Word: wichitas
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Lewis adds, "This is a community that says to blacks: There'll be no more tokens, no more favors. You've made all the progress you're going to make.' " That has not been very much. Wichita is one of the most residentially segregated cities in the U.S.; by recent estimates, less than 1% of its blacks live outside the ghetto in the northeast section of town. Carl Bell Jr., a former mayor, figures that if black movement out of the ghetto increased tenfold, it would still be some 40 years before black housing became diffused...
Schools and busing are Wichita's chief focus of racial strain, as they are for so many U.S. cities. Of 13,000 children who ride school buses, 3,000 do so for purposes of integration. Some 1,000 white mothers clutching preschool tots with I DON'T WANT TO BE BUSED placards recently marched on the board of education headquarters and dispersed only after reciting the Lord's Prayer in unison. The school superintendent, Dr. Alvin Morris, insists that "there is a national revolutionary group at work." "It's not a matter of racial prejudice," Mayor...
Federal model cities' funds for Wichita have already been frozen, and the city is threatened with suspension of federal education aid if it does not move ahead on school integration. There are serious black grievances in employment as well. A survey of 92 Wichita firms several years ago showed Wichita's 12% black population to be seriously underrepresented at the top, with only 0.4% of executive or professional posts; at the bottom, however, black men had 25% of the unskilled service jobs, and black women 36.3%. In the aircraft factories, by and large, blacks have less seniority...
...Some of them have been working for 16 years, and they just shrug their shoulders and say, 'Oh, well, a better day is coming,' " observes Larry Howard, 22, a Wichita State senior. "In Wichita, the peckerwood studies you and finds out where you're most vulnerable, and then he cuts you deeper. This is deeper than the way it's done in the South, and it isn't as open. There they say, 'Nigger, I don't like you, so what you gonna do about it?' Here they smile in your face...
Paul Woods, president of the First National Bank of Wichita, is proud of his few black employees. "There's one right there," he points out to a visitor. "Five years ago," he reflects, "when one of our girls sold her home to a white who handed it over to a black family, I received calls telling me to fire her. Of course, I didn't. Today I doubt there would even be pressure...