Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in Topeka, Kansas preserves Monroe Elementary School, the school most closely tied to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision. The site grew from land bought in 1855 by abolitionist John Ritchie in an area that later became a neighborhood for newly freed African Americans, where Topeka established a school for Black children. The present building, completed in 1926, was one of the city’s four segregated elementary schools for African American students. Its central importance was that Brown challenged segregation itself, leading to the Court’s unanimous ruling that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal under the Fourteenth Amendment.

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Topeka, Kansas · USA