– Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting opinion in Milliken v. Bradley, July 25, 1974

This year, Americans marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended legal segregation of public schools. It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most famous rulings and certainly its best-known education-related case. In many ways, though, Milliken v. Bradley — decided 50 years ago, in July 1974 — has more to teach about the current state of American education and what it would take to truly realize Brown’s promise of integrated schools and equal educational opportunity for all.

If Brown was the green light for school integration in America, Milliken — which addressed the question of whether the federal courts could require regional integration plans across district lines — became something of a flashing red. In overruling the cross-district remedies that lower courts deemed essential for true integration in metropolitan Detroit, the Supreme Court significantly limited the ability of the federal courts to order predominantly white suburban districts to integrate with predominantly black urban ones.

As Marshall sadly predicted, schools today are than they were when he wrote his dissent, with most of that segregation occurring between school districts rather than within them. Indeed, a whopping of the intense school segregation in the Detroit area stems from demographic differences between neighboring or nearby districts — a direct legacy of Milliken.

But the decision did not prevent states from adjusting district lines or taking other steps to promote cross-district integration. That’s exactly what they should do now.

The organization I co-founded, Brown’s Promise, has developed laying out concrete strategies for state leaders, advocates, policymakers and practitioners. States could, for example, transform school funding formulas to allocate resources according to a school’s needs rather than local property values. Or they could create interdistrict transfer programs and public magnet schools, like those that have fostered diverse classrooms in Hartford, Connecticut. States could also require districts to create plans for promoting integrated, well-funded schools within districts and schools, and systematically track their progress toward meeting those goals.

Achieving this sort of state policy change should not require litigation, but history teaches that legal action is necessary for forcing integration in American schools. Several active lawsuits offer a promising roadmap. Students, families and organizations in Minnesota, New Jersey and New York have filed lawsuits arguing that their states have a duty under their state constitutions to address segregation in their public schools. In Minnesota, for example, the state Supreme Court’s most recent ruling in the ongoing Cruz-Guzman school desegregation case underscored the state’s responsibility to address educational inequalities caused by segregation without requiring proof that the state intentionally promoted it. In New Jersey, the Latino Action Network’s school desegregation lawsuit has , seeking remedies after a judge . And an appellate court recently for a suit challenging segregation in New York City public schools to proceed.

These legal challenges are complemented by growing momentum in research, advocacy and community organizing around the country. In New York, is turning to youth leaders to light the way toward integrated, equitable schools. Earlier this year, New America released an innovative, that allows educators, policymakers and advocates to explore how district lines separate students from resources, opportunity and each other. And leading researchers at Stanford and USC recently published eye-opening new about the state of segregation in American public schools.

That research paints a bleak picture of a public school system that has, for decades now, been trending back toward segregation. Indeed, as legal scholar Martha Minow has noted, “.” But that does not have to be the end of the story. A new generation of students, educators, advocates and judges now have the chance to author a new chapter.

In 1969, Debra Matthews was almost 9 years old and looking forward to fourth grade with her friends at Rowen Elementary when her mother told her she would be going to a different school five miles away from her West Oak Lane home.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Matthews recalled. Rowen had just built a brand new annex building that Matthews had been excited to explore. “I thought I would be going there. I was looking forward to that.”

Instead, until she graduated, Matthews, who is Black, rode a bus every morning, about a half hour each way, to predominantly white Northeast Philadelphia. First in a school bus to J. Hampton Moore elementary, then via SEPTA to Woodrow Wilson Junior High, now Castor Gardens Middle School, and then to Northeast High School.

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All in the name of school desegregation.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of what is perhaps the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed Jim Crow laws in 17 states that required Black and white children to be educated in separate schools.

As the nation commemorates Brown, Philadelphians are reflecting on their own long and complicated history with school segregation.

Philadelphia was a city where segregation was not de jure, or imposed not by the laws that Brown struck down, but instead de facto — the result of personal choices, such as where people choose to live, that led to massive white flight.

For some civil rights leaders of the time, Philadelphia was a perfect . While a federal case was never filed, the district experienced more than 40 years of litigation and oversight from the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission aimed at integrating schools. This resulted in generations of students like Matthews, almost all of them Black, bused to schools outside of their neighborhoods and decades of court pressure to implement other policies designed to end segregation.

But, today, the city’s students are still largely attending some of the most segregated and under resourced schools in the country. is 50% Black and 14% white, while the are nearly 40% Black and 34% white, reflecting a longstanding pattern of most white families attending private schools. Although the city is home to a few of the most racially-mixed schools in the state, found Philadelphia’s schools overall remain nearly as segregated as they were 30 years ago. White students are concentrated in a little over a dozen mostly special-admissions schools and comprise just a tiny percentage in the vast majority of neighborhood schools, the study found.

In the 70 years since Brown, “Segregation in the North has gotten worse, and the Philadelphia area is no exception to that,” said Michael Churchill of the Public Interest Law Center, a legal advocacy group.

Advocates like Churchill haven’t given up on desegregation as an ideal, but they have shifted focus to the new frontier in educational equity — school funding

“The schools that have the most minority children also have the least funding,” said Churchill, who has represented plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking fair and adequate school funding in Pennsylvania. “And as difficult as it may be to fix the physical segregation of students, there is absolutely no excuse why there should be such funding disparities.”

The Brown anniversary comes at a time when Pennsylvania’s governor and state legislature are grappling with reforming the state’s funding system in the wake of Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer’s February 2023 decision declaring it unconstitutional. She said Pennsylvania overly relies on property taxes to fund education, depriving students in poorer areas of a “thorough and efficient” education. And she , drawing on and testimony, that Black and Latino students are disproportionately located in districts with inadequate funding.

While Philadelphia is surrounded by overwhelmingly white, better-funded suburban districts, the lead plaintiff in the school funding case is the William Penn School district on the city’s southwest edge, itself an example of : after more Black families moved into the district, white families once again left, perpetuating the largely separate and unequal system. Property values went down, tax rates went up, and those who could afford to move did.

And that unequal system has been proven to , Hispanic students, and students from low-income backgrounds by and educating them in and often plagued with lead and , among other challenges.

“There is an anti-big city, anti-urban attitude,” said Roseann Liu, a visiting professor at Swarthmore College, at an event for her recently published book Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve,” which is a case study of the issue in Pennsylvania.

“What that really means is anti-Black. … I don’t think that state legislators are racists, but there is something to be said about people in power holding ideas about the value of different kinds of children.”

The history of desegregation efforts in Philadelphia

For decades until the 1970s, the school district clearly designed to segregate its schools.

In the early and mid-twentieth century as they built new schools to accommodate the city’s growing population – including many Black families moving from the South – officials drew school catchment area boundaries to segregate students as much as possible.

And well into the 1950′s, the district maintained segregated elementary schools to employ a growing cadre of Black teachers and principals. The white power structure of the day was steadfast in opposition to allowing Black teachers to teach white students and to having Black principals supervise white teachers.

While some practices had eased by then – there were a handful of Black teachers and principals in high schools – discrimination was still very much in evidence in 1970, when the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, which had begun monitoring city schools several years before, filed a complaint against the district. The commission, which at the time had the power to enforce anti-discrimination laws, wanted mandatory busing to remedy segregation.

School officials fought any effort to forcibly bus students out of their neighborhoods, especially white students, but they did agree to a voluntary plan in which students like Matthews took part. They also agreed, in the 1970s, to create several new, specialized schools such as George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science in the hopes of attracting a diverse student body.

When Constance Clayton became the city’s first Black (and first female) superintendent in 1982, she and her chief of staff, Penn law professor Ralph Smith, devised a more sweeping plan to satisfy the commission.

Clayton’s plan had two major components. One was to provide extra resources, including free extended day activities and art, music, and technology programming, to mostly Black schools in racially integrated areas as an incentive for white students to attend. Such a school was considered successfully desegregated if it reached 25% white population.

The second component was aimed at the significant number of neighborhood schools that remained virtually all-white, most in Northeast Philadelphia. Under this initiative, the district vastly expanded the voluntary busing program, with the goal of reaching 40% Black enrollment in as many of these schools as possible. Many more thousands of students than was the case in Matthews’ time were bused starting in the Clayton era.

While the voluntary busing did change the demographics of many schools, the commission, which continued to advocate for mandatory busing, took the district to court again in the 1990s. By that time, with more desegregation becoming virtually unattainable, the case evolved to focus on the adequacy and equity of funding.

Commonwealth Court Judge ordered the district to invest more resources in the district’s poorest, “racially-isolated” Black schools. But when she also ordered Harrisburg to send Philadelphia more money to help pay for this, the state Supreme Court summarily took her off the case and the state legislature largely ignored her directive.

Around that time, when Superintendent David Hornbeck called the state’s education funding system “racist,” Gov. Tom Ridge took umbrage at the comment, an incident that helped precipitate the state takeover of the Philadelphia school district in 2002. The state controlled the district until 2018, an era that saw the rise of charter schools as the primary reform effort to improve the education of low-income, Black, and Hispanic students.

The busing continued until 2009, when the district’s second Black superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, , citing the expense of busing and a waning commitment to desegregation itself for its own sake.

‘Integration 2.0′

As the nation reflects on the Brown anniversary, Philadelphia educators and policymakers have been pondering what next steps should be.

“The other legacy of Brown, is when desegregation did happen it was done at the expense of Black communities,” said Erica Frankenberg, who studies the subject at Pennsylvania State University. “It was done inequitably in that it made some communities question the importance of it.”

She said she has been “thinking about this idea of what would integration 2.0 look like, integration in a multi racial way, with equitable sharing who has to travel, making sure what is reflected in the curriculum and history classes, integrated teachers. All of that is done in some places, but it is not widespread.”

Sharif El-Mekki, a former school district and charter school principal who now runs the , said Brown was invaluable in that it invalidated what he described as an “apartheid” system. At the same time, he said, quoting activist Stokely Carmichael, it is not segregation per se, “but white supremacy we should be fighting against. What’s important is that we don’t have government-sanctioned forms of segregation.”

El-Mekki, who is working hard to recruit more Black teachers at a time when their attrition rate is greater than that for white teachers, said while the government and institutions should be vigilant about discrimination, they should also be doing more to support “all-Black spaces that are holistic and affirming.”

To mark the anniversary, Desireé Chang, the Director of Education and Outreach at the state Human Relations Commission that pursued the Philadelphia case for so long, said there is still work to be done.

“Students living in lower income communities are deprived of the same resources provided to students in higher income communities,” she said. “This underfunding has led to crowded classrooms, fewer teachers and outdated schools, textbooks, and an overall unequal education.”

In in Black community where Debra Matthews grew up, and still lives, and in others like it, there was long the assumption that schools with white students would be better than the one in the neighborhood. The students taking the opportunity to travel from Rowen to the Northeast filled the school bus.

Matthews, now 63, can’t say for sure how or whether she benefited from her experience traveling far from her home to attend school, having nothing to compare it to. She noted that at J. Hampton Moore, the building was more modern, the gym had more equipment, and the schoolyard was bigger than at Rowen. She recalls that she made new friends and enjoyed “a rainbow of classes.”

She remembers that at Rowen she had been on an accelerated track, whereas in her new school she was not. After her mother complained, however, she was switched.

And she recalls that when she arrived, as a nine-year-old, several of the girls in the class had letters from their parents saying that they were not to sit next to any Black students. And the teacher complied.

But, she said, over time, she made friends, even with some of the girls who had the letters. In an era when many students went home for lunch, something the bused-in students couldn’t do, she was invited to go home with a classmate.

“I did that one time, and I wasn’t impressed,” she said, laughing, recalling that the only difference between her Philadelphia rowhouse and theirs — down to the plastic covers on the furniture — was that her friend’s mother didn’t toast their bread.

“I thought I was going to see something with more splendor, grandeur. But they were just an average family. And I was missing pizza day.”

There were occasional conflicts and awkward incidents, but by fifth and sixth grade she and her girlfriends were sitting around together cutting out pictures from magazines of their favorite idols, which included both the Osmonds and the Jackson 5.

“We got along,” she said. “Sometimes, if adults just let children be children and stop trying to spread beliefs onto them, it will work out.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

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Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Piney Woods is a co-educational, Christian college preparatory high school. With over 2,000 acres of land, it has a 250-acre farm that its 100 students tend to daily while caring for the animals and learning about crops. Tuition is $45,000, though every current student receives at least some financial assistance. William Crossley, the school’s fifth president and the first to be an alumnus, spoke to �鶹��Ʒ’s Sierra Lyons about Piney Woods’s survival and its parallels to his personal education journey.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Before Brown v. Board of Education, there were about 100 Black boarding schools across the country. What does it mean to you to be leading one of the last four that remain?

It’s an interesting thing that many of these institutions have sort of gone by the wayside. But in our case, we recognize that the challenge [of] providing high-quality educational opportunity for young people, particularly low-income young people and people of color — that challenge still exists for us as a nation. 

Piney Woods has a 250-acre farm and over 1,000 acres of wildlife. What opportunities does the land allow for students to learn hands-on? What’s a typical student’s day like?

We say, “The campus is our classroom, the land is our lab.” Yesterday, we had students down on the farm caring for the animals. We’ve got eight horses, 60 to 65 head of cattle, roosters, chickens, goats, sheep and some farm dogs. There’s something about caring for animals, and there’s something about working with one’s hands, that connects to one’s brain.

We’re starting a farmer’s market here. The kids are helping to grow that, and we will teach them entrepreneurship. The kids have to sit down and do business and marketing plans. Those become part of how we decide what to sell in the market, which is on our campus. It’s not just for our young people, but it’s for our community, too. 

We do study things in the history books, but we also go to the site of Emmett Till’s death here in Mississippi. We go to the Civil Rights Museum here, and we go to the preserved slave cabins on plantation land in Natchez. We go to Memphis and we see the hotel where Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and we go to the founding site of this institution and see where Lawrence C. Jones was brave enough to find a way to start this enterprise, and we’re all here because of what he did. 

And so we literally live that history and we do it in science because we have five ponds on our campus. And so when we’re testing for bacteria, we’ll get the water out of the faucet, and then we’ll get the rainwater that made its way into the pond and our students will do comparative analysis on what’s in the water. 

Historically, you will have seen pictures of a classroom in 1920 with the desks all lined up and the teacher in front of a blackboard. Then people show a similar classroom today with desks all lined up, with the teacher in front of the whiteboard. One of the things we try to do is break out of that to help our young people understand that to live is to learn and to learn is to live. We don’t make this distinction that you’re in school so you have to sit at this desk a certain way. Our students field calls at our switchboard, our students call our donors and thank them for supporting us with scholarship funds. They call admitted students and say, “Hey, I understand you’ve been admitted to Piney Woods. Well, I’m a 10th-grade student and we’ll both be together next year, and I wanted to see if you had any questions.” Our students go out and carry the message of this institution all over this state and nation, and so it really is learning practiced through living.

How did Piney Wood survive as all those other schools were closing?

One of the things is that we understood our mission, and we try to situate our mission and our vision in the period in which we live. Prior to Brown, Piney Woods issued associate degrees. Once the junior college/community college systems began to allow Black people to come, we recognized that the need was not as great. And so our program adjusted, and we stopped issuing associate degrees. It did not mean that the mission was not still viable. It’s no secret that you can pretty much track an individual’s educational progress by the income levels of their families. If you come from a family with a higher income, you’re that much more likely to succeed and have access to higher-quality education. Part of what we wanted to do was to ensure that we’re still addressing that challenge. You have to adjust to what’s happening in the world but still question what’s the relevance of your mission.

Piney Woods has had an alumni community that’s come forward to support its work and that sacrifices to make sure Piney Woods can still exist and do this work. Piney Woods has an independent board of directors. Sometimes these schools were run by churches, and they sort of went the way of the congregation or denomination and didn’t have as much control over how it advanced. Particularly during days of segregation, there were a number of these institutions that received state support because states didn’t want integration, so they would send some money to the Black boarding schools, which would essentially allow them to avoid integration. When the money left, these institutions couldn’t operate. Piney Woods operated independently of that for most of our existence. I think leadership matters. Piney Woods had strong leadership from our founder, but then we’ve had strong leadership from other folks who preceded me, and our goal from the start has been about building next-generation leadership in all that we do.

This month marks 70 years since the Brown v. Board ruling. Following the decision, many Black teachers and principals were dismissed. What generational impact do you believe this has had on Black students?

You know the old saying, “if you can see it, you can be it.” When Black males have one Black male teacher in elementary grades, their chances of success increase exponentially in school. To some extent, that was true for myself. I grew up on the south side of Chicago and I had teachers who were white, who were Black, but for the most part, they were female. I can remember one male teacher that I had along the way, but who was white, and then the folks in charge were typically white. We didn’t have Black models in leadership at the classroom level, or even at the local school level, and so we are pioneers. Piney Woods is by no means an all-Black staff. We have a diverse leadership structure here that I hope sets a standard for our young people to see.

Laurence Clifton Jones founded the school to educate the children of impoverished Black sharecroppers. With that history in mind, how has Piney Woods remained a safe haven for students who may have financial hardships or face other forms of marginalization?

This is near and dear to me because I will confess that there were moments when this institution faced financial challenges and some thought the answer would be to pursue more exclusively — essentially, people who could pay tuition. Lawrence Jones founded Piney Woods with $1.65. The ability to pay tuition has never been how we [decided] who would get this kind of an opportunity. Our board has worked diligently to ensure that we stay true to that from a mission standpoint. If you can afford to contribute more, we ask you to make a bigger contribution. But if a family doesn’t have the funds, no child is turned away for an inability to pay his or her way. Every young person who is here today has a scholarship. If there are folks who want to come and don’t want a scholarship, we welcome them, too.

The reason we can do that is that members of our community … we have something called the Circle of Faith that they sometimes will recommend a student and they will send contributions to help support that student’s education. Across this nation, the community of supporters makes this kind of work possible.

What does it cost to attend?

About $45,000 per student per year. That’s with room and board and really all their expenses. We don’t say if you want to be on the basketball team, you have to pay an extra fee. Once you’re here, you’ll be part of whatever’s happening, The National Association of Independent Schools pegs the cost of attending a boarding program like ours … we are 50% less than the average boarding school costs in this nation, and we successfully get all of our young people admitted to postsecondary options: community, college, college, military, etc.

You are the first principal to be a former student. How did your time as a student impact your view of education and opportunity in rural Mississippi?

My experience before coming here to Piney Woods was not a good one. I grew up in difficult neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago. My life changed when I came to this institution, and it took me some time to realize that. I was having leadership opportunities that I don’t know I would have ever had, had I stayed back in a public school at home. My grades and my GPA were well beyond where I would have been had I stayed home.

I got a chance to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate. We lived with my grandmother, and she lived about a 15-minute drive from the university. Nobody from our neighborhood went to the University of Chicago. I had driven by it my whole life but I didn’t even know it was a university. Nobody in my family had gone to college. Maybe my last year in high school at Piney Woods and my first year in college at the University of Chicago, it dawned on me that the people I grew up with didn’t have the opportunities that I had. I knew my cousins and folks at church. I also knew that I wasn’t as smart as some, I just had had an opportunity that they didn’t, because Piney Woods had given me that opportunity. I had really at that point in my life said, “This is unfair. It’s unfair for me to be at the University of Chicago and for my cousin to be in Joliet federal prison. That sort of ignited my passion to ensure that we were making educational opportunities available despite the accident of one’s birth, and that’s what this place has done for 115 years. And when I spend my life doing that, that’s the most fulfilling thing I can imagine.

Before returning to Piney Woods, you worked as senior adviser in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. What was your experience with returning to Piney Woods after having such an aerial view of education in the country?

I actually started my career in the classroom. I was teaching in Chicago Public Schools and was volunteering for a first-time-ever candidate for Illinois state Senate from our little district in South Side Chicago named Barack Obama, who went on to do some other things after he got into the Illinois legislature. So I started there and I became really frustrated with the bureaucracy. I wanted to find a path that I could make change on. I didn’t think I could do that with the 26 kids I had in my class, I went to law school, I ended up in a senior position working in government trying to change educational disparity, and Piney Woods sort of came along. 

So I went from this space of working on policy to working directly with people. That was life-changing. I was no longer just putting a policy on the table — I was sitting across the table from a young person who was making a decision about whether to go to college or which college to go to. Or the young person who was sometimes making adult decisions about whether to even remain in school. In many ways, I went from a kind of work that felt very transactional in Washington, D.C., to work that I know is transformational in nature here on the ground. It’s been really a thrill and a delight, because I literally get to touch and sit and really know the people whose lives are being changed by the work we’re doing.

Piney Woods is 20 miles south of Jackson, in the state with the nation’s largest Black population. When policymakers and education leaders are discussing school choice, what specific needs for Black parents and students in the rural South do you believe should be considered?

When I was in D.C., my daughter was on a soccer team, and they lost every game. Sometimes they just lost because the other team had superior skills. But many times they lost 1 to 0, and the one goal the other team made sometimes had gone in accidentally. The reason the ball was able to go in accidentally is because it consistently was on my daughter’s team’s side of the field, which meant that they were always on defense. Another person could, just by sheer luck, put points on the board.

I think that Black kids growing up in America often live their lives on defense. The expectations of them are low. When a Black child fails in school, nobody’s surprised, and that’s a problem. This place changes that. We say this is where you belong, that we expect you to excel and to achieve, and you’re not going to live life on defense. Quite the contrary. We expect you to put points on the board.

One of the things we offer is an atmosphere that says you’re a part of this community. You’re a part of, dare I say, this family. Just as my two daughters aren’t allowed to say, “I can’t do it,” neither are you. There’s a whole field of scholarship from Tocqueville on the impact of community and advancing and turning around its members. The solutions often live on the ground in the community. I think we can choose whether to subject our kids to a mass-production factory model, one-size-fits-all notion of learning, or a personalized, culturally supportive environment in which every single young person is expected to achieve in their own right. I think we do the latter, and we’ve had success, certainly for my 10 years, but for 115 years. I hope that serves as a lesson for us as a nation about the kinds of spaces we should make for the best learning outcomes for young people.

When the time comes, how do you hope to leave the school better than how you found it?

This place was started in the middle of nowhere with almost nothing but a burning desire and passion to have an impact on the lives of others. People invested in that and it came to fruition. Lawrence C. Jones, our founder, described it as “a resistless urge to help people build better lives for themselves and their communities.” I got to be here because people who didn’t know my name, and long before I ever got [here], invested in this space on the belief that someday somebody like me might come through.

I tell our students it so deeply humbles me to think that our enslaved fought for freedom that they never would personally realize, but they fought for those freedoms for future generations and people invested in me in ways that I can’t fully measure. I hope that someone will say, “He did his absolute best to pay it forward, that he did his absolute best to ensure that this institution would become a regenerative community that gives more to the world than it ever takes from it.” If we can position this work to go out and have that kind of an impact, then I think we will have done our work well.

TOPEKA — Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park interpreter Jeff Tully says Kansas entered the union as an anti-slavery state in 1861, but in less than two decades the Kansas Legislature passed a law allowing cities of more than 15,000 residents to segregate elementary schools.

The law applicable to Topeka’s youngest, most impressionable children stayed on the books from 1879 until the 1950s.

“This was the state that wrote in our Constitution, ‘We forbid slavery,’ ” Tully said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “Yet, 20 years later, we’ll start segregating African American kids in primary schools.”

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Lawson Nwakudo, another National Park Service interpreter at the national historical site in the Monroe Elementary School, said that peculiar state law and the excellent Black-only schools in Topeka drew the interest of the NAACP, which was forming a legal strategy that sought to demonstrate to justices of the U.S. Supreme Court the harm inherent in a system of “separate but equal” schools and the necessity of disassembling segregated classrooms across the nation.

“Not only were these educators incredible, but they’re actually more educated than their white counterparts,” Nwakudo said of Topeka’s Black elementary school teachers. “The reason why the NAACP wanted to focus on Kansas, on Topeka, was because there was that level of equality. If they could prove there’s something inherently wrong with a place like Kansas … that would mean that there’s something inherently wrong with everywhere else.”

The consolidated court case, known as Brown v. Board of Education, resulted in the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision May 17, 1954, that declared state-sanctioned segregation of public schools to be a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of one of the century’s most significant court decisions, Washburn University in Topeka will present the play “Now Let Me Fly” at 7 p.m. May 17 in White Concert Hall. It examines the journey of heroes and heroines in the legal fight for equality in education. Admission is free with online ticket registration at or by calling 785-506-7768.

“There are many characters, many people who were involved with the Brown decision,” Nwakudo said. “This play gives you basically a feeling as to what that was like, and what their lives are like moving through and a little bit after the Brown case.”

The parents in Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina and Washington, D.C., who signed on as plaintiffs in what evolved into the Brown v. Board case placed themselves and their children in harm’s way, he said. The lead plaintiff was Oliver Brown, who had a daughter eager to enroll in the Topeka school closest to her home. She was denied access and was required to attend a segregated Black school further from home.

Nwakudo said the stakes were higher for other plaintiffs than they were in Topeka.

“There are some people who are being threatened and other people had their houses burned down. Whereas in Kansas, there still was possibly of an economic threat where your jobs can be threatened. That’s partially why 12 of the 13 complainants were housewives,” Nwakudo said.

Tully said the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Site organized a homecoming celebration for former students, staff and teachers at Topeka’s historically Black elementary schools from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. May 18 at the park’s headquarters in the former Monroe Elementary School. The invitees include those with ties to Monroe, but also to Buchanan, McKinley and Washington elementary schools in Topeka.

“At 12:52 p.m. on May 17, 1954, nine Supreme Court judges unanimously said ‘separate but equal’ was inherently unequal,” he said. “We thought Monroe would be the natural place to have this homecoming of sorts.”

The day’s program will include a roundtable discussion among former students from all four schools, followed by a sit-down lunch (registration for the meal is closed), musical entertainment and the taking of class pictures on the front porch of Monroe Elementary. There will be family and group activities on the north lawn. At any point during the day, visitors can contribute their stories and memories to an oral history project and the Kansas State Historical Society will be available to take digital images of documents and memorabilia related to the Topeka schools.

Nwakudo said the transition to integrated schools produced violence and all sorts of maneuvering to delay implementation of the Supreme Court’s orders.

“That is a major uplift for a lot of places, especially in the South, where these children could step away from these one-room shacks that were their schools. No electricity and no indoor plumbing,” he said. “There was a quite a bit of resistance. Places like Tennessee put forth a 12-year plan to desegregate their schools. Virginia tried to resist in any way they could, and actually ended up closing down a lot of their schools across the state.”

He said his message to visitors to the National Historical Park, especially school children, was that they had “power to make a positive change in our lives, just like their predecessors did. We can draw knowledge and strength from those past experiences, to galvanize ourselves to do more to do better.”

Tully said the National Park Service site south of the Kansas Capitol was among 428 National Park units in the United States. The site in Topeka measured barely 1 acre — a far cry from the 2.2 million acres of the Yellowstone National Park and the 1.2 million acres of the Grand Canyon National Park.

“But what happened in a building in Topeka, Kansas, along with four other court cases around the United States, was probably, in many scholars’ opinion, the single most important 20th century Supreme Court decision,” he said.

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As a teenager in the 1950s he followed and documented the South Carolina case that challenged segregation in public education. Briggs was eventually appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where it became one of five cases consolidated into what is now known as Brown v. Board of Education. 

Williams, now 86, still reflects on the injustices he witnessed in South Carolina in the wake of the case: most petitioners lost their jobs and some were driven out of town. The consequences have reverberated for generations.

“They were ostracized in their own community,” he told �鶹��Ʒ. 

Since the 1960s, Williams has asserted that the 20 parents of Briggs v. Elliott faced a second injustice: They were forgotten. Despite being the first of the five cases to make it to the Supreme Court, Briggs was not chosen as the lead case and was therefore relegated to the position of “et al.” in the seminal Brown v. Board’s name. This naming meant that despite the families’ sacrifices, their stories were removed from the foreground, according to Williams. For decades, he has been advocating for a correction, asking over 100 attorneys to take on a case that would challenge the ordering — and the naming — of Brown. 

In some ways, Williams is a hidden figure among hidden figures, who took up the cause of renaming Brown even before Nathaniel Briggs, the 76-year-old son of the lead plaintiff in Briggs v. Elliott, Harry Briggs, came on board and before South Carolina attorney and civil rights organizer Tom Mullikin agreed to argue it pro bono. 

Mullikin would spend years interviewing the families from the original Briggs case before filing before the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2023. Earlier this month, the justices denied the petition without comment.

“I would do it again,” Mullikin told �鶹��Ʒ. “I would spend another four years doing it. And I’ll spend the rest of my life talking about it because it’s an injustice. Sometimes, there’s a price to being first. And in this case, there’s no denying that people lost their lives, their economic fortunes, and their livelihoods because of their courage and stepping out.”

While on its face a legal battle, the quest to rename the landmark Brown case lays bare how steep that price was and how lasting its painful legacy. For Nathaniel Briggs, it was the dissolution of his family. His father was fired from his job as a gas station attendant; his mother from hers as a motel maid. 

His father began working at a family member’s farm but when he took his cotton to market, Briggs said, people refused to buy it because of the association with his last name. In 1957, out of options, his father moved to Miami. At the time, Briggs was 9 years old. He was devastated when his father was forced to leave the family behind.

“Once a month he would call. I’d hear my dad’s voice for a couple of minutes … I’d put those coins in the old, black dial-up telephone thing, and I’d hear my dad’s voice.”

South Carolina — and the stories of the Briggses and the other families in Clarendon County — have remained largely invisible, despite the notoriety of the titular Brown case, according to Nathaniel Briggs.

“The original signees of this petition, the seniors, they’re all dead,” he said. “So I’m saying, who can speak for dry bones? Me. I’ll speak for those dry bones that cannot speak for themselves … Don’t let this nation, a historian, or a writer write you out of the picture.”

A clerical error or a strategic move? 

The Supreme Court brief that Mullikin filed on behalf of Nathaniel Briggs, as well as Beatrice Brown Rivers and Ethel Brown Marshall, two of the signatories of the original South Carolina petition, asserted that Brown had been incorrectly named due to a clerical error.

Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights attorney and first Black Supreme Court justice, filed in the fall of 1950. Initially, Black parents in Clarendon County were just requesting school buses for their children. But by the time the case was ultimately filed against R.W. Elliott, the school board president, the parents were challenging segregation in its entirety. 

Eventually, Briggs was appealed through the court system and was the first of the five consolidated cases to reach the Supreme Court. It was returned back to the lower district court in 1952. According to Mullikin’s brief, when the case again made its way to the Supreme Court for the second time “the Clerk inadvertently docketed the Briggs case after Brown instead of placing it back as the first case filed. This inadvertent clerical misstep deprived the petitioners their rightful place in history in spite of the great physical, emotional, and financial risks taken by each petitioner. The petitioners request that their place in history be restored by the simple act of reordering the petitioners to the just and accurate place.” 

Mullikin noted that there may be people who view this case as an attempt to pit the involved families against each other, but that to his knowledge “there’s none of that happening.”

“This is in no way to marginalize what [the Brown family] went through or the importance of their case. It’s simply a matter of factual accounting of which case is first. In no way was our collective efforts meant to marginalize or minimize the sacrifice that those families made.”

“We’re not in any conflict with what the Brown case stands for, but we are in conflict with the naming of it,” Williams, the civil rights photographer, said. 

Cheryl Brown Henderson, the daughter of the lead plaintiff in the Brown lawsuit, declined to comment on the record. In an interview with she said that while she did not oppose the South Carolina effort, she had expressed her misgivings to the South Carolina descendants. She told the outlet that the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research had worked to promote the history and legacies of all five cases that made up the Brown and Bolling decisions.

Some historians believe that Brown was given preference for strategic reasons: that the lead case would have an easier path coming out of a “border state” like Kansas vs. a Deep South state like South Carolina and in Brown, the court potentially saw a chance to push the school segregation issue out of the Jim Crow South and onto a national platform.

Going home to Clarendon County

After the original court filing, the Briggs family splintered; with Nathaniel, his mother, sister and brother attempting to reunite with his father in Florida, leaving their grandmother behind, and other brothers moving north to New York City. 

A year later, the Florida family members returned to South Carolina. Briggs enrolled in Scott’s Branch High School, the subject of Briggs v. Elliot and which remained segregated despite the high court’s ruling almost a decade before. Even at the all-Black high school, Briggs said he faced discrimination because of his last name. “Not all of the teachers liked the Briggs children because you’re upsetting a system,” he said.

Those hardships prompted another move by the rest of the family to New York City in the early 1960s. Today, Briggs lives in New Jersey but has returned to South Carolina every year for the past six decades.

“I love my community,” he said. 

In 2014, almost 100% of the schools in Clarendon County were de facto segregated. 

“Most of the white students attend private schools while black students attend public schools, which are still notoriously underfunded,” Mullikin wrote in his brief. Scott’s Branch Middle/High School has a 95.7% minority enrollment and 100% of the students are economically disadvantaged, according to the brief, despite the county of 31,000 being almost evenly split demographically.

In some ways, these numbers are unsurprising since school segregation is still a core feature of American public education, said Ansley Erickson, associate professor of history and education policy and co-director of the Center on History and Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color.

It is important to recognize the burden desegregation efforts put on Black families, she added.

“The key thing that [the Briggs] case can bring to our attention is how much work desegregation required of Black students and families,” she said. “The Supreme Court decision in Brown was not self-executing, meaning that it didn’t automatically tell districts what to do. It established the legal standard, and then made it possible for districts to be sued by local families and attorneys. And that means that it shifted the labor onto families like the Briggses, families like the Browns, families like hundreds that we could name if we look at every local school district that was segregated, and where someone brought the case to court. And that labor is tremendous.”

“Every one of these local districts should recognize the people who did this labor on behalf of justice.”