Monroe School, Topeka, KS
Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Site
Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race …
deprive children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?
We believe it does … We conclude, that in the field of public education
the doctrine of ‘Separate but Equal’ has no place.
Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka
I’m having a difficult time figuring out how to describe yesterday’s trip to the Brown vs. Board of Education National Historical Site. We only had about 1 ½ hours to go through the museum because we had to check out of our hotel by 11 a.m. and we left the Evil Kitten in air conditioned comfort. The Coach and I were the first people in the parking lot – so early, in fact, that we actually got to watch the park ranger raise the flag. Sadly, we weren’t the first people into the museum because we were busy taking pictures of the outside of Monroe School.
The museum itself was interesting. You walk in the front doors and it still looks like an elementary school, with the exception of the directional signs hanging from the ceiling. The water fountains are still at knee height (there’s a hysterical pix of the Coach trying to drink out of the fountain in my Flickr account). We wandered into the first gallery which talked about the five different desegregation cases: Belton vs. Gebhart, Briggs vs. Elliott, Davis vs. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Bolling vs. Sharp, and Brown vs. Board of Education. The whole gallery was rather loud; at first I found that annoying, until I wandered through this little hallway where video clips were playing on both walls. George Wallace screaming about integration, mothers who looked like they should be on the Jerry Springer show, and more. The racket made sense – after all, isn’t how it would have sounded to a child trying to walk through a crowd of racists as she integrated a school?
The other gallery provided a civil rights timeline that included, among other things:
- The fact that Alabama outlawed the NAACP in 1956;
- The rise of Condi Rice and Colin Powell to the president’s inner circle;
- The death of Matthew Sheppard.
The gallery went on to discuss the pursuit of equal rights for other minorities, for the disabled, and for homosexuals. It also included a temporary exhibit about the two court cases from Louisville and Seattle that the Supreme Court just ruled upon. Hey, at least the NPS is more on the ball than the folks who run the Eisenhower Museum!
We were able to see all of the galleries and two (out of 5) short films in the time we had allotted for the visit. I even hit the gift shop before we left. Of course, once we got back to the hotel room, we had a real trauma: the key didn’t work and the cat was sitting in the window screeching at me. Oh well, that was easily solved — a new keycard from the front desk and we were in business. The Coach packed the car, I caught the Evil Kitten, and we hit the road for Council Grove.
