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Takoma Archives

50 years after Brown v. Board of Education

BY DIANA KOHN

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The year 1954 seems remote even for many of us who were alive then. Dwight Eisenhower was President, the first color TVs went on sale, children received their first polio shots, and Mary McGrory began writing for the Washington Star. To help current students better understand the time, Takoma Park Middle School recently brought the events surrounding the case to life onstage, with the help of the New York touring cast of The Color of Justice (see box).

When the Court took up these cases, 21 states including Maryland actually had laws on the books requiring "Negro" and white students to attend separate schools and regulating all contact between races. This "separate but equal" doctrine had been enshrined in American life since 1896 when the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate railroad cars and other public facilities were constitutional as long as they were "equal."

Despite Maryland laws, things were somewhat less polarized in Takoma Park. In many parts of town white and black families had lived next door to each other for years. Children played together on the neighborhood streets, even though they could not attend classes together. Restaurants provided takeout for black customers, but did not allow them to sit and eat with white friends.

Roland Dawes, in his oral history for Historic Takoma, described going into the stores along Carroll Avenue: "you come in the door but you don’t go further than the front step. Whatever you want, you stand up there and tell him and he gets it and brings it to you."

In keeping with Maryland statutes, Montgomery County set up two school systems, each with its own school buildings and school board. Authors Nina Clarke and Lillian Brown have documented that conditions were hardly equal: "Colored" schools were cheaply built one or two-room structures (serving K- 7), with little money for maintenance or textbooks. Teachers were paid half of what white teachers earned. White students attended class for an extra month. It wasn’t until 1927 that the County built a "colored" high school (in Rockville).

Meanwhile, in Takoma Park, Reverend William Parker (the man for whom the current Parker Memorial Baptist Church was named) led the drive to build Takoma Park Elementary School (even the names were duplicates). In 1927, the County allocated $800 to buy the lot, and the community built a cement-block building across from the First Baptist Church of Takoma Park, on the ridge overlooking Maple Avenue.

Roland Dawes remembers attending that school shortly after it opened "It was a two-room school with no bathrooms and no running water. There were forty, forty-five of us in there. School was packed out." His teacher for fifth, sixth, and seventh grade, Alice Beall Allen, made a lasting impression. "She taught us how to do carpentry work. I won first prize for a cane chair at Field Day." When he graduated from the seventh grade he had to ride the bus to Lincoln High School in Rockville. "We left at six o’clock and pulled right in front of the door two minutes to nine every morning."

Conditions hadn’t changed much by 1954, although the County had begun a policy of closing substandard "colored" schools and consolidating them in new buildings. Takoma Park was in the last set of substandard schools targeted. At that point the Brown v. Board of Education decision intervened.

For years, Thurgood Marshall and other lawyers with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been gathering cases to take before the Supreme Court. In the end, four other cases joined the Kansas case known as Brown v. Board of Education. Oral arguments were heard in December 1952; and the country waited while the Court deliberated in secret.

On the morning of May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren was halfway through reading the decision before the Court’s position was clear: "In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. Such considerations apply with added force to children in grade schools and high schools. We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place." However, the justices left it up to the states to work out the "how."

By the following summer, the Montgomery County School Board decided on a plan to integrate the down county schools first. The four schools not yet consolidated were closed effective fall 1955. The 58 students from "colored" Takoma Park quietly joined their white friends at Takoma Park Elementary on Philadelphia (the front section of the old building remains standing). The cement-block building was sold at auction, and still stands at 120 Geneva Avenue (originally Ridge Ave). The "colored" high school in Rockville remained open, but students from the Blair, Einstein, and Chevy Chase districts transferred to their local middle and high schools. Integration became a reality at Takoma Park Junior High (Middle) and Blair High School.

It took the County six more years of extended discussions, committees, resolutions, protests, and petitions before the entire county system became integrated. Even then 46 of the schools remained white because no African-American children lived in their geographical jurisdictions.

Research for this article comes from History of the Black Public Schools of Montgomery County, Maryland, 1872-1961, by Nina H. Clarke & Lilliam B. Brown (Vantage Press, 1978, reprinted 2004) Also, the oral history of Roland Dawes, from the History Takoma Archives, funded by a grant from the Historic Preservation Commission of Montgomery County. For further information, visit www.historictakoma.org.