Topeka History via Eric McHenry

I always assumed that Lowman Hill Elementary School, which I attended, had been segregated until Brown v. Board, but that wasn’t entirely true. Topeka’s public schools were an improvised mix of integrated and segregated in the 19th century, and Lowman Hill had students of all colors. Then, in 1900, someone burned it down. At the time it was located at Munson and Brooks (Jewell). The school moved into a privately owned house while a new structure was being built, and in 1901 someone burned the house down, too. At the same time, whites in the area were circulating a petition demanding that the new school, when it was completed, be segregated. The petition was successful — the arsonists got what they wanted. So in 1902, when the handsome new brick Lowman Hill School opened at 11th and Morris (Mulvane), black kids weren’t admitted. Instead, the city moved a two-room wooden schoolhouse to the site of the original burned-down building, and it opened as Douglass School. The black families protested that the site had been used as a dumping ground since the fire and was unsanitary, that its well water was dangerous to drink, and that there was more than ample room in the new building for the neighborhood’s black and white children. They boycotted it and arranged a temporary private school for the black kids in someone’s home. One father, William Reynolds, tried to enroll his son Raoul at Lowman Hill, was turned away, and filed suit. In 1903, seven years after Plessy vs. Ferguson, Reynolds vs. the Board of Education of Topeka went to the state supreme court, which upheld the separate-and-unequal arrangement. So the black kids in the neighborhood attended Douglass School until it closed in 1917, after one of them got typhoid from drinking the well water. Its first principal was Langston Hughes’s aunt Mary. Its last principal was Aaron Douglas’s father-in-law.