September 8, 2009

September 8, 2009

An hour drive west, we roll into Topeka, the capital of Kansas. There we visit an old grade school that holds Brown v Board of Education National Historic Site. The name is derived from a Supreme Court case in 1954 that kick started the civil rights effort. Until then the South had ”Jim Crow” laws that mandated segregation of the races. An 1896 Supreme Court ruling had upheld this “separate but equal”. In practice southern black schools were often inferior. Beginning in the mid 1930’s the NAACP recruited legal scholars to slowly chip away at the laws. They began with lawsuits against professional and graduate schools where duplicate equal facilities would be cost prohibitive. Eventually they filed five test cases that made their way to our highest court. This time the Supreme Court reversed its stand and ruled that separate is inherently unequal. Despite the ruling, it took many years and US troops to enforce the ruling in the South. We learned about that legacy when we visited Central High Historic Site in Little Rock last Christmas.

From Topeka we drive another hour west to Abilene, KS, boyhood home of Dwight Eisenhower. We spend a couple hours going thru his presidential museum. It is outstanding. Compared to Truman and probably most presidents, Eisenhower was well prepared for his term in office. He had years of practice leading men, running large bureaucracies and planning complicated missions. Few men understood the implications of the Cold War as he did. Surprisingly historians initially ranked him as a mediocre president but now rank him among the top ten. Besides covering his life, the museum has extensive exhibits on WWII. What I found most interesting about the three sites we saw today and yesterday was for me the “missing” history, the events of the mid 40’s thru mid 60’s. It is too old for me to remember but too recent to have been included in my high school history book.