A little girl wanted to go to school down the block, but she couldn't because she was African-American. Her father was angry about that, and he sued the school board. Thurgood Marshall rode in and decided to represent them, and the Supreme Court decided to do the right thing.

Cheryl Brown Henderson[1] uses this short account to illustrate how the story of civil rights can be overly simplified (Blankenship). Actually it is infinitely more complicated. The civil rights path I have chosen to explore begins in the late 1940’s in Topeka and is not yet ended. Click here or on the project tab above to see why these stories intrigued me. The links below or to the left will take you to each of the stories on the path:

1. Lucinda Todd and Maude Lawton, whom I have termed the "Music Mothers", objected that the Black elementary school denied their daughters music education. They later would name their daughters's as plaintiff's in the Topeka Brown v. Board case.
2. The Highlander Folk School, unparalleled in influencing civil rights activist, is the next stop on the journey.
3. Ella Baker, regarded as a savant of community organizing, provides much of the guiding light for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
4. Bob Moses, student of Ella Baker and leader of the 1964 Mississippi project we now know as Freedom Summer.
5. The Algebra Project, which answers the question "What is Bob Moses doing now?"
The theme that runs through these stories are the importance of the child and the grassroots community. To the parents in this story no one can treasure their child like they do and we will see that they did what they needed to do to provide for their children. The struggle depends on ordinary people seeing a problem in their community and deciding what they are going to do about it.

Blankenship, Bill. "Brown v. Board: The whole story." The Capital-Journal cjonline.com 2 May, 2004. Print.

[1] Cheryl Brown Henderson is the daughter of the namesake of the Brown v. Board case in which, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States decreed that separate cannot be equal.