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Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72. By Gretchen Cassel Eick. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xvi], 312. $39.95, ISBN 0-252-02683-7.)
On July 19, 1958, African American students orchestrated the nation's first successful sit-in, targeting Dockum Drug Store, part of Kansas's largest drugstore chain. Utilizing the passive, nonviolent strategies pioneered by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) protesters during the 1940s, Wichita members of the NAACP Youth Council successfully desegregated Dockum's within a month. While the teenaged protesters had the support of Chester I. Lewis Jr., the president of the NAACP's Wichita chapter, they faced opposition from the organization's national leadership. Even after the Wichita victory, which motivated subsequent sit-in protests in Oklahoma City and Greensboro, North Carolina, the national board remained "virtually silent" about the extraordinary actions of the Wichita Youth Council (p. 11).
In Dissent in Wichita Gretchen Cassel Eick explains how activists...