Archive for October 25th, 2009

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.  Read the complete post...