The Lincoln School stood on this site from 1869 to 1956 as a segregated elementary school for Hillsboro's African American students in grades one through eight. Hillsboro became the site of the first Northern desegregation suit following the May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which abolished the nation's long standing separate but equal doctrine. After a two-year legal struggle led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a group of parents, and assisted by Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Supreme Court Justice, the Hillsboro school system was desegregated in 1956. The lawsuit hastened integration in other parts of Ohio and the North because of national media coverage.