Why Brown v. Board Is a Landmark: Remarks by the Park’s Superintendent

Dr. Jim Williams, superintendent of Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park since 2022, is sometimes asked to speak at events tied to the park. He has shared two of his 2024 speeches.

A naturalization ceremony at Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park. Image from the National Park Service's page of the superintendent's public remarks.

Welcoming new citizens — Topeka, June 27, 2024

At a naturalization ceremony held at the park in Topeka, Kansas, Williams welcomed the new Americans on behalf of the Park Service, which loves hosting such ceremonies across its 429 units, from the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico to Maine, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa.

• The Park Service planned to host at least 250 ceremonies the next year — one for each year of the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026, which Congress charged the agency with helping to commemorate. They would take place not only at icons such as the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore and Women's Rights National Historical Park, but also at natural parks like Glacier, Yellowstone and Saguaro.
• National parks have been called one of America's great ideas; Yellowstone was the world's first. The Park Service has sister parks in countries from Kenya and Mongolia to France, Chile and Australia, and 19 of its units are UNESCO World Heritage sites.
• What makes him proudest, he said, is that the Park Service tells all of America's stories, not just the happy ones — Japanese American incarceration, enslaved people, factory workers, women, Hispanic Americans. The Topeka park, created by Congress in 1992, commemorates the Supreme Court's reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended citizenship to African Americans and guarantees everyone due process and equal protection. The struggle for education equity is far from over.
• The park and 12 other civil rights sites — from Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham and Atlanta to Washington, D.C. — were to be proposed for the World Heritage list, an acknowledgment that American history hasn't always been pretty but that the nation is stronger when it welcomes immigrants as full citizens. He invited the new citizens to join the national conversation about citizens' rights.

Monument on the grounds of Legislative Hall in Dover, Delaware, explaining the role of the Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart cases in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The state dedicated the monument on the seventieth anniversary of the decision in 2024. NPS photo by James H. Wil.

"The Significance of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" — Dover, Delaware, May 16, 2024

At the unveiling of a Brown v. Board monument at Legislative Hall in Dover — dedicated on the decision's 70th anniversary and explaining the role of Delaware's Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart cases — Williams asked why the decision is so often called a "landmark."

• Historians and legal scholars often call Brown the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century. At its 50th anniversary, President Bill Clinton compared it to the first shots of the Revolution: if Lexington and Concord signaled America's declaration of independence, Brown embodied its "declaration of interdependence," a turning point when the nation first knew it had to try to become one.
• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed that, despite Southern defiance, the world saw the Court leading the pursuit of equal justice — and that Brown shaped her own women's rights litigation in the 1970s. Courts in Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and India have cited it on education and equal access.
• In 1992, Congress created the Topeka site to interpret the places behind the decision that, in the law's words, "brought an end to segregation in public education." A later law signed by President Biden added a site in South Carolina and affiliated areas in Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C., to honor stories of struggle, perseverance and activism for education equity.

A contested landmark

Landmarks are contested, Williams noted — Mount Rushmore is inspiring to some Americans and a scar on an ancestral landscape to others. And Congress got ahead of itself in 1992: by some measures, U.S. schools are more segregated today than in 1954. Civil rights attorney Jack Greenberg had said in 2004 that the glass was empty in 1954 and might be full in another fifty years.

The Legal Defense Fund and others now fear for Brown's future. The year before, the Supreme Court's affirmative action decisions in higher education debated Brown in five of six opinions:

• the majority read Brown to mean a student must be treated as an individual, "not on the basis of race";
• a concurrence held that the claimed benefits of diversity "cannot justify racial discrimination today";
• in dissent, Justice Sotomayor called the majority's reading "revisionist history."

The Park Service will keep preserving the places tied to Brown, including Howard High School, Hockessin Colored School #107 and Claymont Community Center in Delaware. As a historian, Williams said, he can't predict whether the glass of education equity is fuller than twenty years ago — but if wrongs remain, someone should be working to right them.

Sources

Based on "Public Remarks about Brown v. Board of Education NHP," by Superintendent James H. Williams, Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.