Lucinda Todd and Maude Lawton

Lucinda Todd was mad! A notice in the newspaper announced a grade school concert representing all eighteen grade schools in Topeka. Offended and frustrated, she pointed out to the administration that there were twenty two grade schools in Topeka, not eighteen (Kluger 376-77). Although she was able to convince the school administration to expand music instruction to the Black schools, this “music thing”, as she called it, prompted her to join the NAACP (Todd).

         
At the time the grade schools in Topeka were segregated, with the aforementioned four black schools and eighteen white schools. The junior high schools and Topeka High were academically integrated and segregated for all activities outside the classrooms. (Kluger 375) Some neighborhoods in Topeka were integrated, so the white grade school age children on the block went to the neighborhood school and the black children were bused to the black schools. Living at 10th and Jewell, Nancy Todd would have gone to Lowman Hill Elementary if she were white. Instead, she was bused to Buchanan Elementary (Lucinda Todd).

The NAACP Lucinda Todd joined was a small group, headed by McKinley Burnett who persistently and diligently petitioned the Topeka School Board for improvements in Black education. Mr. Burnett would patiently wait through the entire school board meetings hoping for an opportunity to speak. When the school board scheduled their meetings during his working hours, Mr. Burnett arranged for vacation time so he could get off work to attend (Blankenship). Reading the accounts of the activities leading up to the filing of the Brown case it seems that Lucinda Todd was able to match Mr. Burnett in perseverance. The accounts describe a mother outraged at the treatment of her child.

As the organizing plans and strategies developed, many of the meetings were held around the dining room table at the Todd house. Lucinda Todd, as the NAACP secretary, was a force in the push to desegregate the grades schools and credited with contributing to the court case strategy. The issue was the forced separation of the children and the practice of busing the black children while the white children could attend schools close to home. Lucinda Todd was “RED HOT” when Nancy fell and was almost hit by a bus she was attempting to catch. Lucinda recruited other mothers to join the cause and the case. She distributed pamphlets that she had written, she promoted NAACP meetings and she wrote letters. As the plans for the court case developed she and her husband hosted traveling attorneys in their home (Lucinda Todd).

In the fall of 1950, the NAACP leadership, including McKinley Burnett and Lucinda Todd, asked parents to watch the newspapers for school registration dates so they could take their children to the white schools to attempt to enroll. Lucinda took Nancy to Lowman Hill. When Nancy was refused admittance, Lucinda was the first person to respond to Burnett as a plaintiff (Kluger 395).

Maude Lawton was the second listed plaintiff in the Brown v. Board case, although we do not know that she was the second to answer the call for plaintiffs. Maude and her husband Richard were good friends with Alvin and Lucinda Todd and it follows that Maude Lawton joined other black mothers at Lucinda Todd’s table (Benson). It also follows that these mothers talked of ways to improve education opportunities for their children, including access to music education. As musically talented as Maude Lawton’s descendents are, it makes sense she would have joined these mothers in demanding music for her children.

     
Maude and Richard Lawton lived in a racially mixed neighborhood on Huntoon between Lane and Washburn. Richard was a talented plasterer, one of just two black men in a white profession. Maude cleaned houses, raised their nine children and actively resisted segregation. Her daughter Victoria tells a story of a family member that could be served at Bobo’s because she was very light skinned. They would not serve Maude and Victoria’s older sister Gloria at a table, they would have to take the hamburgers in a bag since Bobo's didn’t serve Negroes. Maude proceeded to order twenty hamburgers and when they came, told the server she didn’t eat where Negroes were not served (Benson).

The closest school to the Lawton's home was also Lowman Hill. When Maude's daughters Victoria and Carol Kay were refused admittance, Maude was ready to join the court case.

The people that sat at Lucinda Todd’s table read like a who’s who of the Brown decision. Not only the Topeka NAACP leadership but Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP at that time, the Topeka legal teams John and Charles Scott and Charles Bledsoe, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg and Thurgood Marshall (Hall)

This is where it all started, right here at this very table.  Lucinda Todd, secretary of the Topeka NAACP chapter

   

                                                                                                                                                                     

Benson, Victoria. Personal interview. 21 Apr. 2014.

Hall, Mike. "Center renamed for Brown v. Board figure Lucinda Todd." The Topeka Capital-Journal cjonline.com 18 May, 2007. Print.

"Lucinda Todd." kansapedia. Kansas Historical Society, March, 2013. Web. May 2014.

Todd, Lucinda and Alvin Todd. Interview by Ralph Crowder. Beyond Brown pursuing the promise. PBS. n. d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014. http://www-tc.pbs.org/beyondbrown/foreducators/tscript/todd.pdf

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown V. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf, 1976. Print.

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