Topeka 50 years later: the real story behind the Brown in Brown v. Board

Ebony, May, 2004 by Kevin Chappell

Et. al. For half a century, two tiny Latin words have haunted those closest to the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, starting out as a whisper before reverberating throughout the Kansas capital in much the same way as the Supreme Court's emphatic denunciation of segregation echoed throughout the country in 1954.

For fifty May seventeenths, ever since the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision 50 years ago this month, people in Topeka and other cities across the country have told the legendary story of how Oliver L. Brown, a welder for the Santa Fe Railroad, took on the Topeka Board of Education simply because he wanted his daughter to attend a nearby school designated as White-only instead of being bused across town to an all-Black school. And when he didn't get the remedy he sought there, he took his fight--according to tradition--all the way to the Supreme Court.

But is this what really happened?

Spend a little time in Topeka talking at length to locals who either witnessed the history made there or who had family members who did--and you still may not come away with the complete story.

Take a walk down the streets of the working-class town, down Kansas Avenue to 1st Street, which served once as one of the bus stops where Black children began their journey each morning to one of four segregated schools--and you still may not come away with an unequivocal answer to these questions.

Keep walking four blocks to Kansas and 5th Street, where the two-story charcoal-colored courthouse (now a post office) still stands more than five decades after the district court upheld legal desegregation in the first Brown trial, and you will find additional answers and questions about the man who gave his name to a legal decision that turned Topeka and America upside down.

So who was Oliver L. Brown? Why was he listed first on the petition that made it all the way from the halls of Monroe Elementary School to the Supreme Court and the annals of history? And why has Brown become a household word and a cause and a hope?

Some say that the case was named for Brown because his name was first alphabetically. But that can't be true, for there was another plaintiff, Darlene Brown (no relation to Oliver), whose name preceded his alphabetically.

There are other reasons, some more or less plausible, but the real reason is almost certainly that Oliver L. Brown was selected because the lawyers and tacticians decided in the beginning that his name at the head of the list would help the case more than the name of any other plaintiff. They made that decision either because Brown was the only male on the list, or because he was a hardworking male and father, or because he was a moderate who had never been in the forefront of militant agitation, or because of all of the above.

But while the real story may never be known, partly because most of the participants, including Brown, died without giving a detailed account, a growing body of evidence indicates that the case was more complex than is generally thought.

Ironically, and significantly, the Brown family, led by his widow, Leola Brown, and his daughters, Linda Brown, Cheryl Brown Henderson, and Terry Brown Tyler, are leading the effort to tell the whole Brown story and to give credit to all the participants. Linda Brown, who was 7 years old when her father went to court on her behalf, is now 61. Her older sister Cheryl Brown Henderson, a former school administrator, is founder of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equality, Excellence and Research. It is largely because of the oral histories of Brown survivors and others that a complete and accurate picture is emerging of the case.

"Initially," Leola Brown says, "[Brown] didn't want to be a part of the case. After all, all of the other plaintiffs were women. But after a while he agreed. He said that after all, these are our children. So he would do what he could."

Brown filed the suit on behalf of his daughter, Linda Brown, a student at the segregated Monroe Elementary School, who recalls today how her father worked long hours so that she could have a normal childhood. Everything in her life was normal, she says, except her schooling. "We lived in an integrated community," she says. "I had playmates of all nationalities. But when school started I would go one way and they would go another ... Being that young, I didn't comprehend skin color."

By all accounts Oliver Brown was an extraordinary man. But by all accounts, he was only one of a long list of petitioners and organizers and heroes. It is too frequently forgotten today that the full name of the case is Oliver L. Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. Oliver Brown was a part of the et al--"and others"--one of nearly 200 plaintiffs in five states, a group of common folks with a common purpose, all working to change a system that had been in place since the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision established separate but equal as constitutional.

The list of heroes and martyrs is long and illustrious and could start with McKinley Burnett--the president of the Topeka chapter of the NAACP--a man who made it his life's mission to destroy the Jim Crow system. Burnett and other NAACP leaders would sit into the early morning hours, waiting for their chance to voice their objections to the city's school segregation. White board members would often joke that they wished Burnett and the others would grow tired and leave. One board member even challenged Burnett, who taught Sunday school at the Lane Street Church of God, to a fight. Instead of a physical fight, they got a court fight. It was Burnett who, in the summer of 1950, recruited parents to serve as plaintiffs in a suit against the school board.