Kansas capital where Brown v. Board of Education ended school segregation
Topeka is the capital of Kansas and the site of one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in American history — Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site preserves the Monroe Elementary School where Linda Brown was denied enrollment. The city sits on the Kansas River amid the tallgrass prairie, with a Victorian-era state capitol building featuring murals by John Steuart Curry and a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln on the grounds.
Topeka was founded in 1854 as Kansas struggled violently over whether to enter the Union as a free or slave state — the era known as 'Bleeding Kansas.' It became the capital of the new state in 1861. The city's most indelible moment came in 1951 when Oliver Brown, a welder and part-time minister, joined other Black parents in filing suit against the Topeka Board of Education after his daughter Linda was denied admission to the whites-only Sumner Elementary School. The case reached the Supreme Court, where Thurgood Marshall argued it, and the unanimous 1954 decision overturned Plessy v. Fergus…