School that launched Brown v. Board of Education on endangered list
TOPEKA, KS -- ...the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, to its 2008 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places...
Sumner Elementary School, a National Historic Landmark that helped launch the nation's Civil Rights Movement as the centerpiece of the U.S. Supreme Court's (1954) ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, presently sits in a deteriorated and threatened state.
Vacant since 1996, the school suffers from deferred maintenance and has sustained significant damage from water infiltration, neglect and vandalism. As current problems remain unaddressed and damage worsens, this national icon is being allowed to deteriorate even further and resources have not been allocated to stem this tide...
"Losing Sumner Elementary School to neglect is utterly unacceptable," says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "It represents a significant chapter in American history and powerfully symbolizes the struggle for equal educational opportunities in this country. We must protect the legacy of Sumner Elementary and provide the conscientious stewardship it needs and deserves." MORE
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Sumner Elementary School Update
We've just discovered that there is a plan underway to turn Sumner Elementary School into a charter school. Topeka has given the nonprofit group steering the effort two months to make good. We wish them luck. However, should the plan fail, we will renew our call for a national effort to save Sumner Elementary School.
A Plea for Sumner Elementary School
It causes us great pain to learn that Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, KS, the centerpoint of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegegration case, is in serious jeopardy. Few locations can match the significance of this site as a beacon of hope and of our capacity to remake our world for the better. Sumner, at the time of the case, was an all-white segregated facility that Black parents successfully brought the case against to gain admittance for their children. And thereafter, the walls of segregation came tumbling down.
As I write this, some 1,000 miles to the east of Topeka, the National Association of Minority Contractors (NAMC), the country's leading minority construction organization, begins its 39th Annual National Conference in Charlotte, NC. Once again, we come together to celebrate our capacity to physically remake our world for the better--and our ability to participate in that process to the extent that we can today, something that would have been impossible if the parents of Topeka, KS hadn't decided to make a stand.
Fittingly, North Carolina has seen fit to devote resources to the construction of a freedom monument devoted to the African American presence in that state. Yet, if ever there was a monument to freedom for the whole of our country, Sumner Elementary School is surely it. Yet somehow the resources have not yet been found to ensure its future.
Perhaps it can be turned into a museum dedicated to that historic decision; the educational and cultural programs that would result could generate and draw on a wide range of funding sources. Or maybe a national effort could tap builders around the country, both majority and minority, to contribute funds, talent and resources to saving the edifice.
There must be a way to save it and we have a responsibiity to ourselves and future generations to to find it. What do you think should be done to preserve Sumner Elementary School?