TOPEKA, Kan. — The lesson on diversity began slowly in a first-grade classroom in Topeka, where schools were at the center of the cause to overturn segregated education.
“I like broccoli. Do you like broccoli?” Marie Carter, a librarian at a black school, asked broccoli-hating librarian Amy Gugelman, who is white.
The students in the sunny, book-filled room compared what makes them the same and what makes them different. It’s part of their introduction to Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling commemorated on a national historic site in a former all-black school down the street. Linda Brown, whose father Oliver Brown was the lead prosecutor in the case, was a student there after she was denied admission to an all-white school near her home.
Within a few questions, Williams Science first-graders & The Fine Arts Magnet school saw the two women holding their arms together. “My skin is tan,” Carter noted, “and Mrs. Gugelman’s skin is not.”
And then Gugelman got to the heart of the lesson. “Can we stay friends?”
The students, themselves from different ethnicities, shouted “yes!” unaware of the messiness of the issue, of the history of this place, of the struggle with race and equality that continues even now.
Seventy years after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling, segregation continues, not as a legal issue, but as a reflection of underlying inequities, including in housing. In Greater Topeka, as in school systems across America, students of color are concentrated in districts that disproportionately serve low-income families. That racial isolation has lasting consequences, because students who attend high-poverty schools have lower graduation rates and less earning potential.
Through school lessons, commemorations and ceremonies, Topeka underlines its ties to the 1954 ruling that exalted “separate but equal.” But just as clear to many is the legacy of discrimination that stands in the way of the promise of equality.
MaKenzie Johnstone, who is white, enrolled two years ago at Williams, one of the magnet schools built to attract white students to historically black neighborhoods. In her old neighborhood, Auburn-Washburn, which is 72% white, the 11-year-old said she rarely encountered people of color.
Now her best friend, 10-year-old Malaya Webster, is black. The fifth graders spend recess together, chatting incessantly. Sometimes the subject wanders to what happened down the street.
“White people,” Malaya explained, “couldn’t stand next to black people, which is pretty bad because we should all be treated the same.”
MaKenzie was furious and said, “It didn’t make any sense at all.” She described the desegregation case as a piece of distant history – something that happened “back in time.”
That’s not the case for Tiffany Anderson, Topeka’s first black female superintendent.
“When you’re here in this magnet school environment, you see an array of diversity. But if you drive 20 minutes down the road,” she said, “you may not see any diversity in the student population or the staff population.”
In Topeka, like much of the rest of the country, court-ordered desegregations have ended, but racial imbalances persist. Today, 36% of students in the Topeka district are white, up from 72% in 1987. The changes coincide with the nation becoming increasingly diverse. Yet none of Topeka’s neighboring districts have a white enrollment below 64%; one district has a white enrollment of 94%.
The concentration of students of color in districts with higher numbers of poor students partly reflects the historical shift and that poorer families couldn’t afford to move to suburban districts with more expensive homes, said Frank Henderson, who has served on the state and national school board. associations.
Four years ago, the largely white suburb of Seaman, north of Topeka, where Henderson was the first black school board member, was forced to confront the dark aspects of its past.
In 2020, student journalists confirmed that the district’s namesake, Fred Seaman, was a regional leader of the Ku Klux Klan a century ago. After student protests, rallies and surveys, the school board voted unanimously to abandon Seaman and his KKK activities but keep the name.
The vote followed an election in which two name-retention candidates defeated incumbents. Critical race theory was in the news nationally.
“I felt like this was probably the best thing that could be done to address this current issue,” said Henderson, whose 16½-year term on the board ended in January.
Madeline Gearhart, co-editor of the high school newspaper, was disappointed. But now she thinks the student journalists who broke the story laid the groundwork for an issue that could come up later in a district that is 80% white.
“I just find it so ironic that in a world where Topeka was part of Brown v. Board, we still keep the district’s namesake and don’t try to distance ourselves,” said Gearhart, who is white and now a junior at the University of Kansas.
“I would say,” she added, “it speaks to the larger implications of the way Topeka is divided.”
Seven years after the landmark ruling, Beryl New attended the all-black school, Monroe Elementary, where Linda Brown and another of the plaintiff’s children were students. The country was still largely segregated, not by district policy, but by redlining.
Her family was friends with the president of the Topeka chapter of the NAACP, who recruited the 13 families who sued the Topeka district. Their case was eventually joined by school desegregation cases from Virginia, South Carolina, and Delaware. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in the case bearing Oliver Brown’s name. A similar case from Washington DC was decided at the same time in a separate ruling.
The ruling embarrassed city leaders who believed they had built fair schools for white and black students, said New, who serves on the African Affairs Commission for Kansas and is a former principal and district administrator.
“But of course there were issues that went deeper than just what a building looks like,” she said.
Vicki Lawton Benson, 78, whose mother, Maude Lawton, was among the Topeka plaintiffs, said she didn’t learn about her mother’s involvement until high school. Her parents, she said, protected the family from the ugliness around them.
“I love having strength of character, building a legacy and wanting to be an integral part of changing history for the better for all humanity,” she said.
For New, the mission now is to diversify the district’s workforce. In the aftermath of Brown, tens of thousands of black teachers lost their jobs in newly integrated classrooms, and the consequences are clearly visible today.
Nationally, only about 45% of students in public schools are now white, but about 80% of teachers are, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“You hear all the wonderful things about Brown v. Board,” said Anderson, the Topeka school superintendent. “But the reality is that many African American teachers have lost their jobs.”
Her district hands out token teaching contracts to high school students and promises to hire them when they graduate. And to remove roadblocks for Black assistants who want to become full-fledged teachers, their salaries are sometimes paid while their students are teaching.
That’s what allowed teacher Jolene Tyree, who is black, to complete her degree. The longtime assistant hopes that having someone who looks like them makes a difference for her students. Growing up, she remembers having very few black teachers herself.
“You just kind of feel on the outside,” said Tyree, whose mother also attended Monroe and whose first-graders are now learning about the desegregation case.
Back at the library, Tyree’s students’ lesson was coming to an end. Anderson, the superintendent, walked to the front of the room and asked the children if they ever wanted to be a teacher, a doctor, or even the president of the United States.
Hands shot into the air. Anderson said many of the kids wouldn’t have done this in the past because they hadn’t seen anyone who looked like them in those roles.
“So, boys and girls,” Anderson said, “as I look out at the sea of differences that make you all special… let me remind you: Do differences really matter?”
The children shouted “no” before trickling out of the room.
Seven-year-old Jamari Lyons was left behind.
“It’s okay to be white. And it’s okay to be black. You can still be friends. You can still be neighbors. You can still love each other,” Jamari said, spreading his arms wide.
Then he asked, “Right?”
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