OTTAWA -An Ottawa school desegregation lawsuit was the focus of a presentation Saturday morning at 10 by Franklin County Historical Society Director Deborah Barker at Ottawa City Hall. Barker says the 1881 case, called Tinnon versus Ottawa Board of Education, got to the Kansas Supreme Court and was the first time in the nation’s history that a court ruled that the 14th Amendment banned segregated schools. The Tinnon case was nearly 70 years before the landmark case Brown versus Topeka Board of Education. However, Elijah Tinnon, who brought the lawsuit, didn’t achieve his goal of desegregating Ottawa schools because the Board closed the Central school and built schools in each ward and assigned students of different races to separate schools, she said. The talk, which is part of Black History Month, is free and open to the public.
Updated 2/17/13 @ 8:05 pm
