Topeka was at the center of Brown v. Board. Decades later, segregation of another sort lingers

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The lesson on diversity started slowly in a first-grade classroom in Topeka, where schools were at the center of the case that struck down segregated education.

“I like broccoli. Do you like broccoli?” Marie Carter, a Black school library worker, asked broccoli-hating librarian Amy Gugelman, who is white.

The students in the sunny, book-filled room were comparing what makes them the same and what makes them different. It’s part of their introduction to Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling commemorated at a national historic site in a former all-Black school just down the street. Linda Brown, whose father Oliver Brown was the lead plaintiff in the case, was a student there after she was denied entry to an all-white school near her home.

Within a few questions, the first-graders at Williams Science & Fine Arts Magnet school watched the two women hold their arms next to each other. “My skin is brown,” Carter observed, “and Mrs. Gugelman’s skin is not.”