What you forget--at least I did--is that there was Supreme Court precedent as late as the 1950s.
Way back in 1894, in New Orleans, a man named Homer Plessy took a seat on a railroad car that was, officially, off limits to him, Homer Plessy being--you guessed it-- a person of color. When Homer lost, he not only got kicked out of the precious whites-only seat, his case also set up a long and bitterly hated argument for "separate but equal" legislation, which meant, among other things, that there would be, down South especially, but not just there, separate schools for African Americans. Separate water fountains, separate movie theaters, separate coffee shops, separate just about everything. The law ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that "separate but equal" was a wholesome way of dealing with questions of racial equality.
That's how things stood, from 1896. The lay of the land for fifty years was “separate but equal.”
Monroe School, Topeka, Kansas, looks just about like any other school would of its vintage (1950s).
We stopped by a couple of years ago, and the docent we met at the door began by showing us photos of two schools that looked just about the same--one officially designated “African-American,” he said, the other designated "white."
"Separate but equal, right?" he asked.
It was the kind of quizzing I hadn't signed up for, so I just shook my head.
"That's right," he said. "There's no such thing."
And there came a man right from the neighborhood of the very school his daughter wanted to attend. This man, named Rev. Oliver Brown, interested in cause of civil rights but no radical, no activist, simply got mad when it became apparent that his fourth-grade daughter, who wanted to go to summer school, couldn't go just a block away but had to go here, Monroe, because Monroe was the "colored" school. She had to be bussed to the “colored” school.
The Rev. Mr. Brown didn't shoulder the burden of legal proceedings alone. Right beside him was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and, arguing his cause and a handful others before the Supreme Court was a cast of first-rate civil rights lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, who would soon after be a member of the United States Supreme Court.
The Reverend Oliver Brown was a welder and part-time preacher, and not only changed the way the nation's school teach history, but reshaped the entire face of a nation.
Iowa outlawed separation of the races in the 1850s.
Does that mean there was no segregation here? No, ma'am and no sir. You might want to check to see how many communities had "sunset laws" that outlawed people of color from staying overnight--Council Bluffs, Cherokee, Spirit Lake, and Spencer, just to name a few.
Today, Oliver Brown's name is linked with a fulsome number of civil rights heroes. Just stop sometime at Monroe School in Topeka--the history is so real you can feel it.
Brown vs. Board of Education. Topeka, Kansas. Honestly, worth a trip, worth never, ever forgetting.
