Kansas

The Supreme Court case that ended school segregation in America started in Topeka, Kansas. In 1951, a father named Oliver Brown tried to enroll his daughter Linda at the elementary school seven blocks from their house. The school said no because she was Black.

Linda had to walk to a bus stop, cross railroad tracks, and ride a mile to a separate, underfunded school instead. The NAACP took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, with a young attorney named Thurgood Marshall leading the fight.

In 1954, the court ruled unanimously that separating children by race in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education changed the country forever.

But Kansas was fighting over equality long before that. The Kansa, Osage, Pawnee, and Wichita peoples had lived across these plains for centuries before the U.S. opened the territory for settlement in 1854.

When Congress let settlers decide whether Kansas would allow slavery, both sides flooded in. Pro-slavery voters poured across the border from Missouri, stuffed ballot boxes, and set up a rival government. Anti-slavery settlers fought back. The territory turned so violent that newspapers called it "Bleeding Kansas."

An abolitionist named John Brown and his sons killed five pro-slavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek in 1856. The fighting didn't stop until Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861, just months before the Civil War began.

You can visit the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, housed inside the old Monroe Elementary School where Linda Brown was sent. In the Flint Hills, drive the Flint Hills Scenic Byway through one of the last stretches of tallgrass prairie left on Earth.

Out in Dodge City, walk the old boardwalks of Boot Hill and imagine the days when Wyatt Earp kept the peace. And in Hutchinson, the Kansas Cosmosphere has one of the biggest collections of space artifacts in the world, including the actual Apollo 13 command module.