Brown v Board Monument

Driving through Topeka this morning, we stopped at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Landmark. Unlike the iconic Central High School in Little Rock, which we visited on a previous road trip, the physical location of the Brown landmark was not particularly significant. It was simply on the first floor of what was once an all-black elementary school that the eponymous plaintiff’s daughter was required to attend.

An aggressively friendly, if defensive and apologist, ranger explained that the all-black schools in mid-twentieth century Topeka actually provided an education on par with, if not superior to, that available at the all-white schools. I’m a little skeptical of that claim, for obvious reasons, but he did cite the fact that the black teachers were on the whole more highly educated than their white counterparts.

Apparently this was part of the reason that Topeka was chosen as one of the five cities in which the NAACP challenged segregation laws. Because there wasn’t a material inequality argument to be made (the NAACP’s own lawyers determined as much), Topeka enabled them to focus their suit on the very principle of separate schools, even when a seemingly equal education was available, which of course in many places it was not.

It was good that we met such an informative ranger, as the exhibit itself spoke broadly about segregation in America, its history, and the ongoing impact of the Brown decision, but not very much about the Brown case itself or its local context. Personally, the political and legal strategy that goes into such a campaign is what I’m most interested in.

Brown did not arise from a spontaneous incident, as the Montgomery bus boycott did from Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat. Rather, the cities and plaintiffs in the suit were carefully chosen by the NAACP for strategic reasons. Brown was an aspiring minister and an upstanding member of the community. He was also a unionized employee of a national railroad company, meaning he was less vulnerable to pressure from an employer unhappy with his participation in the suit. The twelve other plaintiffs in Topeka were all housewives, mothers of children in the public school system, with no jobs to lose.

According to one of the Supreme Court justices who decided the case, it was named for Topeka not because it was the first of the five cases appealed, as would be tradition, but because it was the only non-southern city in which the NAACP had brought litigation. He claimed that the Court wanted to avoid the perception of hostility towards the South, which already viewed civil rights as an imposition from the North, and so titled the case in the least alienating way possible.

I asked a few questions about how the Court’s decision was received in Topeka and what the school system looks like now, which is when the (white, though not necessarily local) ranger started to get defensive. We had introduced ourselves as being from Boston, though if the guy really knew his desegregation history, he’d know that that wouldn’t give us any room to look down our noses on Topeka (nor would our actual hometown of Baltimore, for that matter). He explained that although de facto segregation did continue to a considerable degree, Topeka did not take active efforts to encourage it. Whereas other cities closed schools or gerrymandered districts, Topeka apparently accepted the decision and what minimal integration its residential patterns produced.

From the exhibit, I later learned that black parents in Topeka had brought two more suits against the Board of Education since Brown, and that Topeka hadn’t been found to be in compliance with the decision until 1996. On the way out, I asked the ranger about this. He admitted as much but qualified that those cases were based on de facto segregation, which he didn’t seem to consider particularly significant. (Actually, he claimed he wasn’t going to give his opinion, only present the arguments made, but he’d already made his own stance pretty apparent.) Unlike when discussing the quality of education in segregated schools, he couldn’t point to any hard facts about the schools today and claimed only that “some are more integrated than others” and that “test scores are pretty good”.

The exhibit itself was small and fairly generic, but well-presented. The most innovative part was a dark, narrow corridor whose walls were comprised of four large television screens. The screens displayed old footage of white protesters waving racist signs and shouting insults and threats. Thus, walking through the corridor evoked, in some minor way, what it may have felt like to brave such crowds in a sit-in or freedom march, or even as a child just trying to go to school.