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Monroe School, Brown v. Board of Ed. NHS
National Park Service Photograph
NAACP special counsul Thurgood Marshall
Photograph by Oliver F. Atkins
Photograph courtesy of Atkins Collection, George Mason University Libraries
Monroe Elementary (Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site) and Sumner Elementary (a National Historic Landmark) played a significant role in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The decision forced the desegregation of public schools in 21 states.
Topeka's elementary schools had been segregated since 1896, when the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned "separate but equal" classrooms for black children. Until the landmark Brown decision, young Linda Brown could not attend all-white Sumner Elementary four blocks from her home. Instead, she had to cross a railroad yard and busy boulevard to wait for a rickety and frequently-delayed bus that would take her 20 blocks to all-black Monroe Elementary. The NAACP filed suit, but in August 1951 a three-judge federal panel threw out the case, ruling that although segregation might be detrimental to Topeka's black children, it was not illegal, since all Topeka schools had equal facilities and programs. The NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court, joining the Brown case with similar cases from Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia, and naming it after the Kansas case to show that the issue was not unique to the South. Special counsel Thurgood Marshallargued that segregation was unconstitutional because it stigmatized African Americans, thereby denying them the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren and a unanimous court agreed.
Brown intensified resistance by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and white citizens' councils, but it encouraged and empowered African Americans, who for the first time in more than half a century felt they had a "friend" in the Supreme Court.
The Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Site is located in Topeka, KS. A new unit of the National Park Service, Monroe School is not yet open to the public. Visitors are welcome to come by the park headquarters located in the Main Post Office at 424 Kansas Avenue in downtown Topeka. Guided tours of the school are available by reservation. For more information, call 785-354-4273, or click here.
IN BRIEF
On October 26, 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-525 establishing Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site to commemorate the landmark Supreme Court decision aimed at ending segregation in public schools. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously declared that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and, as such, violate the 14th Amendmentto the United States Constitution, which guarantees all citizens "equal protection of the laws."
The site consists of the Monroe Elementary School, one of the four segregated elementary schools for African American children in Topeka, and the adjacent grounds.
Oliver L. Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas et al
Remarks Given at the "The Great American Post Office" Ceremony
May 17, 2001
Main Post Office, Topeka, Kansas
Today, we celebrate the national recognition of the historical significance of the Topeka Main Post Office and its role in writing the story of Oliver L. Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas et al. The challenge for me these next few minutes is to distill 350 years of civil rights history into a context within which those of us without legal training may begin to understand the most important legal decision for human rights in American history.
In America, from the early 1600s to the 1860s, peoples of African descent sought the most fundamental of rights individual freedom. Despite the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, a bloody civil war fought largely over the issue of slavery, and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which outlawed slavery, they remained in economic and social bondage born of and enforced by segregation. Not even the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 to guarantee equal protection under the laws, lifted the oppression. Nor was the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870 to guarantee voting rights, any more successful.
The 14th Amendment: "Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The amendment is concise and simple. Yet, states, counties, and municipalities ignored both the spirit and intent of the amendment, passing Jim Crow laws crafted to isolate minorities geographically, socially, and economically, virtually perpetuating enslavement.
Where does the legal story of Brown begin? In 1849, 5-year old Sarah Roberts would walk past five White elementary schools to Smith Grammar School, a segregated school in Boston, built in 1820. Smith was badly run down. Sarahs father tried to enroll her in one of the White schools, without success. He selected African American attorney Robert Morris to represent his case, Roberts v. City of Boston. Noted abolitionist Charles Sumner, who was white, was asked to join Morris when the case was argued before the Massachusetts Supreme Court. This was a unique and unusual pairing of an African American and white attorney in the matter of civil rights. Sumner cited the Massachusetts constitution, arguing that school segregation was discriminatory and harmful to all children. Despite his eloquence, the court ruled in favor of the school committee.
Similar cases occurred throughout the United States, involving American children of African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native descent. In 1879, Kansas legislators passed a law allowing school boards in cities with a population of 15,000 or more to determine local segregation policies. So, in small Kansas towns, schools were integrated; the cities chose segregation. Between 1881 and 1941, ten racial segregation cases came before the Kansas Supreme Court. Three originated in Topeka: Reynolds v. Board of Education(1903), Wright v. Board of Education(1929), and Graham v. Board of Education (1941).
In 1892, Homer Plessy, an African American, tested a Louisiana segregation law by riding in a train car reserved for Whites. The law stated that segregation was legal as long as the facilities maintained separately for African Americans were equal. Despite the obvious disparity in the quality of the separate facilities, he was arrested and tried before the Criminal District Court for the Parish of New Orleans. Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against Plessys argument that the segregation law violated the 14th Amendment. Plessy appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which granted his petition to take the case to the US Supreme Court. In its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court upheld Fergusons ruling, in effect validating segregation as the law of the land. Subsequent cases based on the discriminatory nature of unequal facilities met with little success, even with the efforts and guidance of the NAACP, established in 1910. That began to change in the 1940s and 1950s.
In Belton v. Gebhartand Bulah v. Gebhart, in Delaware, the initial petition concerned equal access to transportation. The NAACP encouraged the plaintiffs to drop the initial petition and sue for full integration of the schools. In April 1952, the Chancery Court of Delaware ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the towns of Wilmington and Hockessin to integrate their schools. The ruling was upheld on appeal at the state Supreme Court. The school boards then appealed to the US Supreme Court.
In Topeka, the local chapter of the NAACP, led by McKinley Burnett, asked the school board several times to fully desegregate the schools. Lacking any constructive response, the local chapter requested the assistance of the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund. Since Topekas school facilities and curricula were relatively equal, the legal strategy focused on the discriminatory and harmful nature of separation. When African American parents trying to enroll their children in White schools for the 1950-1951 academic year were refused, the case was filed here in the Federal District Court as Oliver L. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas. (Ironically, one of the White schools involved in the suit, Sumner Elementary, was originally constructed in 1878 for African American students. It was named after Charles Sumner, the staunch advocate for little Sarah Roberts in Boston in 1849. After the first Sumner school was replaced in 1901, African American children were relegated to lesser facilities and Sumner became a school for white students. The current school, which closed in 1995, was constructed in 1936.) In August 1951, the court found in favor of the defendants but expressed serious doubt about the doctrine of "separate but equal." The case was appealed to the US Supreme Court.
Briggs v. Elliotbegan in South Carolina on May 17, 1950 when an NAACP legal team lead by Thurgood Marshall, future Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, filed suit in Federal District Court against the school board of Clarendon County for failing to provide equal access to public education. Segregated schools were vastly inferior and no transportation was provided for African American students. The Marshall argument attacked segregation itself and his witnesses included social psychologists who testified about the effects of segregation on the developing minds of African American children, internalizing the ubiquitous messages of inferiority. The court dismissed the argument and its testimony, citing the Plessy decision. However, the court refused final adjudication and, in January 1952, passed it to the US Supreme Court.
The Virginia case grew out of a student boycott of classes in protest of the inferior conditions of segregated school facilities, including tarpaper shacks used as classrooms at Moton High School. The NAACP filed Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward Countyon May 23, 1951 in the US District Court in Richmond, calling for the integration of schools. The court discounted evidence of the psychological harm of segregation and determined that no discrimination existed. Citing Plessy, the court ruled for the defendants. The NAACP appealed to the US Supreme Court.
On September 11, 1950, because of the inferior conditions of the segregated schools, eleven African American teenagers attempted to enroll in the new John Philip Sousa Junior High School in Washington, DC. They were refused admission to this White school. James Nabrit, Jr. filed suit on behalf of his clients and Bolling v. Sharpewas born in 1951 before the US District Court. Stating that segregation was still constitutional, the judge dismissed the case. Nabrit appealed to the United Circuit Court of Appeals. On the suggestion of the Clerk of the US Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals agreed to allow the case to advance to the Supreme Court in 1952. There, it joined the other four cases under the name Oliver L. Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas et al.
At 12:52 p.m. on May 17, 1954, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court rejected the 1896 Plessy ruling. "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment." Segregation and Jim Crow were legally dead.
Then came the deliberate and choreographed resistance by some states. In spite of the Supreme Courts order in Brown II that states desegregate with "all deliberate speed," the states continued to ignore the ruling. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent Federal troops to Arkansas to secure the integration of Little Rock High School over the resistance of Governor Faubus, who then closed the school the following year. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard in 1963 to enforce the integration of the University of Alabama in confrontation with a defiant Governor Wallace. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, public schools were closed for five years to resist integration; the education of the African American children languished while White students attended private schools subsidized by the county.
Slowly, slowly, de jure segregation faded. Economic conditions did not fade, and they perpetuated de facto segregation that continues in many locales to this day.
The legacy of Brown is its impact on the whole of American society and its contribution to the civil rights movement, which struggled through the violence of Birmingham and Selma and thousands of other places, and has brought us a little further on the journey to equality, compassion, and tolerance. Brown also has given immeasurably to human rights in the international community. Examples include the post-apartheid constitution of South Africa and the activities of the Law and Society Association of the United States, a movement advocating the rights of Romany peoples in Europe. Brown belongs not to the United States but to the world.
Why do we commemorate these historical events? Certainly to honor the determination and sacrifice of the courageous people who made this case law, and the hundreds of thousands of repressed peoples to whom they gave a voice. I propose that the other side of this commemoration is to remind us how fragile the American coalition is. That we must be forever proactive in insuring that the last vestiges of Jim Crow are extinguished and do not return.
Do you know the story? If you are a person of color, you know. If your people traveled in steerage and arrived on this shore at Ellis Island, if you are a victim of the glass ceiling, if you are physically challenged, you know the subtext. If you are an African American man in Florida told just a few weeks ago that "coloreds are served in the back," you know the story is unfinished. If you are a black teenager who dared to be impudent to a White woman in 1955 Mississippi, if you are a young man in Wyoming who did not hide his sexual preference, you have paid the ultimate tuition for the learning of what it means to be different.
What does this have to do with me, you ask? The vast majority of characters in this story are common, ordinary folk. Think about the rights you and your children enjoy and how easily a legal decision could take them away. Think about the soccer mom recently arrested and jailed for failing to wear her seatbelt. Do we know that full story? Perhaps not, but the offense was a misdemeanor. The Constitution is supposed to protect against unreasonable seizure. Are you comfortable with the Supreme Courts interpretation of the 4th Amendment in upholding that arrest? If it can happen to the soccer mom, it can happen to you or to me. Know that we are protected only so far as we understand that the Constitution is either for all of us or none of us, and that that protection extends only as far as our voices demand it.
These walls know the story. Listenlisten
Stephen E. Adams
Superintendent
Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site
Primary Reference: Kluger, Richard
1977 Simple Justice. Vintage Books, New York.
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