By Mark McCormick, The Journal
Wichita, at one point in its history, stood as one of the most racially segregated cities outside the South.
It took longer to integrate its schools – the early ’70s – than many cities in the South.
White friends of Black civil rights lawyer Chester Lewis craftily bought a home in a white neighborhood in the 1960s and deeded it to Lewis and his wife. Then other friends had to sit on the porch with a shotgun to protect the house from angry white neighbors.
When Black architect Charles McAfee moved into the same neighborhood, racist vandals threw a brick through his daughter’s bedroom window.
In the South, white people didn’t care how close Black people got to them so long as they didn’t get too big. Well, in Wichita during the 1960s, whites didn’t care how big you got, so long as you didn’t get too close. The same neighborhood? That was too close.
Long-term exposure to this toxic belief system may have created a coldness in some of Wichita’s seemingly least-likely individuals – people who have likely experienced that unwelcoming spirit.
We must take great care that we are not of the world we inherit, but a few people have drifted toward behavior uncomfortably close to what African Americans have encountered for centuries.
The reaction of some to the city’s decision to place an emergency warming center in central northeast Wichita comes to mind, as does an attempt a few years ago to establish a Lord’s Diner location in the same neighborhood.
Late last year, the City Council voted unanimously to allocate $685,000 of COVID recovery funds to support an emergency winter shelter on Opportunity Drive that would be open through March. The move proved prescient when a January cold snap produced wind chills well below minus 10 degrees.
Officials put the number of people seeking shelter the previous winter at about 188, and without a new shelter, nearly 50 people needing shelter would have been turned away.
To that, the president of the Millair Neighborhood Association, Aujanae Bennett, seemed to suggest that the city had moved to help those from outside that part of town while ignoring the needs of people who live there.
“Again and again, you show blatant disrespect for our community,” Bennett said. “ZIP code 67214 was the most impoverished in the state. You talk about compassion. Well, where is your compassion for us?”
In addition, fears were expressed about moving homeless people close to the TOP Early Learning Center and daycare, the Boys & Girls Clubs of South Central Kansas and Gordon Parks Academy, a K-8 magnet school.
My mind traveled back to January 2005, when I wrote about Randall “Randy” Taylor, a homeless man who, seeking shelter from deadly cold, climbed into the back of a parked van and died from exposure.
In that piece, I quoted what I thought was a poem my Dad used to recite, but was actually lyrics from a Hank Williams standard from the 1950s, “Men With Broken Hearts.”
You’ve never walked in that man’s shoes
Or seen things through his eyes
Or stood and watched with helpless hands
As the heart within you, dies.
Some were paupers, some were kings
Some were masters of their arts
But in their shame, they were all the same
Those men with broken hearts.
Social media buzzed for a while with complaints about the emergency homeless shelter.
People asked, “What about the kids?” Others faulted the city for not communicating sufficiently about its plans. Many said they just didn’t want homeless outsiders getting dumped in their neighborhood.
I found that response sad and disappointing coming from the progeny of people who’d been treated similarly by segregated communities and schools, by violent “sundown towns,” and by government and banks’ racial redlining.
It reminded me of an attempt a few years ago to establish a second Lord’s Diner location near 21st and Grove streets, not far from where the emergency shelter stands.
Then, Wendy Glick, the former executive director for the Lord’s Diner, was trying to meet the needs of the hungry in the area when she fielded an unforgettable call from a grandmother.
Glick says she could hear children screaming from hunger over the grandmother’s pained voice. The grandmother had no money and no car. She pleaded with Glick to pick up the children and take them downtown to the diner for a meal.
Glick couldn’t do that, but promised to do her best to establish a Lord’s Diner in the neighborhood where the grandmother and the children could go for a meal.
Glick says public school data as well as food bank figures showing how many children qualified for free and reduced lunches in the area led them to the area to try to address the needs there. The city embraced the plan as did a handful of community activists.
But it never happened.
Community opposition was abrupt and sharp. The loudest complaints came from people who were neither hungry nor homeless, but rather, people concerned about aesthetics and appearances.
“It became very apparent that we were not welcome,” Glick says, remembering a meeting downtown at the Bishop Eugene Gerber’s conference room. “We were told that if we were to continue to persist that we would be sorry. We were threatened.”
She says she tried to make Wichita a community that prided itself on how it served the least and the lost.
But what do we do when even some of the “least of these” decide that they, too, don’t want anything in their backyard? When the stranger no one welcomed wants to deny others the basic dignity of a meal and a warm place to sleep when winter temperatures plummet?
I wish I knew. I don’t understand it.
Maybe this reflects a deep mistrust of city government. Maybe these things don’t happen if city officials had communicated better with residents. Maybe this is just a few loud people who are eager to weigh in on a public issue because the opportunity to do so has long been denied them.
Those days of segregated neighborhoods and schools really aren’t that long ago, but even if forgotten, can’t justify denying people food and shelter.
That last line from the country-western song quoted above really said it best: “So help your brother along the road, no matter where he starts. Because the God that made you, made him too, those men with broken hearts.”
Mark McCormick previously served as the editor of The Journal.
A version of this article appears in the Spring 2024 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.
This article first appeared on KLC Journal and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Previously Published on klcjournal with Creative Commons License
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