Brown v Board of Education National Historic Site

I think that most people when asked about slavery and racial discrimination in the U.S., would think of the deep South.  The Midwest is not the first area that comes to mind.

Yet here I am, touring National Park sites in the midwestern states of Missouri and Kansas and, so far, have visited two Civil War battlefields, the birthplace of a former slave, and a fort that originally was intended to separate whites and Indians yet became embroiled in pro- versus anti-slavery. Now I am at the site that triggered a landmark Supreme Court decision on legal discrimination.

I refer to Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, which was central to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. This decision ended the practice, prevalent across the south, of having separate schools for white and black students. Known as “separate but equal”, the Supreme Court ruled that such schools were “inherently unequal”.

The Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka is housed in the elementary school that was at the center of the lawsuit. Monroe Elementary was one of four elementary schools in Topeka for black students.

I had imagined that this would be a run-down building with poor facilities, hence triggering the lawsuit.  I was surprised to find a school that very much resembled the elementary school I attended in the 1960s. I found out during my visit, that this was not a bad school. The teachers worked hard to give students a good education, and the facilities were more than adequate. The same was probably not true in segregated schools across the southern states.

So why the lawsuit? One of the reasons was simply that, as I mentioned, there were only four schools that black children could attend in the entire city. Whereas white children could go a few blocks to a neighborhood school, black children often traveled miles to the nearest school.  I also think (my opinion here) that it was easier to file such a class-action lawsuit in Kansas than it would have been to do so in a deep south state. Such “rabble-rousers” would face possible violence simply for taking such action.

There isn’t too much to see at this Park site. One can wander around the school a bit. The gymnasium has been turned into a theater for a continuous video presentation.  Unfortunately, the video covers so many subjects and has no beginning or end, that I feel I could have spent a few hours here just to see it all.  As it were, I watched for around 40 minutes. The video is well done, but may be too long for one sitting.

Brown v. Board of Education was one of the first bricks to fall in the Jim Crow laws of legalized discrimination. It would be another ten years before the Civil Rights Act ended all legal barriers to equal rights in the country. Sadly, “soft” discrimination continues to this day.

Steve