Since the beginning of the public school system, many states legally denied African American school children access to public schools on the basis of race. African Americans challenged this forced segregation. In 1849, African Americans in Boston filed a lawsuit against mandated separate schools. African Americans financed and built their own schools. In some states, such as Kansas, public funds paid for the building of separate schools for blacks and whites. Black children often faced a long commute to their segregated schools. Some black schools had no desks, no indoor plumbing and were built from tar paper. Black schools had fewer books and black teachers were paid less than their white counterparts African Americans used the courts to fight racial segregation in public schools for 105 years. Five court challenges from the late 1940s to early 1950s would finally end this institutionalized racism.

When McKinley Burnett, President of the Topeka National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, could not convince the local Board to integrate their schools he set out to organize a law suit to challenge this policy of racial segregation. The NAACP was looking for multiple plaintiffs and successfully recruited 13 families with school-aged children. NAACP secretary, Lucinda Todd, was the first to step forward and was later joined by others including Oliver Brown who would later be assigned as lead plaintiff. In the fall of 1950 these parents were instructed to attempt to enroll their children in white elementary schools and when turned away the NAACP would be able tell the court that these parents had been denied the right to enroll their children in public school, for no other reason then their race.

The Kansas case went all the way to the Supreme Court where it was combined with other NAACP legal challenges to school segregation in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia and the District of Columbia. In all, nearly 200 plaintiffs were represented. 

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation of public schools violated the14th Amendment. Separate but equal was not equal as the Supreme Court had ruled in 1896 in a case known as Plessy v. Ferguson. This ruling ended the doctrine of “separate but equal” that had stood for 58 years. 

This landmark decision combined the legal challenges in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and the District of Columbia under the heading Oliver Brown et.al. versus the Board of Education of Topeka. 

Some opponents of the decision issued a Southern Manifesto and implemented strategies for non-compliance. The Courts followed with their 1955 Brown II decision calling for integration "with all deliberate speed."


For more information, contact:
Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence, and Research
PO Box 4862
Topeka, KS 66604
Phone: 785-235-3939
Fax: 785-235-1001
Email Brown Foundation
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