Dissent in Wichita

On a hot summer evening in 1958, a group of African American students in Wichita, Kansas, quietly entered Dockum's Drug Store and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter. This was the beginning of the first sustained, successful student sit-in of the modern civil rights movement, instigated in violation of the national NAACP's instructions. Based on interviews with over eighty participants and observers of this sit-in, Dissent in Wichita traces the contours of race relations and black activism in an unexpected locus of the civil rights movement, revealing that the movement was a national, not a southern, phenomenon.

Gretchen Cassel Eick, a professor of history at Friends University, Wichita, has received two Fulbright grants and was for ten years a professional lobbyist in Washington, D.C.