Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is widely known as the Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools to be "inherently unequal.

A thirty year old white Jewish woman who was upset that the local black students were stuck with a dilapitated school while the whites got a brand new one.
Eventually, Esther's empathy would cause her to push the state's NAACP chapter to launch a campaign to end segregation in Kansas schools--a campaign that would lead to victory on May 17, 1954 when a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Topeka Board of Education's policy of segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution

Eventually, Esther's empathy would cause her to push the state's NAACP chapter to launch a campaign to end segregation in Kansas schools--a campaign that would lead to victory on May 17, 1954 when a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Topeka Board of Education's policy of segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. In 1876, Kansas required that all of its public schools be open to all students, regardless of their race.

Just three years later, however, the legislature backed away from its enlightened approach to racial issues, and authorized school boards in cities of over 15,000 persons to establish separate black and white schools for elementary and junior high students.

Topeka exercised its option to segregate its elementary schools, and the Topeka School Board's policy of segregation was upheld by the Kansas Supreme Court in 1903, seven years after the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the principle of "separate but equal" in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. It would be more than four decades before another challenge to segregation in Topeka's elementary schools would be mounted.

At the end of World War II, Topeka was a Jim Crow city in some respects, but not in others.