Day 76, Saturday, September 29, 2018
Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, Topeka, Kansas
After staying a night at a KOA in Topeka, Kansas (nice place), I took the opportunity to visit the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in Topeka, Kansas. This was one of the pivotal sites in the Civil Rights Movement!
The Monroe Elementary School had a long history even before the Brown legal case. John Ritchie, an abolitionist, bought a 160 acre plot of land in 1855 and after the Civil War, a number of black families built homes on this land. Due to the large size of the black community here, the local school board decided to set up a school here for the black children in the neighborhood. The current Monroe Elementary School is the third school on the site; it was built in 1926 and operated as a school until 1975.
So, back to Brown v. Board of Education. You have heard of this landmark case I’m sure, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, ruling that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. And this, I agree, is true. But how did they know? It’s interesting, because social scientists helped to answer this question. They had done research with black children, showing them white and black dolls and asking the children which dolls were good and which dolls were bad. The black children overwhelmingly said that the white dolls were good and felt that they were most similar to, and preferred, the white dolls. Evidence was presented during the case to show that this impact of segregation would follow the children for the remainder of their lives. More recently, implicit bias studies performed at Harvard have shown similar results.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. At least at Monroe Elementary, a segregated school wasn’t necessarily a bad school. Black teachers sat on the committees to select books for the school district, so books were the same at all of the schools in Topeka. Teachers at Monroe were highly educated. Teachers and parents alike worried (rightfully so) that black teachers would be unable to find jobs at the desegregated schools. However, the research showed that even at good segregated schools, the segregation itself would leave black students with a lasting feeling of inferiority.
Monroe Elementary School had a self-guided tour and the exhibits were interesting. I spent about an hour reading the information and exploring the rooms of the school, which was in good shape for a school that was almost a hundred years old. One of the dolls from the experiments was on display, along with a detailed timeline of the case, as well as timeline of this history of African Americans in the United States, from the time they were first brought to the colonies on slave ships.
It was certainly worth a visit to this important site in our nation’s history!
As I made my way west, I made a couple of brief stops at historic buildings.
The historic Ritchie House, built in 1856, was the home of John Ritchie, the abolitionist who bought the land where the community and Monroe Elementary were built. It is open to the public a few days a week, but it was closed when I stopped by.
And the historic Hinerville School was a cute stone one-room schoolhouse, built in 1898, in Alma, Kansas. Both places were neat to see!