Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is widely known as the Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools to be "inherently unequal." The story behind the case, including that of the 1951 trial in a Kansas courtroom, is much less known. It begins sixty miles to the east of Topeka in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam, Kansas, where Esther Brown, a thirty-year-old white Jewish woman, became incensed at the local school board's reluctance to make modest repairs in a dilapidated school for area black students, even while it passed a bond issue to construct a spanking new school for whites. Eventually, Esther's empathy would cause her to push the state's NAACP chapter to launch a campaign to end segregation in Kansas schools--a campaign that would lead to victory on May 17, 1954 when a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Topeka Board of Education's policy of segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.
In 1876, Kansas required that all of its public schools be open to all students, regardless of their race. Just three years later, however, the legislature backed away from its enlightened approach to racial issues, and authorized school boards in cities of over 15,000 persons to establish separate black and white schools for elementary and junior high students. Topeka exercised its option to segregate its elementary schools, and the Topeka School Board's policy of segregation was upheld by the Kansas Supreme Court in 1903, seven years after the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the principle of "separate but equal" in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. It would be more than four decades before another challenge to segregation in Topeka's elementary schools would be mounted.
At the end of World War II, Topeka was a Jim Crow city in some respects, but not in others. In the capital of Kansas, a city of about 80,000, the 7,000 or so black residents could sit where they wished in buses, enjoy integrated waiting rooms at train stations, and attend integrated junior high and high schools. On the other hand, Gage Park swimming pool was for whites only, and many of the city's movie theaters, restaurants, and hotels practiced racial discrimination. And although Topeka High had an integrated student body, it had separate sports teams and cheerleading teams for blacks and whites. The black basketball team was called the "Ramblers" and the white team was the "Trojans." Blacks and whites had separate student governing bodies and generally sat at separate tables in the school cafeteria.
Topeka operated twenty-two elementary schools at the time the Brown suit was filed in 1951, eighteen schools for white children and four for the city's black students. In many cases, black students were forced by the policy of segregation to attend a designated black school far from their homes when a much closer elementary school, open only to whites, was nearby.
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