Kansas attorney honors civil rights leader with LEAD program scholarship

By Lily Parker ’23/25

Last October, Wichita State’s student-run newspaper, The Sunflower, reached out to all Wichita-area candidates for the Kansas State Legislature, asking what each aspirant would do to serve Wichita State students, if elected.

The question got Mike Snider, candidate for the Kansas House of Representatives District 87, thinking. He responded to The Sunflower, promising to use his legislative salary to establish a scholarship at WSU. He lost the election to incumbent Susan Estes in November, but “losing an election is no reason to give up on a good idea,” he says, smiling.

In April, he and his spouse, Joan Kirkpatrick ’78, a social work alumna, established the Civil Rights Law Scholarship in support of aspiring attorneys in the Legal Education Accelerated Degree (LEAD) program in the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The couple was inspired by Wichita’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, namely the work of Wichita-based attorney Chester I. Lewis. Lewis led efforts challenging segregation at local schools, swimming pools and, notably, the Dockum lunch counter, where he supported Shocker students staging a peaceful sit-in protest, one of the nation’s first, at the drugstore’s lunch counter. “We need now, as much as we needed them then, good people who are willing to work for good causes,” Snider says. “That’s why we started this scholarship.”

Snider attended the Washburn University School of Law before opening his firm, Snider & Seiwert, LLC. The most rewarding aspect of his more than three decades practicing law and advocating for Kansans with disabilities and work-related injuries, he says, “without a doubt, is being able to help others.”

For students who wish to help others through policy and litigation, the LEAD program at Wichita State offers a head start. In this six-year course of study, students graduate with their bachelor’s degree from Wichita State and a juris doctorate from the University of Kansas School of Law, allowing them to enter the legal profession a year earlier than the traditional law school pathway.

Snider is hopeful for the future of the program and the many students it will matriculate. “Education doesn’t just open doors to your career, it opens your eyes to the experiences of others,” he says. “When people learn about due process, about the Bill of Rights – the hallmarks of our country – they realize how imperative it is that they be protected.”

“These students are our idealists, our dreamers,” Snider says. “And with a little support, they’ll be the next generation of lawyers preserving the civil rights in our country.”