Gretchen Cassel Eick’s book “Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in Midwest, 1954-72” provided a lot more detail about my hometown than I knew before.

Like many others, I’ve seen video footage of marches around the country and black and white designated areas in waiting rooms, drinking fountains.

But I did not know about Eick’s documented detail. What surprised me the most was the amount of institutionalized racism that existed.

For example, she writes that until 1950, most African Americans applied to the Veterans Administration and Federal Housing Authority (FHA) for housing loans. Those agencies’ policies only allowed financing homes in neighborhoods of people of the same race as the person buying the home until 1950. Minorities only received 2 percent of the underwritten FHA loans even though they represented about 12 percent of the population nationwide.

She also explains how the local schools’ population, which were based on race and busing, played a significant role in how neighborhoods formed. This maintained segregation and violence by white people, such as drive-by shootings, against African Americans.

She is inclusive about how many other groups and organizations – including the local NAACP and the Wichita State basketball team – it took to create change in Wichita.

Many risks were taken, and many setbacks occurred, personalities and conflicting ones, too.

I feel like I know more about Wichita, my community, much more after reading this book. My sensitivity toward why Wichita is the way it is – it grew from almost 115,000 people in 1940 to about 255,000 in 1960 because of the aircraft industry – and how the neighborhoods were formed gave me greater insight into the place where I grew up.

 Reading about the Dockum Drug Store sit-in at Douglas and Broadway in 1958 (before the famous 1960 sit-in in Greensboro, N.C.) made me want drive there, get out of my car and try to visualize what happened.

Eick also tied the local Civil Rights struggle to what was happening on the national and international level. This gave her local subjects a great context.

I can also understand minorities’ anger toward the dominant white majority. Who wouldn’t be? Anyone unjustifiably oppressed has reason to be mad.

People who oppress other people are hurting themselves; they just do not know it.

It takes awhile before federal laws filter into local laws, zoning requirements and greater equality changes are made.

It takes even longer before those adjustments are accepted and attitudes and opinions change.

Lastly, it is behavior of people within the community that takes the longest to modify.

We are still working on that one.