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Kansas has a mixed record on race relations.
As you probably all know, Kansas has this reputation as the "Free State", which goes back to the 1850s, during the territorial period.
This was a site where pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces were duking it out,
as to whether Kansas would come into the Union as a Free state or a Slave state.
As Jay was mentioning earlier, places like Lawrence and Topeka were started primarily by Abolitionists,
for the express purpose of bringing Kansas in as a Free state.
It's during that time in the 1850s, where Kansas gets this reputation, because of people like John Brown,
as a place that is safe and welcoming for African-Americans.
If you go to Lawrence, the Free State Brewery, they built a whole mythos around this notion.
Part of the reason for that is what inspires a movement by African-Americans in the 1870s to come here.
In 1878 and '79, you have a movement of 26,000 Blacks out of the South, coming to Kansas,
expressly because of this reputation as a sanctuary away from racism.
That's the positive side. The negative side is that Kansas hasn't always lived up to that reputation.
Something that we're discovering about the Free State Movement is while it was anti-slavery, but it wasn't exactly pro-Black.
In 1860, when the Wyandotte Constitution was written in Wyandotte County, one of the goals there was to bring Kansas in as a Free State,
but there was also a provision in that document to exclude free Black people from living here.
So, just because you were Abolitionist, just because you were anti-slavery,
didn't necessarily mean you wanted Blacks and Whites living here, side-by-side.
Kansas reluctantly supported the 15th Amendment, which granted the right to vote to Black men.
The exodus movement that I mentioned earlier in the late 1870s, partly as a consequence of 26,000 refugees from the South arriving here,
is that Kansas established its first segregation laws.
Segregation in Kansas was not the way you saw segregation practiced in the South.
Kansas had a bit of a decentralized system, in that the State government did not legally mandate segregation,
but it allowed for local communities to do so, at the local level.
So you did have segregation practiced in towns like Topeka, Leavenworth,
and Kansas City, Kansas, where much of the Black population lived.
You did have segregation that applied in theaters, restaurants, and public facilities.
But particularly, you saw it applied in school districts.
Kansas divided communities into First Class and Second Class cities.
So, a Second Class city was any thing that was above 15,000 people.
Not coincidentally, that's where 98% of all African Americans in Kansas lived.
We're going to talk a little bit on Wednesday about blacks in Western Kansas, who lived in small, rural communities like Nicodemus.
But, most of the Black population lived here in the northeastern part of the state,
so that means communites like Topeka did allow for segregation to be practiced at the local level.
Segregation was practiced in Topeka until 1955.
You have a strong Black middle class in Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City.
By the Mid-20th century, there were strong Black organizations like the NAACP,
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was particularly strong here in Topeka.
This whole area around the Capitol was the Black neighborhood.
Topeka was not like a ghetto, like you would in in a place like Saint Louis or Chicago.
This was mostly a middle class Black community. They had their own newspapers, doctors and lawyers.
So, it was a strong, vibrant African-American community.
You had Black children coming to this place, Monroe Elementary, where they were taught by Black teachers.
One of the myths about the Brown case that's been perpetuated by the media
is you've got this little girl named Linda Brown, who had to walk far, far away from here home across the dangerous railroad tracks
to go to the Black school, far away from where she lived, when there was a perfectly good White school nearby.
That's the aura, the reputation associated with the Brown case.
Linda Brown was about 11 years old when the case began. This was not something that was begun, spontaneously .
Her father, Oliver Brown, was a local minister, but he was also active in the local branch of the NAACP.
So, this was really a community effort, as were all of these kinds of cases.
It was not some spontaneous thing, like Rosa Parks refusing to relinquish her seat. All of these were highly orchestrated affairs.
As you know, any case that starts at the local level and goes to the United States Supreme Court takes years.
So, by the time this case actually got to the Court in 1954, Linda Brown was in High School.
She'd' get married a few years later, and started to have children.
So really, this was never about her. This was really a test against school segregation.
One of the reasons why the case was named "Brown" is for the name Oliver Brown,
but the Brown case that goes to Washington D.C. is a consolidation of six different cases that are mostly located in Southern states.
It's named "Brown", partly because Oliver Brown's name was the first alphabetically of all the different plaintiffs.
Also, though this is not corroborated by evidence, though I've heard this anecdotally from local people involved in the case,
that they wanted Kansas' name to be on the the Supreme Court decision,
because nobody would expect segregation could happen in a place like Kansas.
Nationally, most people were unaware that segregation existed outside the South.
and they certainly didn't think it would exist in a Midwestern State, with Kansas' reputation.
At any rate, the case goes to the United States Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs' lawyer is Thurgood Marshall, who later goes on to become a Supreme Court Justice, himself, and the first Black justice.
What they present at the hearing is very overwhelming.
Basically, the Earl Warren court overturns the earlier, 1896 decision, Plessy v. Ferguson,
which did make segregation in public schools legal.
I won't go into too much of the details of the case, itself. They do that here, very well.
Something to consider: when you're going inside to see some of these monuments to the Civil Rights movement,
there were many African Americans in Topeka that weren't too happy with the Court's dicision.
Because, a few years later, the Brown Elementary School would be closed.
In fact, this is what happened to all of the Black schools that were affected, locally.
When Topeka does desegregate its public schools, White and Black kids start going to the same classes and have the same teachers,
What do the White parents do? "We don't want our kids being taught by Black teachers."
Consequently, the Black teachers who worked in places like this were terminated, lost their jobs,
and it was actually seen as a blow to the Black community.
Studies show that the Black community is economically worse off today than it was in 1954,
and that's true for a lot of the Black areas around the country.
If you think about it, segregation had its moral problems, but it kept that money,
it kept that professional class there in the Black community.
In the 1960s, as segregation ended, and the black doctors, lawyers and newspaper publishers move out to the suburbs,
to places like Johnson County, what they left behind them was a group that was much poorer, what sociologists call the "underclass".