A panel discussion this week at Kansas University will kick off a national commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

The discussion at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Dole Institute of Politics is the first in a series of events sponsored by the case’s 50th Anniversary Presidential Commission.

“Lawrence is an ideal community to begin (the commemoration) because it is a strong community in terms of social progress and intellectual exchange,” said Deborah Dandridge, a commission member and director of the African-American Collections at KU’s Spencer Research Library.

Scheduled to speak are:

• V.P. Franklin, a member of the Teachers College faculty at Columbia University in New York who focuses on black education, urban educational history and student activism. His books include “Martin Luther King Jr.: A Biography and Living Our Stories” and “Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African-American Intellectual Tradition.”
• David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Illinois, who specializes in the history of labor, race relations and the South. His books include, “Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past” and “Wages and Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.”
• Roger Wilkins, professor of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who shared the 1973 Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein while he was writing editorials for the Washington Post. His books include “A Man’s Life,” “Quiet Riots” and “Jefferson’s Pillow.”

Deborah Dandridge, director of the African-American Collections at Kansas University's Spencer Research Library, is also a member of the Brown v. Board of Education 50th Anniversary Presidential Commission. The commission has scheduled a panel discussion this week at KU as the first in a series of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the school desegregation case. Dandridge is shown in this file photograph with photos of two attorneys, Charles S. Scott, left, and Elisha Scott, who represented plaintiffs from Topeka, as well as a letter written from Elisha to his son, Charles, who was serving overseas in World War II. The documents are stored at the Spencer Research Library.

Other programs are scheduled for Oct. 9 and 10 at the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio; Nov. 5 at Clark-Atlanta University in Atlanta; and Dec. 7 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Two additional programs will be scheduled in January and February.

Each event will focus on a different aspect of the 1954 Brown case, in which Topekan Linda Brown’s family led the fight to end school segregation.

“Some of the other programs will involve activists and other experts in the field,” Dandridge said. “We started out with the scholars, but the scholars we chose weren’t restricted to the ivory tower, they’re involved in the real world as well.”

The national commission’s programs will culminate in March with a conference at KU. That program, “The Legacies and Unfinished Business of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,” will be March 14-17.

¢ KU archivist to help plan Brown case anniversary (9-23-02)¢ Group prepares for Brown case’s 50-year mark (9-07-02)¢ Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site