Brown set the tone for change in Utah

The second-graders in Alice Glenn's class may not know the definition of "segregation," but they do know that 50 years ago, they would probably not be eating lunch at the same table together.

"They . . . would probably be at a black school, and I'd be at a white school," said Adelena Duran, 8, pointing to two boys — one of Laotian descent, one of Mexican descent — across the table. "I'm friends with David and Joseph."

"I'd be at the Asian school," replied Joseph Lee, 8. "I'd be in the black school," said David Landa, 8.

"Martin Luther King, he gave a speech," said third-grader Cheyanna Burk, 9. "It means a lot to me, because we wouldn't have this kind of world if Martin Luther King didn't have that speech, and I wouldn't have all the friends that I have."

But before there was a King or a Rosa Parks, there was the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed public school segregation. Today marks the 50th anniversary of that landmark decision.

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People argued that equality in education could not be achieved until segregation in the schools was ended.

The case included the NAACP's appeals of decisions from four states: Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia, but the decision brought about change across the nation, even in states such as Utah where schools were never segregated.

Craig Fuller, Utah State Historical Society historian, said the state's black population at that time was "pretty minimal."

Blacks and other minorities made up too small a fraction of Utah's population to ever fill up their own schools, so the public schools weren't segregated, Fuller said.

Blacks, Native Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders together comprised 1.7 percent of the state's total population, according to the 1950 census, Fuller said. Hispanics, which today comprise the state's largest minority group — 9 percent of the population in 2000 — were not counted in 1950. Today about 11 percent of the state's population are minorities, according to the census.

Opportunities denied

While the state did not separate its minority students, there were instances of black college graduates who were denied employment as teachers. As of May 1954, the NAACP reported that no black teacher had taught at any level in the Utah education system, said Ross Peterson, professor of history at Utah State University. His account of Brown v. Board's impact will be published later this year in the Utah Historical Quarterly.