Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park

At the time of the case Topeka ran 22 elementary schools, 18 for white children and four for Black children, under an 1879 state law that let Kansas cities of 15,000 or more segregate their grade schools. Monroe, built in 1926 to designs by the Topeka architect Thomas W. Williamson, was the newest of the four and the school Linda Brown attended. Parents had been challenging the law since 1881, and by 1950 eleven cases had reached the Kansas Supreme Court without success.

The Topeka case began with Lucinda Todd, a former teacher and secretary of the local NAACP, who saw a citywide concert advertised for all 18 Topeka elementary schools, leaving out the four Black ones. She proposed a lawsuit, and she and the chapter recruited 13 families, her own first, to try to enroll their children in white neighborhood schools and be turned away. Oliver Brown became the lead plaintiff. The suit was filed in February 1951, and that August the district court ruled that segregation might be harmful but was not illegal. On appeal it was joined with cases from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C., and on May 17, 1954, a unanimous court held that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Monroe closed in 1975. When the empty building was advertised for auction, the Brown Foundation and other supporters worked to save it, Congress made it a national historic site in 1992, and it opened on May 17, 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the decision. Exhibits fill two floors.