by D. W. Carter
The Red Cross did not wish to become entangled in the equal housing issues—so instead, it gained approval to allot ninety dollars a month in cash payments for rent to those still needing shelter. Rumors quickly spread that the majority of the houses offered were in the ghetto, and others were simply uninhabitable. In an interview conducted by two Wichita high school teachers, Leonard Wesley and Frank Carpenter, on April 20, 1965, they spoke to residents about the generous offer from some property owners in Wichita to supply homes to those in need. Among those interviewed was Clarence Walker.
Clarence Walker was a tall, lanky man in his late fifties who incessantly smoked cigarettes. He wore a low haircut and full mustache and loved to have a conversation, even if he did the majority of the talking. He worked at the Boeing plant as a cook and was well liked among friends for his solid smile and good-humored personality. A combat veteran, he had witnessed friends die fighting in subzero temperatures during the Battle of the Bulge, one of the largest German artillery attacks of World War II. Ironically, it was only after surviving the horrors of Piatt Street that he would undergo psychiatric counseling for several months to cope with the trauma.211
Clarence and his wife, Irene, who barely escaped their home when the plane hit, quickly informed the interviewers about what actually occurred during recovery efforts:
Let me correct you right now. That was one of the biggest frauds that ever came out. This fellow offered these homes. He had so many houses, and it come to find out that he didn’t have nothing but some coops out there that had to be fixed up—just like my garage which is ready to fall down—and he offered them to us, and the Red Cross, well, we asked them to find us a home and they couldn’t find nothing.212
Mrs. Walker went on to describe how the Red Cross found them some apartments for eighty-five dollars a month, but it would pay for only one month’s rent. Not to mention, the apartments were located in a dilapidated area.213 Those who had no choice but to stay in the apartments offered by the Red Cross called them “the filthiest place I’ve been.”214 The families affected, in many cases, were split up and forced to live wherever they could find shelter. Carpenter and Wesley later concluded in their study, “It is obvious that the Red Cross, while it offered food vouchers in several instances and rendered other amenities, misread the housing needs of the displaced persons.”215
Victims also soon discovered that the clothes donated were mostly hand-me-downs, in odd sizes, which either needed repair or were so “on the fritz” that they were of use to no one. Furniture was “filthy” and missing pieces. Operation Holiday, which looked so promising just hours after the crash, was quickly discovered to be a “glorified rummage give-away” by most victims.216 Moreover, few had the wherewithal to retrieve the donated items or anywhere to put them. And despite the air force providing $1,000 in financial aid to individuals, it required proof of identity, property ownership and next of kin (if the victim had perished) before it would pay out any aid money. In many cases, the next of kin resided in other states, identification and property papers were destroyed in the fire and some blacks were understandably hesitant, even suspicious, about signing paperwork from what was perceived then as a “white” government.217
James Garmon, a former navy aviation machinist and Boeing employee who once ran for state senator, operated Razook’s store just yards from the crash site and attempted to ease the difficulties for blacks dealing with the air force claims office.218 Over 60 percent of his customers were the residents impacted by the tragedy. Garmon was also African American, and because of his intimate knowledge of the black community, the claims office asked for his assistance. According to Garmon, “You couldn’t get the people to sign a claim,” especially since “attorneys and the ministers were instructing them never to sign any papers whatsoever.”219 The majority of uneducated blacks living in this area feared this was some type of final settlement. This, coupled with the air force’s requirement of signatures and various forms of proof, drastically delayed the entire process.
The $1,000 grant was also, in reality, much closer to an average of $250 per claim. Five months after the crash, Carpenter and Wesley reported that only one family, the Meyers, received a $1,000 grant. This happened only “after much persuasion from their attorney, G. Edmond Hayes.”220 Carpenter and Wesley concluded that the major source of hesitation by blacks to receive their claims “came from the inertia developed by long frustrating previous struggles with whites. Always under the surface of interviews was the idea, by implication, that ‘We’re in another situation where we might get taken again.’”221
There was also an overwhelming feeling that the $6,992.03 reported by the Red Cross in April as its total expenditure on the disaster “filtered out into higher salaries” because it failed to match its performance, given the substantial contributions received.222 Race was, indeed, a factor, as it had been in almost every area of life in Wichita—even in disaster.
Racked with anxiety and uncertainty, the victims of the Piatt disaster could only speculate how this tragedy might have unfolded differently had Raggy 42 fallen just a few blocks east. An unidentified woman in a taped radio interview at the crash scene aptly surmised the dichotomy between the two neighborhoods: in other neighborhoods there were resources, but in the ghetto, “I guess we just have to make do.”223
11
A DIVIDED CITY AND COUNTRY
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.
—John F. Kennedy, 1963224
The mayday call by Raggy 42 on January 16, 1965, was not the only distress signal ringing that day. Hundreds of feet below the turbulent KC-135, the city—and, indeed, the country—was sending out its own cry for help. America was in trouble; Americans were divided. By the time 1965 was underway, one of the greatest hopes for the progress of civil rights, President John F. Kennedy, was slain; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was planning what would become the most famous march for equality in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery; American soldiers were entangled in an expanding and deadly Vietnam War; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were signed into law by the first southern president to be elected in over a century; black homes, churches and businesses were bombed and burned in the South; violent race riots broke out in Watts, California, later that year; and Americans everywhere were pushing for the integration of segregated establishments across the United States.225
Racial equality had reached an impasse. Neither the passage of laws nor federal troops could fix the problem. As President Kennedy observed, “[L]aw alone cannot make men see right.”226 Once again, mirroring what took place one hundred years prior, Americans were in the midst of civil war.
Martin Luther King Jr. at the White House with Lyndon B. Johnson, March 18, 1966. Lyndon B. Johnson Library.
It is not possible to fully understand the impact that a massive KC-135 aircraft, laden with jet fuel, has when it crashes into a primarily African American neighborhood in 1965 without first bearing in mind the context of what was taking place in the city of Wichita and in the country itself. When this tragedy befell Wichita, it did so during one of the worst periods of social upheaval in American history: at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The crash and its effects, which divided the community, were a microcosm for the larger conflict at hand—a conflict that burned brighter as the decade progressed. How the nation arrived at this point, the role of Kansas in the Civil Rights Movement and the African American experience in Wichita during 1965 are crucial points to consider when encapsulating this tragedy.
KANSAS: A BRIEF RESPITE FROM THE SOUTH
A seventy-year-old coffin maker from Tennessee led the biggest impetus for free blacks to enter Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s. He had experience placing the bodies of dead slaves who “got out of line” into their graves. He knew all too well the cruelties of slavery and the oppression of blacks in the South following the Civil War.227 Benj
amin “Pap” Singleton—who had a stern face, a strong jaw and piercing brown eyes—was a rough, disciplined man. He had seen his share of life. Born and raised in slavery, Singleton led so many blacks out of the South that he once boasted, “I am the whole cause of the Kansas immigration!”228 Few could argue to the contrary.
Singleton, through his immense work and tenacity in leading blacks from former slave states to Kansas, would eventually become known as the “father of Kansas black immigration.”229 Singleton wrote numerous letters to the Kansas governor asking for help with the exodus and he traveled extensively back and forth to Tennessee, over hundreds of miles, leading thousands of blacks to establish settlements in Kansas. In his twilight years, he declared, “I have taken my people out in the roads and in the dark places, and looked to the stars of heaven and prayed for the Southern man to turn his heart.”230
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton. Kansas Historical Society.
Not only did migration to Kansas give blacks new freedoms and opportunities, but Singleton also surmised that, by removing blacks from the South, he could create a labor shortage to remind southern whites not to mistreat the people they depended on for production. Granted, the mistreatment of blacks by southerners did not cease, but many oppressed laborers went elsewhere to states like Kansas.
Exodus handbill. Kansas Historical Society.
MIGRATION
Men like Singleton and Henry Adams, another well-known organizer of black migration, were a part of the movement following Reconstruction that brought the first black families to Kansas. After years of bloodshed to determine whether Kansas would become a slave state or free state, in the vacillating conflict known as “Bleeding Kansas,” it finally entered the Union as a free state on the bitterly cold day of January 29, 1861.231 With the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, settlers soon crossed the threshold, making Kansas their home. Eight years later, when the first flour mill was established in the city of Wichita to support what had become a thriving wheat industry, the first black family settled there in 1870.232 The next family arrived in Wichita in 1871, followed by four more in 1872, two in 1874, one in 1875, five in 1876, three in 1878 and 1879 and four in 1880. By 1880, nearly two dozen black families were living in Wichita.233 These numbers continued to grow over the decades as more migrated to Wichita in search of employment and freedom.
BURGEONING WICHITA
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.234 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.”235 Wichita was home to a booming aircraft industry with Boeing, Hawker Beech and the newly built McConnell AFB in 1954.236 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.237 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.238 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.239
RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION AND THE CREATION OF WICHITA’S NORTHEAST “GHETTO”
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 “21st Street and east to Hillside” in what was referred to as a “tightly segregated” community.240 In fact, Wichita was one of the most compactly segregated cities in America in regards to residence, with “95.3% segregated residentially.”241 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.242
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.243 The northeast section contained malodorous stockyards, packing plants and refineries, which pelted foul-smelling odors into the neighborhood every time the south wind blew.244 But blacks had few options in prime real estate.
THE WRECKING BALL
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.245 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.246 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.247
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.”248 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.249 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.250 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.
RESTRICTIVE COVENANTS
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 i
nterviews 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 13th 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.251
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.252
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.253 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.254 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.