Family's foundation is working to ensure that the Brown story will still be told

Cheryl Brown Henderson was only 3 years old when the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision made her family name instantly synonymous with the end of school segregation. She was only 10 years old when her father, Oliver Brown, whose name heads the five cases combined in Brown , died. Those two events had a major impact on Brown Henderson’s lifework: to ensure that the story of school desegregation—and the people who risked their lives to achieve it—isn’t lost.

“For my family,” Brown Henderson wrote in a 1996 article in Cultural Resource Management magazine, “the significance of my father’s passing was intensely personal yet profoundly public. In addition to his physical death, we also lost an opportunity to learn his views about the famous case which bears his name.” In the late 1980s, as she remembered in the CRM article, Brown Henderson found herself increasingly concerned that “not only were [Brown ] anniversaries passing unnoted, history classes were only giving cursory mention to Brown .”

Determined to share the legacy of all five court cases, Brown Henderson created the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence, and Research in 1988. One of the foundation’s first achievements was saving a key site in Brown ’s history, Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kan. Constructed in 1926, Monroe was one of four segregated schools for African-American children in the city. It was this elementary school that Brown’s sister, Linda, was forced to attend in the early 1950s rather than having access to an all-white school closer to the family’s home.

In October 1992, thanks to the efforts of the Brown foundation, an act of Congress established the school as a national historic site, now a national park. Although the site currently can be visited, a grand opening is planned for May 17, 2004, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the court case.

Working in partnership, the foundation and the National Park Service offer a variety of resources on Brown  and the school desegregation movement for teachers and students, including exhibits and audiovisual presentations; a pre-visit guide to the park; curriculum guides for grades 4, 6 and 8; and classroom presentations. Also available are a CD-ROM, “Brown v. Board of Education: Struggle for Equal Rights” and a 12-minute video, “A Case for Equality: Reading, Writing and Resistance.”

The foundation also offers an oral history collection, an activity booklet for elementary school children, an orientation handbook on the five Brown  cases, and a video and teachers’ guide, “In Pursuit of Freedom and Equality: Brown v. Board of Education.”

For more information, visit the foundation at http://brownvboard.org  and the Brown v. Board of Education  national historic site at www.nps.gov/brvb/home.htm.

Back to feature story:

Brown : The fight for equity in America's schools

Copyright by the American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO. All rights reserved. Photographs
and illustrations, as well as text, cannot be used without permission from the AFT.