Sumner Elementary School
school building in Topeka, Kansas
The Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas was involved in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case in 1954. Linda Brown's attempted enrollment to the Sumner School was rejected by the Topeka Board of Education, thus forcing her to attend the all-black Monroe School, which was farther away from her home. Oliver Brown, Linda's father, then joined the class action lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education that was eventually heard before the Supreme Court.
The Sumner Elementary School is currently a National Historic Landmark listed with the United States Department of the Interior. It was constructed in 1936 as a part of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, a New Deal program. The school was designed in the Art Deco style by Thomas W. Williamson, and has an unusual amount of stone detailing. Because of the quality of the original construction, it retains many of its original features, including light and bathroom fixtures, clocks, carved woodwork and a marble-rimmed fireplace in the kindergarten.
Monroe Elementary School, the school that Linda Brown had been attending, closed in 1975 and was held privately for a number of years before being purchased in 1991 by The Trust for Public Land and added to Sumner's listing on the National Register. Because Sumner was still in use at the time for classes and Monroe was not, Monroe was selected on October 26, 1992 to house the Brown v.
“Sumner Elementary School” enters the record as school building in Topeka, Kansas. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sumner, Elementary and School can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Sumner Elementary School” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Sumner, Elementary and School provides the most credible route into that argument.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7637970. Authority coordinates are 39.058, -95.682. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1936, 1975 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sumner Elementary School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.