housing and employment quandary faced by many blacks. The pejorative comments put forth, however, only exposed the racial barricades, bigotry and apathy that fomented civil unrest in Wichita. The article was ironically entitled “How to End Prejudice”: