Travels in Topeka

Slate magazine this week is featuring a five-day Well-Traveled series on Topeka, Kansas. Why Topeka? The Brown Museum will open in the city later this month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court declared that separate, segregated schools were inherently unequal. The series began Monday. For writer Matthew Polly, the trip to Topeka was also a journey back to his hometown. He doesn’t know quite what to make of the museum’s big opening day, when dignitaries are expected to gather in Topeka. “Having the Brown Museum placed in my city is at best a dubious achievement,” he writes. “The reason Oliver Brown, his daughter Linda, and Topeka have come to personify the case is that we were the law-abiding segregationists.”

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