Brown v. Board of Education Timeline

Even before the Supreme Court's decision, the Board of Education of Topeka began to end segregation in the Topeka elementary schools in August 1953, integrating two attendance districts.

On May 18, 1954, the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown ruling. However, others in the city resisted integration with legal obstacles, and in 1969 the federal government found the city out of compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1956, a special session of the Virginia legislature adopted a legislative package allowing the governor to close all schools under federal desegregation orders. In early 1958, newly elected Governor J. Lindsay Almond pursued this policy, though Arlington County and Norfolk schools desegregated peacefully in early February 1959.

Image source: Massive resistance

All the Topeka elementary schools were changed to neighborhood attendance centers in January 1956, although existing students could continue attending their prior assigned schools. Plaintiff Zelma Henderson later recalled no demonstrations accompanied desegregation in Topeka.

In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas Army National Guard to block the entry of nine black students, later known as the 'Little Rock Nine', after the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School.

Image source: Little Rock Nine

In Harlem, New York, not a single new school had been built since the turn of the century even as the Second Great Migration caused overcrowding. Mae Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered a lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959.

When faced with a court order to finally begin desegregation in 1959, the Prince Edward County, Virginia board of supervisors stopped appropriating money for public schools, which remained closed for five years. Black children had to leave the county or receive no education until the Supreme Court ruled in Griffin v. County School Board in 1964.

Image source: Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County

When Medgar Evers sued in 1963 to desegregate schools in Jackson, Mississippi, White Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith murdered him. Beckwith was not convicted of the murder until 1994.

Image source: Medgar Evers

In June 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace personally blocked the door to the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium to prevent the enrollment of two black students, upholding his 'segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever' inaugural promise.

Image source: Stand in the Schoolhouse Door

In 1977 the Supreme Court said in Dayton Board of Education v. Jenkins that at the very least, Brown I has been misunderstood by the courts, shaping how later desegregation obligations were interpreted.

Constitutional originalist Raoul Berger argued in his 1977 book Government by Judiciary that Brown cannot be defended by reference to the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, noting the same Congress that passed the Amendment voted to segregate District of Columbia schools.

In 1978, Topeka attorneys Richard Jones, Joseph Johnson, and Charles Scott Jr. filed a new lawsuit arguing that segregation continued in Topeka schools, reviving the legacy of the original Brown case locally.

In June 1987, Philip Elman, a civil rights attorney in the Solicitor General's office during Harry Truman's term, claimed he and Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter were mostly responsible for the Supreme Court's decision, stating the NAACP's arguments did not present strong evidence.

In 1989, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit ruled 2–1 that vestiges of segregation remained in Topeka with respect to student and staff assignment. In 1993, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal and remanded it for implementation of the mandate.

Monroe Elementary, the segregated school Linda Brown attended, was designated a National Historic Site under the National Park Service on October 26, 1992, and redesignated a National Historical Park on May 12, 2022.

Image source: Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park

After a 1994 plan was approved and a bond issue passed, Topeka issued a plan to add magnet schools and redraw district attendance plans to meet court standards of racial balance by 1998. The district was declared unitary on July 27, 1999.

Zelma Henderson, the last surviving plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, died in Topeka on May 20, 2008, at age 88. She had recalled in a 2004 interview that no demonstrations or tumult accompanied desegregation in Topeka's schools.

Linda Brown, whose exclusion from a nearby white school sparked the landmark case, died on March 25, 2018, at age 75, leaving behind an enduring legacy in American civil rights history.