Bill Holiday, a retired veteran social studies teacher of 48 years, believes in exposing students to primary sources in history and would introduce his students at Brattleboro Union High School to people who could tell them firsthand about their lived history. He notes that the United States Supreme Court recently weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
DUMMERSTON-On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. That ruling has long been recognized as a turning point in American history.
Yet the path to Brown stretched back to the post–Civil War era and forward through years of resistance after 1954.
The material in this article comes from visits to the neighborhood of Linda Brown (the third grader who was the plaintiff in the case), the Capitol Dome in Topeka, Kansas, the Sumner Elementary School, and especially the Monroe Elementary School, which is central to the Brown case. Now the Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Park, the school building is now a place where the story of the decision is interpreted on site by the National Park Service.
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In the decades after the Civil War, many states — especially in the South, though not only there — translated longstanding racial prejudice into law.
This took place despite the passage of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to affirm the rights of the now-emancipated population of Black people.
The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship of people born in the United States, including former slaves; prohibited states and local governments from depriving "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and forbade states from denying equal protection under the law.
Despite the Constitutional protections, legislatures created a patchwork of statutes relegating African Americans to separate facilities or excluding them altogether from public spaces.
One such statute, the Louisiana Separate Car Act, required segregated railroad cars. In 1892, Homer Plessy, a Black citizen of New Orleans, deliberately challenged this law by sitting in a whites-only car. When he was arrested, his case eventually reached the Supreme Court as Plessy v. Ferguson.
The Court upheld the law. It ruled that Plessy’s rights under the 14th Amendment had not been violated because, in its interpretation, racial separation did not necessarily deny equality before the law. In the majority opinion, the justices rejected the “fallacy” of the argument that segregation by itself stamped African Americans with “a badge of inferiority.”
Only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented. He famously declared that the United States Constitution is “color-blind” and that there is “no caste” in America. Yet, despite Harlan’s warning, the nation’s highest court had effectively sanctioned a caste system.
The years after Plessy were deeply discouraging for African Americans. The judicial system that was supposed to ensure fairness and equality instead reinforced racial hierarchy. States, emboldened by Plessy, enacted Jim Crow laws that often ignored even the pretense of equality in the “separate but equal” formula. Congress refused to pass federal anti-lynching laws, further signaling that Black Americans could not depend on national lawmakers for protection or reform.
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Out of this bleak landscape came organized resistance.
In 1909, civil rights leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to fight for legal and political change.
The NAACP’s broad goal was to end segregation, but its legal strategy was careful and incremental. Rather than immediately asking the Supreme Court to overturn Plessy, the organization first chose to attack the glaring inequalities that existed under the separate-but-equal regime.
Charles Houston, who served as NAACP chief counsel from 1935 to 1938, and his successor, Thurgood Marshall, brought a series of cases in the 1930s and 1940s, focusing especially on education.
Beginning with higher education, they secured several victories that chipped away at the most obvious disparities between Black and white institutions. These rulings signaled the Court’s discomfort with extreme inequality but also revealed the justices’ reluctance to explicitly overturn Plessy.
By 1948 the NAACP concluded that the time had come to attack the “separate but equal” doctrine itself. The organization set out to build a series of test cases in public education that would directly confront segregation as inherently unconstitutional.
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By 1952, four of the five cases that would become Brown v. Board of Education had reached the Supreme Court under NAACP sponsorship. These cases, from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Kansas, were deliberately drawn from different regions to demonstrate that segregation was a national problem, not only a Southern one.
The Supreme Court case took its name from as Brown’s was the first name in alphabetical order. But the Kansas case — Oliver L. Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. — was also strategically chosen to be the lead case of the five for several reasons.
Too strong an emphasis on the Deep South, where racial tensions and politics were particularly volatile, risked complicating the Court’s deliberations.
Topeka also offered a distinctive legal setting. Unlike many Southern districts where Black schools were clearly inferior, the Black and white schools in Topeka were, in construction and facilities, “essentially equal.” This meant that the case could focus more sharply on the consequences of segregation itself, rather than on measurable inequalities in buildings or materials.
When Thurgood Marshall argued these consolidated cases before the Supreme Court, he advanced a clear and direct position: Racial classifications are unconstitutional, and separate educational facilities created to maintain those classifications are themselves inherently unequal.
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On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Court ruled that segregated public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The significance of this decision was profound and multilayered:
• It reaffirmed the 14th Amendment, which had long been undermined by Plessy.
• It clarified that the federal government had both the authority and the obligation to protect citizens’ rights when state laws threatened those rights.
• It opened the modern Civil Rights Movement for African Americans, and it helped lay the groundwork for similar struggles by other minority groups.
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The Topeka component of Brown centers on the experience of Linda Brown and her family.
Linda attended Monroe Elementary School, a segregated Black school in Topeka. A photograph of her kindergarten class, taken on March 3, 1949, still survives; the classroom is preserved, and people are encouraged to look for Brown, the “little girl in the back row with pigtails,” photographed in the very room where she once studied.
The superintendent of schools, A. J. Stout, described the kindergarten as a place where “little children play and work together” and where play is “directed towards useful purposes,” while work is made so interesting that it feels like pleasure. The stated goal was to cultivate habits and attitudes needed for good citizenship. Yet this rhetoric of shared citizenship existed alongside a different reality of segregated schooling.
Linda Brown had to walk six blocks through a railroad switching yard to catch a bus to the Monroe Elementary School, the Black school, which was was approximately 2 miles from her home.
The white school, Sumner Elementary School, was closer — just four blocks away — but Linda was barred from attending because of segregation.
To understand Linda’s daily journey, I climbed to the top of the Kansas State Capitol dome (296 steps, the equivalent of a 10-story building) and was stunned by the distance. This geography underscores the everyday burden segregation placed on African American children.
Importantly, during the period when the Browns lived near Sumner, the school’s racial identity shifted. Originally built for African American students, Sumner (named for Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator and prominent abolitionist who fought for civil rights and the end of slavery) became a white elementary school as the neighborhood’s white population grew faster than the African American population.
This left the Browns in a neighborhood where their own children were excluded from the local school.
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Kansas occupies a complicated place in the history of slavery and civil rights. The state had fought violently over whether it would enter the Union as a free or slave state during the “Bleeding Kansas” period of the 1850s.
Yet roughly a generation after it was admitted as a free state, the Kansas Legislature passed a law permitting segregated elementary schools in certain cities.
The explanation lies in fear. Following the Civil War, large numbers (20,000 to 40,000) of African Americans, known as Exodusters, migrated from Southern states to places like Kansas. The Black population in the state exploded, from 627 in 1860 to 43,110 less than 20 years later.
Some white Kansans feared that the state would become “an all-Black state.” Some stated, “we want to be free, we just don’t think we want to be that free.”
The solution chosen by the Legislature was the “first-class city statute” of 1879–1880, which allowed cities of more than 15,000 residents to construct segregated elementary schools.
Key features of Kansas segregation policy included:
• Only elementary schools could be segregated by law.
• Junior high and high schools that developed later in qualifying cities remained integrated.
• Elementary segregation would thus be the only legal form of segregation in Kansas. Other forms of separation — such as in public accommodations or transportation — were a matter of practice rather than explicit law.
By 1950, 12 cities across Kansas were operating separate elementary schools for African American children under this legal framework.
Monroe Elementary — where Linda Brown attended kindergarten and where several other plaintiffs’ children also went to school — was one of four segregated Black elementary schools in Topeka, all built to the same standards and quality as the city’s white elementary schools but separated by race under the authority of state law.
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The local legal challenge that would become part of Brown began in 1951, when 13 African American parents in Topeka sued the local school board.
Crucially, they did not argue that the Black schools were physically inferior. Instead, they claimed that the segregation itself was a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause — denying their children equal opportunity and equal access to education.
A three-judge federal district court in Topeka heard the case. The judges ruled in favor of the school board, and “nothing really changed” at the local level.
The plaintiffs then appealed, and the case became part of the consolidated Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Topeka’s school board ended legal segregation in its schools more than eight months before the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown. Yet this local step did not erase the national implications of the case or the lived consequences for teachers and administrators.
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School desegregation in Topeka brought uneven benefits. While students of color gained access to formerly all-white schools, many Black educators paid a steep professional price.
During the Brown proceedings, Black teachers in Topeka worried about their jobs. Integrating students was one thing; placing Black teachers in front of white classrooms was another.
The school board’s actions confirmed those fears. Before the Supreme Court ruled, letters were sent to Black teachers with less than two years of service warning that, if segregation ended, “your services would no longer be needed,” because “the majority of the people in Topeka will not want to employ Negro teachers for white children.”
After Brown and the local end of segregation, the district moved cautiously and quietly to place Black teachers in integrated settings. By the early 1960s, Merrill Ross became the assistant principal of a formerly all-white school, breaking the color barrier for administrators in Topeka.
These changes highlight a recurring theme: legal victories for students did not automatically translate into justice for teachers. The dismantling of segregated structures in education was uneven, and progress often came at the expense of those Black professionals who had sustained segregated schools for decades.
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The site of the Monroe Elementary School today presents not only the “Road to Brown” exhibit and the broader “Legacy of Brown” exhibit, which traces the subsequent Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Visitors are reminded that:
• The Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown (1954) preceded iconic Civil Rights Movement events like the March on Washington by almost 10 years.
• Brown is often understood as the first major step in dismantling the “separate but equal” system in the United States.
• The “white” and “colored” signs marking segregated facilities across the country would later be found unconstitutional and violations of the 14th Amendment, especially through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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Monroe Elementary School was closed in 1975, and the property was donated to the National Park Service in 1993. As a national park, the former school has hosted notable figures in civil rights history, with visits from Michelle Obama, Ruby Bridges, and Andrew Young underscoring its symbolic role as a national landmark in the struggle for equality.
In the preserved kindergarten room, the historic photograph of Linda Brown and her classmates offers a quiet but powerful reminder that this constitutional revolution began with the everyday experiences of children — walking past nearby schools they could not attend, boarding buses at distant corners, and learning in classrooms shaped by law and custom.
The story told within the former Monroe Elementary School situates Brown v. Board of Education within a long arc of American history, from Reconstruction and Plessy v. Ferguson, through the NAACP’s careful legal strategy, to the everyday realities of segregated schooling in Kansas and beyond.
The unanimous decision of May 17, 1954, did more than reorder public education. It reasserted the 14th Amendment as a living guarantee of equal protection, signaled federal willingness to confront state-sanctioned discrimination, and helped to launch a broader Civil Rights Movement that would reshape U.S. law and society.
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The influence of Brown extended beyond the United States. The ruling served as a model for the inclusion of education as a basic right in the constitution of post-apartheid South Africa.
Yet, Brown was only the beginning.
For more than a decade after the 1954 decision, it was met with fierce resistance. Even today, the case is framed as a guidepost from half a century ago, a reminder that the ideals of the U.S. Constitution — equality, fairness, and equal protection — can never be assumed or taken for granted.
Brown remains unfinished business. Resistance in the decade after the ruling, the displacement of Black teachers, and ongoing debates over educational equity all point to a central lesson: that the high ideals of the U.S. Constitution can never be taken for granted.
In Topeka, the distance between Monroe and Sumner schools — physical, legal, and symbolic — has become a powerful teaching tool. From the rooftop of the State Capitol to the worn floorboards of a former kindergarten room, the story of Brown v. Board of Education continues to ask Americans to reconsider what equal protection, citizenship, and public education should truly mean.
This Voices Historical Lens was submitted to The Commons.
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