Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 45-61.
Abstract
On an early spring day in the city of Topeka, Kansas, a father walked his child to their neighborhood school. His child was refused admission and was instructed to attend one reserved for "colored children." The parent filed a lawsuit and sued the Topeka Board of Education, demanding that his child be received and instructed at that school, regardless of race. The case went to the Kansas State Supreme Court where it became a precedent for maintaining school segregation in Topeka and other cities in Kansas. The year was 1902. Despite its outcome, this lawsuit illustrates the local-level issues and distinctive color-line practices that characterized challenges to segregation in Topeka before the civil rights movement. Like the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka some fifty years later, the issues in the 1902 Reynolds v. Board of Education grew out of efforts by the local board of education to maintain school segregation against challenges from African Americans dissatisfied with the status quo. The ongoing legal battles in Topeka revolved around segregation contingencies not addressed in the Kansas state constitution written in 1861. Confrontations over maintaining the color line erupted as public schools began to develop junior high schools separate from elementary schools (which were covered under segregation statutes) and high schools (which were exempt).1 Challenges to the color line also occurred as the city limits of Topeka expanded to incorporate rural communities in outlying areas that had already established their own informal, yet distinctive, patterns of integration and segregation. Each annexation created new fault lines along the color line as its practices were renegotiated as part of the confrontations between real estate developers, city government officials, the board of education, and parents of school-age children.
The important role that the community of Topeka played in the events that eventually led up to the famous 1954 Supreme Court case has been underemphasized. This lack of interest might be related to the fact that Topeka, Kansas, was not located in the deep South and did not have the same history of violence in race relations as, for instance, a place like Birmingham, Alabama. There were no spectacular events such as bombings, race riots, mass marches, or boycotts that characterized the mass mobilizations in the South. Little acknowledgment has been given to Topeka's own unique history of race relations and the fact that its subsequent type of resistance to segregation is related to that history.
HISTORICAL LEGACY OF RACE RELATIONS
Kansas's distinctive color-line practices regarding public education are illustrated by the shift back and forth between integration and segregation in school legislation. Instead of mandating a uniform system of segregated schools, the original constitution left that determination up to local school districts and local custom. This allowed a small window of opportunity for African Americans to establish some legal basis from which to challenge the constitutionality of segregated schools in their own communities. It also gave them the right to appeal to the local board of education to review its policy of segregation if the policy did not conform to state statutes. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Topeka did this in 1948, before pursuing the actions that resulted in the Brown case. Challenges to school segregation resulted in modifications to the school segregation laws in 1867 and 1879.2
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln