Deborah Dandridge Remembers Building the Brown v. Board of Education Site

On February 26, 2020, Deborah Dandridge — an archivist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and a former board member of the Brown Foundation — was interviewed by Rachael Bledsaw of Outside the Box for the National Park Service's Midwest Regional Office. The interview, at KU's Kenneth Spencer Research Library, was for the administrative history of Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, which documents how the park was developed. What follows summarizes her account.

A personal stake

Dandridge is a lifelong Topekan. She attended Washington School, one of the city's schools assigned to African American children, from 1951 until 1957 or 1958. Even after schools opened to all neighborhood children in 1955, her parents kept her at Washington School — though Parkdale was only three houses from home. That experience, she said, was the personal perspective she brought to the park.

Joining the Brown Foundation

Around 1991–92, she worked on an exhibit about the African American experience in education in Kansas, supported by the Hallmark family and a Kansas Humanities grant, with Katie Armitage, whose background was in the history of Kansas education. Dandridge found that her library's collections reflected her own life. The exhibit became a major traveling exhibit for the Brown Foundation, and she was then asked onto its unpaid board.

Before the site opened, the Foundation — the park's partner, with its own funding from Congress — kept the story alive through outreach: annual seminars, community programs, games and videos for younger children, and the Brown Quarterly, a bulletin sent free to schools that covered not only the case but its legacy for First Nations, Latinx people and others. With the park, it also trained rangers in telling the local and national story.

Shaping the story

• Interpretive Themes Workshop, 1993. Lawyers, activists and people from the other cases in Brown took part, among them, she recalled, the attorney who had defended Kansas. Her priority was the African American experience, told in detail, with the message that school segregation was no exception in American race relations since 1619. At Harpers Ferry, where the exhibits were designed from about 2000 with park staff including Steve Adams, that push produced a chronology on the walls.
• General Management Plan team, 1994–96. She represented the Foundation, expecting — and preferring — that it would keep running the park's outreach as a partner.
• Proudest work: the interpretation plan. Visiting Harpers Ferry two or three times to review it, she was impressed; a statement in the main auditorium, drawn from the American Creed, came from her.

Topeka's selection wasn't a given, she noted — plaintiffs in other states had suffered far more — but Cheryl Brown Henderson and the Foundation, working with Senator Bob Dole, brought the park to Topeka. When it opened in 2004, she said, the city improved the neighborhood, though much of the Black business district on Quincy Street was long gone.

The partnership ends

Dandridge described growing tension between the park and the Foundation. The Foundation's funding, by then placed within the park's budget, came under the park's control; the Foundation's office in the building was closed, and it was, in her words, forced to part ways. She called the public break — including allegations about the Foundation's use of funds, which she rejects — devastating for the Foundation, the families and Leola Brown Montgomery, widow of Oliver Brown, and said the park should acknowledge that the charges were untrue.

Her view of the park now

• Training has slipped. On recent visits, she said, rangers told a mostly southern version of school segregation with little about Kansas, Delaware or Washington, D.C., and repeated the untrue claim that Black students couldn't attend Topeka High School.
• Fewer big programs. The Foundation once brought national speakers to Topeka; the park now focuses on nearby schools.
• Space was always tight in the small building, which is why the team argued against a permanent archive on site. The local NAACP chapter still meets there free — something the Foundation negotiated.
• Communities matter. The National Park Service's relationship with local communities needs work, she said, and it has lost support among people connected to the decision in Topeka, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware. Partners will disagree, as families do, but should not discredit each other in public.

The Brown Foundation has since published Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision, funded by the Walmart family, whose contributors met at the Smithsonian's African American museum. Its earlier oral history project, funded by the Hallmark Foundation, is held by the Kansas State Historical Society.

Sources

Based on "Oral History Interview with Deborah Dandridge," National Park Service, Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, interview by Rachael Bledsaw, February 26, 2020; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The interview is summarized, and Deborah Dandridge's account and views are hers; the transcript and audio file (BRVB022620) hold her own words. Her portrait is not reproduced; rewritten in hubnx's own words.