Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.That same year, about 30 miles away from Topeka, in Lawrence, Kan., my father, who had just received his master’s degree in education from the University of Kansas, was hired by the Lawrence public school system as its first Black teacher.
My father was 26.President George W. Bush honored the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision in 2004. Bush appointed my father to the commission commemorating the decision.
But even then, the promises of the Brown decision had not yet been fully realized. It was not until 2016 that the last segregated school closed.
By then, my father was 88 years old.None of this is ancient history. Nor is it exclusively the domain of history. The vestiges of slavery and systemic.