Urban Education: Kansas City’s Central High School and the Enduring Legacy of Racism is an institutional history of the oldest public school west of the Mississippi River. Central High School was the premier segregated White high school in Kansas City and among the top high schools in the United States between 1867 and 1955. 

Following Brown v. Topeka Board of Education in 1954, Central High School became one of the first schools in Kansas City to integrate. Between 1955 and 1962, Central’s student body went from all White to all Black.