Wichita’s Dockum Drugs sit-in to be featured on TV’s ‘Mysteries at the Monument’

Wichita’s pivotal role in the civil rights movement will be featured on “Mysteries at the Monument” at 8 p.m. Friday on the Travel Channel.

The story starts with mention of 100-degree temperatures and Ron Walters, a 20-year-old college student who was fed up that African-Americans had to eat their lunches outside in that heat.

“In 1958, Wichita was one of the most segregated cities in the country,” Friends University history professor Gretchen Eick says in the episode. “There was a law against this, but it wasn’t being enforced.”

So Walters led a sit-in at the lunch counter of the Dockum Drugs Store at Broadway and Douglas for three weeks. It was the first successful youth-led sit-in in the country.

“This is the first domino in what would become a nationwide movement,” Eick said.

The seven-minute segment in the episode uses a combination of old photos, interviews and modern actors to dramatize the events represented by the 20-foot-long bronze lunch-counter sculpture that now sits in Chester I. Lewis Reflection Park on Douglas between Market and Broadway. The original Dockum Drugs was in what is now the Ambassador Hotel.

This story was originally published July 28, 2015 at 9:01 AM with the headline "Wichita’s Dockum Drugs sit-in to be featured on TV’s ‘Mysteries at the Monument’."