Monroe School and Brown v. Board of Education

Kansas law let cities of over 15,000 people operate segregated elementary schools, and Topeka did. Black children attended four schools, including Monroe Elementary; Linda Brown's walk to Monroe took her past Sumner, the white school close to her home. In 1950 the Topeka NAACP recruited thirteen families, led by Oliver Brown, to try to enrol their children at their neighbourhood schools and to sue when they were refused.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka reached the Supreme Court alongside cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. On 17 May 1954 the court held unanimously that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, overturning the doctrine it had endorsed in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Thurgood Marshall argued the case; the social-science evidence that segregation harmed Black children was central to it.

Brown II, a year later, required desegregation only "with all deliberate speed", and the South organised around that phrase. Nineteen senators and eighty-two representatives signed the Southern Manifesto; states passed interposition resolutions, closed schools, and funnelled public money to private academies. A decade after Brown, barely one per cent of Black children in the Deep South attended school with white children. Monroe Elementary is now a national historical park.