Title
Remembering and Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka which is the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
Body
WHEREAS, On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal; and
WHEREAS, The decision effectively denied the legal basis for segregation in Kansas and twenty other states with segregated classrooms and would forever change race relations in the United States; and
WHEREAS, In the early 1950's, racial segregation in public schools was the norm across America and although all the schools in a given district were supposed to be equal, most black schools were far inferior to their white counterparts; and
WHEREAS, In Topeka Kansas, a black third grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away from her home; and
WHEREAS, Under Plessy vs Ferguson, the Topeka School system was segregated on the basis of race and under the separate but equal doctrine, the arrangement was acceptable and legal; and
WHEREAS, The parents of Linda Brown sued in federal district court on the basis that separate facilities for black children were inherently unequal; and
WHEREAS, The lower courts agreed with the school system that if the facilities were equal, that black children were being treated equally with whites as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment; and
WHEREAS, The Browns and other families in other school systems appealed to the Supreme Court that even facilities that were physically equal did not take into account "intangible" factors and that segregation itself has a deleterious effect on the education of black children; and
WHEREAS, The case of the Brow...
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