Monroe Elementary School's auditorium, around the 1940s. Image from the National Park Service's page
At noon on Monday, May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483), the landmark ruling that ended legal segregation in America's public schools.
A long road to the Court
| Date | |
|---|---|
| Feb. 28, 1951 | the case is filed in U.S. District Court in Topeka, Kansas |
| June 25, 1951 | Topeka attorneys Charles Bledsoe and Charles and John Scott, with Robert Carter and Jack Greenberg of the NAACP's legal staff, demand the total and immediate desegregation of Topeka's elementary schools |
| August 1951 | a three-judge panel unanimously finds "…no willful, intentional or substantial discrimination…" in the city's schools — though the school board ran four elementary schools for Black children, as state law allowed. The dismissal clears the way for an appeal |
| June 1952 | the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case |
| Dec. 9–11, 1952 | first round of arguments, with the companion cases; the Court orders a second round |
| Dec. 7–9, 1953 | second round of arguments |
| May 17, 1954 | the ruling |
A later decision, Brown II (May 31, 1955), would order desegregation to proceed "with all deliberate speed." But May 17 was cause for celebration in Topeka.
The celebration at Monroe
The Topeka State Journal reported a "victory celebration" for Tuesday, May 18, 1954, at 8:15 p.m. in the auditorium of Monroe Elementary School, organized by Topeka NAACP president McKinley Burnett.
- Speakers: Dr. A. M. Lampkin of Shiloh Baptist Church, Rev. E. Woody Hall of St. John's AME Church, and Dr. G. Robert Cotton, president of the Kansas Technical Institute, a vocational school for Topeka's Black students founded in 1895.
- Music: the choir and men's chorus of Antioch Baptist Church.
Lucinda Todd — one of the 13 plaintiffs in the original suit, who helped bring the NAACP into the local case — said she was overjoyed. Ending segregation in practice might take a long time, she acknowledged, but she was grateful to have come this far: the ruling that segregation was illegal meant a great deal, whatever machinery would now be needed to carry it out.
Sources
Based on "The Day After Brown," National Park Service, Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, drawing on the Topeka State Journal (1954); a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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