Traveling Exhibit - Panels

 

Brown v. Board of Education - In Pursuit of Freedom & Equality - Traveling Exhibit
   
Panel 9 - Those Who Challenged


Russell Cartwright, teacher, at Cleveland Elementary, 1940s. As neighborhood population shifted by 1920, this school, at issue in the 1906 Supreme Court case, had become all black.
Courtesy Russell Cartright Collection, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas Libraries.


Ehsha Scott (1891I?- 1963), attorney for Celia Thurman-Watts in the 1924 case from Coffeyville successfully argued "such discrimination is without authority of law, un-American, unjust and contrary to the law governing cities of the first class."
Courtesy Kansas State Historical Society.


James H. Guy (1861-1940?) was one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the 1906 Cartwright v. Board of Education, Coffeyville.
Courtesy Blue Book of Topeka 1910, Kansas Collection, University of Kansas Libraries. 


D.A. Williams refused to send his four children to the new all black Douglas School located across seven railroad tracks from the family home in Parsons. In the 1908 Williams v. Board of Education case, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld the parents.
Courtesy Kansas State Historical Society.


Central School, Ottawa, Kansas, 1885.
Courtesy Franklin County Historical Society and Kansas State Historical Society.

Tinnon Challenge - 1881
When the School Superintendent in Ottawa refused Leslie Tinnon admission to the school near his home, his father, Elijah Tinnon, brought suit. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that second class cities could not discriminate.

The decision in the Tinnon case was one of the earliest in the nation to favor racially integrated schools. Both Franklin County District Court Judge Nelson T. Stephens and Supreme Court Justice Daniel M. Valentine found for Tinnon on the basis of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guaranteed equal protection of the law.


Park School, Wichita, about 1900. Classrooms and playgrounds were segregated within Park School. African American parents briefly succeeded in halting this practice in the courts. The 1907 Kansas Supreme Court case Rowles v. Board of Education involved Park School. By 1914 Wichita had two all black schools, Frederick Douglass and L'Ouverture.
Courtesy The Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum.