By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Park ranger Jeff Tully presented the lecture "Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park: A Brief History" as part of the month-long "Sorting Out Race" speaker series on Tuesday at the Hays Public Library.
The case known as Brown v. Board of Education is the Supreme Court decision that ended segregation in U.S. public schools on May 17, 1954.
When it ruled, the Supreme Court considered cases from five lawsuits filed by lower courts in Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, the District of Columbia, and Virginia.
The court ruled that separate but equal conditions for students violated the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
The case was named for plaintiff father Oliver Brown, who was one of 13 families who sued the Topeka school board to allow their children to attend white schools in Kansas' capital.
One of the all-Black Topeka schools, Monroe Elementary School, is a National Historic Park with an accompanying museum and visitor center that tells the story of U.S. segregation and the broader Civil Rights Movement.
Monroe school was built in 1927 and was one of four all-Black elementary schools in Topeka. The schools included students in grades first through eighth grades.
However, the battle for and against civil rights dates back much farther in the history of the U.S. and Kansas.
As Kansas was being settled, factions for and against slavery engaged in violent clashes. This period is known as Bleeding Kansas. Kansas entered the Union as a free state shortly before the Civil War erupted across the country.
In 1879, Kansas enacted a statute that would allow first-class cities to operate separate elementary schools for Black children.
Tully said the first-class city designation was likely influenced by an influx of Black families settling in Kansas after the Civil War. Some of these families, known as Exodusters, settled in the Nicodemus community, which also has a National Historic Site.
To understand the Brown ruling, you must go back to the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1892. The Separate Car Act of Louisana required separate train cars for Black and white passengers.
Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, was arrested in New Orleans for refusing to move from a train car that was reserved for white passengers.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality. The doctrine became known as separate but equal.
The first all Black Monroe school was constructed in Topeka in 1892.
"While Topeka was not a Jim Crow city or segregated in all aspects of life," Tully said, "most restaurants, hotels and other public places were segregated in practice but not by law."
By 1950, 12 cities in Kansas had segregated schools.
In Topeka, the four Black elementary schools were built to the same standards as the white elementary schools. However, the inequity was having to attend a Black school even if you lived across the street from a white school, Tully said.
Eleven other cases had been filled in Kansas concerning segregated schools before Brown v. Board.
"But with Brown v. Board, for the first time, they looked at the constitutionality of segregation. Was segregation legally allowed in the United States? Was it a violation of the Fifth Amendment—due process— and the Fourteenth Amendment—equal protection clause?" Tully said.
The NAACP legal defense fund became involved in the case.
In 1950, 21 states had segregated schools.
Once the Supreme Court issued the Brown v. Board decision, the Justices realized that they had not established a timeline for school desegregation. So, they came back the next year with a decision that said desegregation should happen "with all deliberate speed."
Topeka began integrating its schools in 1953, and by 1955, the school district was almost fully integrated. However, many schools took much longer, especially in the South.
In Summerton, South Carolina, the elementary schools were not fully integrated until 1966, and the high school until 1970.
The school district was closed entirely for five years in Farmville, Virginia.
"Children were 22 years old when they were graduating from high school," Tully said.
Events that followed the Brown decision included:
• Rosa Parks
• Civil Rights Act of 1957
• March on Washington in 1963
• Equal Pay Act of 1963
• 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Selma to Montgomery March in 1965
• Voting Rights Act of 1965
• Fair Housing Act of 1968
"All of these were attempts to dismantle the rest of separate but equal in the United States," Tully said.
Monroe school closed in 1975. The building had a variety of owners after its closure as a school.
In the 1990s, the Brown Foundation for Educational Excellence and Research, led by Oliver Brown's daughter, Cheryl Brown Henderson, created a nonprofit foundation to save the school. It was the last of the former Black school buildings still standing in Topeka.
"There was a real threat that the school was going to be demolished, and they were going to create U-Stor-Its on the land on which that school was located," Tully said.
The Trust for Public Land purchased the building in 1991. In 1992, it became a National Historic Site, and in 1993, the school's title was conveyed to the National Parks Service.
It took about nine years to transform the building shell into a museum and visitor center, which includes a restored kindergarten classroom. The renovated building had its grand opening in 2004.
The school hosts a quarterly naturalization ceremony for new U.S. citizens and recently conducted a Monroe school reunion for students, teachers, staff and others with connections to the school in honor of the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision.
In 2022, President Biden took all of the sites in the five states that were part of the Brown v. Board Supreme Court case and combined them into a multi-state national park with the Topeka Monroe school still being the main site.
After Brown v. Board legally ended segregation, attempts to keep the races apart still occurred.
Children, especially in the South, were pulled out of public schools and placed in private schools. After Brown, homeschooling popularity increased, Tully said.
A fifth lecture in the "Sorting Out Race" series was added at 3 p.m. on Oct. 22 in Albertson Hall, Room 169, on the Fort Hays State University campus. Cornel Pewewardy, associate professor of political science at the University of Central Oklahoma and former vice-chairman of the Comanche Nation, will present "Seeing Red: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture and Sports."