It’s now been 65 years since the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
The Brown case, which gets its name from plaintiff Linda Brown, was a class action suit filed by thirteen Topeka parents and their 20 children against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas. The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education under the Plessy v. Ferguson precedent that supported “separate but equal.” When it reached the highest court, Brown consolidated cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington D.C.
The final 1954 SCOTUS ruling overturned the Plessy decision. Brown is largely viewed as a turning point for civil rights nationwide.
But in more honest discussions about civil rights history, many consider Brown “hallowed but hollow.” In the decades following, many cities and states resisted the Brown ruling, circumventing it with policies that established racist residential patterns that remain deeply embedded. Today, students who attend schools in Kansas face discriminatory treatment and disparate access on a number of fronts.
Opportunity
As ProPublica recently reported, AP course composition in Kansas includes only 4% Black students, although black students compose 12% of the state’s total enrollment. This means that White Kansas students are 2.1 times as likely to be enrolled in at least one AP class as Black students.
Suspensions
ProPublica also found that Black students are five times more likely as likely to be suspended as White students, and Hispanic students are 1.5 times as likely to be suspended as White students.
School-to-Prison Pipeline
An ACLU national report found that, consistent with nationwide trends, Black girls in Kansas are four times more likely to be arrested in school than White girls. Black students make up only 7% of the state’s total enrollment, but 20% of school arrests.
Under-funding
School funding was a major focus this legislative session - and with a case still pending in front of the Kansas Supreme Court, it still hasn’t been resolved. For more than a decade, the state of Kansas has been in litigation over whether its spending school is enough and whether the distribution of funding is fair under the Kansas Constitution. Meanwhile, wealthy, Whiter districts continue to upgrade their schools at will while urban districts floating bond issues meet shrieking, well-funded opposition groups — groups that not only raise questions about waste, but also question the very idea of public education.
Resistance to Brown began with ugly picketing, then morphed into lawsuits by angry White families, which eventually became separate, private, and sometimes Christian academies. Today, the resistance looks like lip service paid to valuing integration and diversity, rather than a willingness to understand and correct for the role racial bias plays in daily decision-making in Kansas classrooms in meaningful ways. It looks like a blindness to how segregation in some neighborhoods is, today, worse than before the ruling, in the form of both predominantly white or minority schools.
To truly recognize the landmark Brown v. Board ruling, Kansas schools require far more than a resolution simply recognizing the anniversary — they need adequate and equitable funding, a safe learning environment for students of color, and an explicit recognition of how much work remains before Kansas schools embody fairness and justice.