The former Monroe Elementary School in Topeka was attended by six students whose parents joined the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit in 1949, and on May 17, 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled that in education separate facilities are inherently unequal, a breakthrough in the nation’s struggle to provide equality of opportunity. Thurgood Marshall led the legal team seeking to end legalized racial segregation, focusing on public education and combining five class action lawsuits from four states and the District of Columbia for argument before the US Supreme Court, with Topeka attorney Charles Scott among those involved. The surrounding community also reflects a longer history of freedom struggles: African American families began settling in Ritchie’s Addition after the Civil War ended in 1865, with a large surge in 1879 as people fled oppression in the South after Reconstruction in search of new freedoms and opportunities on land opened by John and Mary Ritchie, white abolitionists and former Underground Railroad activists who supported a vision of blacks and whites living together. Brown v. Board of Education was first argued in 1951 in a third-floor courtroom in Topeka’s federal building, and Kansas’s march to free statehood had begun earlier in October 1855 with the drafting of the antislavery Topeka Constitution in Constitution Hall.
