On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared an end to the principle of “separate but equal” in American education. The court’s judgment in Brown is broadly recognized as the first serious blow to the comprehensive system of laws collectively referred to as “Jim Crow,” which codified separation of the races and limited the freedom and options of former slaves in the South following the Civil War.

The University community includes many people who recall the impact the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown had on their childhoods. The accounts of five members of the community who lived through the turbulent changes in the South were published earlier this month in the first-ever all online version of Michigan Today, the University alumni publication. What follows are brief descriptions of those interviewed. The full story, by Deborah Meyers Greene, can be read at http://www.umich.edu/news/MT/04/Spring04/.

As the stories in Michigan Today reveal, America’s “peculiar institution” of slavery and segregation fostered different patterns of awareness and response in each individual. Those interviewed include:

President Mary Sue Coleman in 1954 was an 8-year-old living in a large, old country house near Statesboro, Ga., about 60 miles from Savannah. Her father taught at what is now Georgia Southern University, and her mother was a high school teacher in a nearby rural school. Rather than integrate, several Southern states ultimately withdrew support from their public schools, Coleman recalls, leading to the shutdown of entire school systems. The family made plans to leave.

Adye Bel Evans, librarian emerita, was born and raised in San Antonio, Tex. Suddenly faced with the option to attend a white high school, Evans’s family decided she should go to a Black school, Phyllis Wheatley. Two years after the Brown decision, Texans approved referenda opposing compulsory attendance in integrated schools and extending the Jim Crow prohibitions. In 1957, the Texas legislature passed laws encouraging school districts to resist federally ordered integration.

Billy Joe Evans, professor emeritus of chemistry, was 12 when the decision was rendered. He says Brown wasn’t even discussed in Macon, Ga., Although everyone was aware of Brown and its importance, it was understood that change would not occur in that deeply traditional southern town. He attended segregated Ballard High School with a population of some 2,500 Black students, many of whom were bused to school, some more than 50 miles across county lines.

Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs, professor of music, and senior counselor to the president for the arts, diversity and undergraduate affairs, was 7 when the principal stepped into his second-grade Little Rock classroom on May 17, 1954, to announce the decision. Monts recalls children crying when she told them they no longer would be able to attend their school, which turned out not to be true.

Richard Tillinghast, professor of English and director, U-M Bear River Writers’ Conference, was 14 years old and in his last year of junior high at Fairview School in Memphis, Tenn. Tillinghast says as a child he didn’t understand segregation at all, although it “was more or less total in Memphis in the ’50s,” as it remained through his high school years. As a college student, he became actively involved in “the Movement” at the University of the South, known as Sewanee.