‘I don’t think we ever healed.’ Documentary explores devastating 1965 Wichita plane crash

“Kids don’t play at this park, and kids don’t know why they don’t play at this park,” Kevin Harrison says about Wichita’s Piatt Park.

To the passerby, it’s an unassuming park. Alongside a basketball court, it has a slide, some swings and plenty of space for kids to play.

Nearly six decades ago, however, 20th & Piatt was the site of tragedy.

A Boeing KC-135 refueling tanker carrying more than 30 thousand gallons of fuel crashed and set the neighborhood ablaze on the morning of Jan. 16, 1965.

Thirty people died, including 23 on the ground in the predominantly Black neighborhood.

“This catastrophic event was the worst non-natural disaster ever in the state of Kansas,” a memorial reads.

How can a community move on from such a massive tragedy?

Harrison, an assistant professor and director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Wichita State University’s Cohen Honors College, explores this question and others in “The Silent Cries of Unborn Ghetto Children,” a new documentary about the Piatt neighborhood crash.

The 80-minute documentary premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday, June 25, at Piatt Park. Admission to the screening is free.

“You talk to adults who don’t really want to talk about it, especially the ones who remembered it, lived close to it, lost loved ones in it, so you think, ‘Hmm. Maybe that trauma is still there. Maybe people haven’t healed,” Harrison said.

“I talk to people, they say there’s not a day that goes by that they don’t think about that. I talked to one lady who said this is the first time she’s ever spoken about this since 1965. She’s never opened her mouth and said a word.”

The documentary is named in reference to Laverne Warmsley, a pregnant woman who died in the tragedy.

This is the first film made by Harrison, who directed and researched the project. After growing up in Wichita, he hopes the documentary can reveal some truth about the tragedy while also giving people a path to heal.

“Over the years, you just kind of hear whispers about it, but no one really talks about it, so being a product of Wichita’s northeast community, you hear those whispers, and so as you get older, you start to understand or at least start to interpret those whispers a certain type of way,” he said. “I think there’s empowerment in knowing the true story. I think there’s empowerment in having a voice as well.”

Part of uncovering this truth for Harrison comes in the dispelling of myths. Many rumors have circulated around the crash over the decades.

The most harrowing, Harrison said, postulates that the plane intentionally landed near Piatt instead of another neighborhood with more white residents.

“Based on Wichita’s racial segregation at that time, based on some other racial issues at the time, based on the fact that people weren’t giving answers, based on the fact that people were giving really pitiful settlements after the fact and how they were treated after the fact, you can see why a myth like that would emerge,” he said. “As humans, when we don’t get answers, we kind of create the answers that make sense to us at that time, and when you’re dealing with racism already, that made sense.”

This kind of racism, Harrison said, may have stalled the healing process for Piatt survivors and loved ones of those who died.

“Wichita was very good at segregation. We think Birmingham, Alabama, we think Mississippi, we think Tennessee, but most don’t realize Wichita had a 95% segregation index in 1965, which put us in the top five cities in the country. We didn’t have the lynchings and some of those other discomforts, but as far as residential segregation was concerned, we were really good at it, and with that, there is some trauma, there is some inferiority complex, there’s some anger, there’s some depression. ... You can’t feel fully human if the mainstream of society is constantly telling you that you’re not human,” he said.

“Most believe that maybe if we were white, we probably would’ve got better answers. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but who am I to argue with someone’s perspective? Most believe that, you know, the settlements would’ve been more fair had we been white. Well, I’m part of the most that believe that.”

Harrison recalled looking at obituaries from the time where the Black victims were listed in a column of names, ages and addresses. A white victim, in comparison, was given an equal column for a biography.

“You’re looking at a society, or a sector of society, that nobody seemed to really care about, and so here we are 58 years later. I want to try to give a voice to that sector of society,” he said.

“I think it’s a natural desire of humans to be heard and understood, and I think there is some depression in not being able to be heard and understood, so hopefully being heard and understood will create some resolve and some conversations that will allow people to maybe deal with this situation a little bit better than maybe they have.”

Clyde Stevens was born in Wichita in the 1950s to a white mother and a black father but eventually ended up in a California orphanage. He kept in contact with an uncle.

“My uncle told me that my father died, but he didn’t tell me how,” he said. “When he said he was going to the funeral and he’d be back, I said, ‘I want to go’ and he told me, he said, ‘There’s no body.’”

Stevens later learned his father was one of the victims of the Piatt crash.

“It took my father from me, and then like the $900 that they paid out after he died, his brother, my uncle, took that and put it in a trust fund in some government agency that I’ve never been able to find out about,” Stevens said. “You could go so far as to say I lost everything that day. I lost everything that makes life good.”

He described working with Harrison and the documentary crew as a positive experience.

Working alongside Harrison in the making of “The Silent Cries of Unborn Ghetto Children” were co-creators and assistant directors Riccardo Harris, executive director of Wichita GEAR UP, and independent producer Kenneth Hawkins.

“I hope that this documentary will allow some people to have some conversations and talk about what it felt like and talk about how it impacted the families, you know, and the people,” Harris said. “That’s my hope.”

Harris is related to the Piatt crash in a direct way. Though it was seldom discussed in his home, Harris’ father lost his aunt, her son and her granddaughter that Jan. 16 morning.

“Everybody has a different perspective of how they saw it and how it affected them and their family,” he said. “Our community suffered a great deal of trauma because of this, and I don’t think we ever healed from the trauma, you know?”

The documentary’s creators worked with WSU’s Omega Psi Phi fraternity’s We Do It For the Kids Foundation as a non-profit partner. Members of the fraternity will participate in future discussion panels for the documentary, as will project consultant and WSU business history professor Robert Weems Jr., according to a Wichita State news release.

“Hopefully we can kind of uncover some truths, take a look at some of the racial dynamics that took place at the time and also look at what does it take for a community to heal and hopefully create some conversations around this,” Harrison said. “Some real conversations, some true conversations may allow, you know, some type of healing, I would hope.”